Volatility

March 22, 2018

“Golden Rice”, Case Study in the Propaganda Function of Regulators

>

Can you spot the truth in this picture? Those who spewed the fog try to make sure you can’t

 
 
A major role of regulatory agencies is to serve as corporate propaganda outlets. Specifically, the regulator places its imprimatur on the alleged safety of a corporate product whose safety was never really confirmed at all. Indeed, as with the cancerousness of glyphosate, the regulator has prior knowledge of the harmfulness of the product but helps the corporation suppress this knowledge. This imprimatur is the third part of what I’ve long called the corporate regulatory template.
 
Today we have a particularly clear example of this propaganda process. Health Canada, as well as the regulators of Australia and New Zealand, are putting their safety imprimatur on “golden rice”, even though golden rice doesn’t exist in any commercial-ready form and therefore couldn’t possibly be safety-tested even in principle. Of course in practice no actual scientific tests were done at all, same as for every other GMO.
 
Health Canada was unusually frank in explaining its propaganda services: “Developers often choose to seek authorization in Canada as a first step in their regulatory plan even if they do not plan to sell the product in Canada.” This regulatory plan of course is to get corporate-friendly Western regulators to lend their imprimatur to the product. This often is sufficient to then force other countries to accept the product; globalization pacts often require such cross-acceptance. And where this isn’t in force, the imprimatur still serves the corporation in its pressure campaigns against resistant countries: If it’s safe enough for Canada, how can you say it’s not safe enough for here?
 
(Meanwhile there’s good reason to doubt the safety of golden rice. The food safety concern is especially critical here since golden rice, if it ever were deployed the way the pro-GMO activists claim to intend, would be the first GMO ever deployed as a staple direct food.)
 
This propaganda role is inherent to regulatory agencies in any productionist system, for example any capitalist system. It’s not an “abuse”, and you can’t “reform” it. It’s inherent to the regulatory model itself, which is dedicated to helping to foster maximal production for the sake of maximal production, inducing or forcing “demand” for this production, and managing any problems along the way. This “management” includes every kind of management, most obviously the management of how rapidly the system physically poisons humanity and the Earth, but not least the political management of any political problems the corporations encounter. From the inception of GMOs the regulators have performed this political service on behalf of the corporations. Today’s regulatory PR campaign on behalf of the idea of “golden rice” is a clear example.
 
I stress, the idea of golden rice. The real thing doesn’t exist as any kind of finished product. As the GMO regime of lies diverges ever further from reality, it’s fitting that the regulatory propaganda fog machine is being deployed on behalf of this longest-running media hoax. Golden rice itself is nothing but a dirty-yellow smog.
 
 
 
 
 

February 17, 2017

Golden Rice – A Supreme Hoax, Part of A Supreme Crime

>

The corporate world is full of hazards for rice. Genetic engineering adds to them.

The corporate world is full of hazards for rice. Genetic engineering adds to them.

 
 
The program to breed a commercially deployable version of “golden rice” continues its perfect record of failure. In the latest screw-up, an attempt to back-cross a GM rice variety with a conventional Indian variety resulted in a crop with reduced yield, stunted growth, and growth abnormalities.
 
The authors of the new study documenting this result blame the effects on transgenic interference with the plant’s growth hormones. Worse, the transgene is fully active not just in the rice grains as “intended”, but in the leaves as well. This resulted in reduced photosynthetic ability.
 
These visible effects had not manifested in the GM variety. Therefore the engineers assumed the transgenic effect was “stable”, and that this stability of transgenic effect could be taken for granted throughout the process of back-crossing the transgene into the Swarma variety, perfecting this Indian version of golden rice, increasing the seed, and commercially deploying it.
 
This is typical of how GMOs are developed. The entire process, from tissue culture to seed increase, focuses only on whether the crop visibly seems to meet commercial standards. That’s the full extent of the quality control and safety testing. It’s the same as how all alleged safety tests in the lab really have been tests of nothing but whether CAFO inmates can reach their slaughter weight being fed grain from the crop. This and similar industrial parameters comprise the sum total of the “safety tests” performed by corporations, accepted by regulators, and touted by regulators and media. The same paradigm applies to agronomic testing. Therefore it’s no surprise that under new conditions, conditions not as controlled as the laboratory greenhouse, GMOs often break out with completely unexpected deficiencies, sicknesses, and crop failures. This is especially true under real world agronomic conditions.
 
Michael Antoniou commented that this latest GMO failure is probably yet another example of the pathology of the GM insertion process. “The GM transformation process as used in the development of GMO crops selects for the insertion of the GM gene into active regions of the genome (areas where plant host genes are switched on and functioning). This bias in the GM gene insertion into active regions therefore maximises the possibility of disrupting the function of one or more host genes, with potentially adverse effects such as poor crop performance or even toxicity.” In order for the GM process to work the transgene must be inserted into the most active part of the recipient genome, and the gene cassette usually includes an epigenetic component called a “promoter” which keeps the transgene turned on to maximum expression mode at all times. Therefore the entire development and deployment process selects for maximum effects of the transgene, both the advertised effects as well as the unheralded ones.
 
Evolution crafted our genomes in an exquisitely nuanced way, including a complex orchestration of notes, volumes, and rests for all genetic elements. Genetic engineering, being a very stupid, imprecise, blunt-force tool, is incapable of any kind of nuance whatsoever, and engineers have always had a fundamental contempt for complex systems which reflects the limitations of their own minds. Their only tool isn’t even a hammer but a caveman’s club. That’s why they loathe evolution and its works and yearn so fervently to subjugate evolution to the brute force simplifications of their concepts and engineering processes. That’s why they’re congenitally incapable of comprehending the fact that nature works, genetic engineering does not. And that’s why they carry their evolution denial to the extreme of wanting to leap over all the evolutionary tests and safeguards of competition, space, and time, to deploy their shoddy, half-baked, failure prone product as completely across the entire planet as possible, and completely to eradicate as much of non-GM agricultural biodiversity and wild biodiversity as possible. It’s a fundamentalist hatred of evolution, of nature, of life itself.
 
The effects of this have always been well known to all. Contrary to the standard lie, genetic engineering has zero in common with conventional breeding and disavows all principles of sound breeding. Unlike conventional breeding, unlike conventional sexual reproduction, this technological evasion of sex generates an artificially hyper-active section of the genome which can generate severe unpredicted effects at any time. (CRISPR “gene editing” is designed to render this genetic chaos far more severe.)
 
The crisis points especially occur wherever there’s a discrete change in circumstances, as in the case of this golden rice back-crossing project. Such crisis points occur often in the real world, amid the general environment, wherever GMOs are commercially deployed. These real world crisis points will become far more common as the climate chaos driven by corporate industrial agriculture becomes more intense. As Antoniou points out, this breeding blunder goes to show that any golden rice variety, if released so that it can cross with non-GM varieties, may cause general rice crop failures and endanger harvests over vast regions. (Rice has moderate cross-pollination, and GM contamination has been rife in China where Bt rice was widely if illicitly released.) And yet certain smug, racist Westerners, even among “GMO critics”, have seen fit to lecture Philipino farmers about how uncivil it was for them to tear up a golden rice field trial in 2013.
 
We must stress that there is nothing at all “unintended” about these effects. The effects of genetic engineering are grossly unpredictable, but this unpredictability is known and embraced ahead of time. “Unpredictable” has nothing conceptually in common with “unintended.” We can compare the typical operations of poison-based agriculture to spinning a roulette wheel where the various colors and numbers indicate various chaotic effects, many of them to be a surprise. Which number will come up is unpredictable, but one spins the wheel with full malice aforethought, full intent to trigger the chaos.
 
Genetic engineers and breeders involved in developing GM crops for commercial release have full knowledge of their inability to predict anything, therefore they intend chaotic results, just as they do with their broader mandate to drive climate change and pump as much synthetic poison into ecosystems as possible. The pro-GMO activists simply lie about all this when they make any claim to “precision” or predictability. No one who wanted stable, predictable results would still be working with genetic engineering. Where it comes to our food, agriculture, and environment, we’re not just spinning the roulette wheel. We’re playing Russian roulette, as Black Swan author Nassim Taleb put it.
 
Therefore I recommend to anyone interested in conceptual and terminological discipline that we discard the whole false notion of “unintended” effects of GMOs, pesticides, climate change, etc. This is factually wrong and morally far too lenient. Chaos is the predictable effect of genetic engineering, therefore the pro-GM activists intend chaos. That’s one of the purposes of this massive uncontrolled human feeding experiment, to log the unpredictable effects of the globally promiscuous deployment of GMOs in the environment and diet. They premeditate the chaos so they can hope someday to understand it, toward vastly more far-reaching eugenic goals. As a US mayor once said following a police riot, in a profound slip, “The policeman is there to preserve disorder.”
 
 
And what if golden rice ever were to overcome the incompetence of its designers and actually “worked” to the point it could be deployed commercially? Like every other technological dodge, and like every other element of corporate agriculture, it would only increase hunger and aggravate the very malnutrition diseases it’s allegedly being designed to treat.
 
This is because golden rice, like all other forms of “improved seed”, is designed for industrial monoculture commodity agriculture in a globalization framework. Therefore in addition to the special contamination problems golden rice presents, it would make the standard contribution to corporate agriculture’s general destruction of soil, environment, farmers and communities, and the standard contribution to increasing hunger and malnutrition.
 
What’s the real market for a commercialized golden rice, beyond some token food aid shipments paid for by taxpayers? I suppose it could become an ingredient in “biofortified” processed foods, similar to enriched and fortified breakfast cereals. But how could it ever actually do the thing it’s allegedly supposed to do, provide vitamin A to impoverished people suffering from deficiency disease? How are the people who need it supposed to pay for it? The reason they suffer the night blindness symptom is that they can’t afford real foods containing vitamin A like green, yellow, and orange vegetables. The reason they have no money to pay for these is the same reason they can’t grow real food themselves: They were driven off their land by the same corporate agriculture now offering this techno-solution in exchange for the same money these people don’t have.
 
It’s clear that “golden rice” has always been a media hoax. After nearly twenty years of hype the thing doesn’t exist in deployable form and there’s no evidence it ever will be worked into such a form. Nor is there any evidence that there’s any system intent truly to deploy it, since it’s very hard to see what the commercial market is. Unless the plan is for Western taxpayers to pay for the whole production and distribution shebang, 100% corporate welfare for Syngenta and the rice commodifiers. It’s true that each individual corporation contemplates the taxpayers as an infinitely deep trough. But how much longer can they all maximize their gorging?
 
Far worse, golden rice is a core part of the overall “Feed the World” hoax. Corporate agriculture causes hunger, drives hunger, maximizes hunger. It can never do otherwise, nor can any element of it do otherwise. Just like every other product of corporate industrial agriculture, golden rice is designed to cause malnutrition, it’s designed to cause hunger. It’s designed to force ever more people into the trap where they have no money, can get no money, and yet need money to get food.

 
Night blindness resulting from vitamin A deficiency has one and only one cause: Corporate agriculture destroys food production, drives people off their land, requires them to use money it denies them the ability to get, and leaves them to sicken and starve. Golden rice, like every other technological solution, every other alleged “silver bullet”, represents no alternative to this hunger-mongering paradigm. On the contrary golden rice, and GMOs as such, represent nothing but the escalation of this destructive system. GMOs stand for nothing but disease, hunger, starvation, famine. They’re designed to make all of these worse. This design is intentional. And in this case the effect is 100% predictable.
 
 
 
If you like these pieces, propagate them! Like heirloom crop varieties, ideas die if they’re not planted far and wide.
 
 
 

May 17, 2014

Make It Up on (Propaganda) Volume – The Golden Rice Hoax Marches On

>

The hoax product “golden rice” continues to be touted through the corporate media and academia bullhorn. This is even though it doesn’t exist except in flawed experimental form while its own proprietor, the International Rice Research Institute, admits that even if it ever were perfected and available to the public, it may not actually work to reduce vitamin A deficiency. The PR campaign has an inverse ratio of noisy lies to real world achievement.
 
The media continues to spew the typical lies. The fact is that never once has anyone actually tried to deliver “golden rice” anywhere and been prevented from doing so by citizen action. That’s because the product doesn’t exist in deployable form. Researchers continue to struggle to breed an indica variety of the product. Any phony regulatory struggle hasn’t even begun yet, as the technical problems of the project remain insurmountable. Yet we keep being told by professional liars that the US government and the GMO cartel, the most powerful government and one of the most powerful corporate oligopoly sectors on earth, are being thwarted by “powerful forces”. When I ponder the flimsiness and sheer idiocy of the lies GMO proponents tell, I don’t know what’s greater, these people’s moral depravity or their intellectual stupidity.
 
Of course, citizens will indeed fight wherever we have to, as we do vs. every other predatory poison GMO.
 
The fact is that golden rice has never been anything more than a media hoax. Since all real-world GMOs are simply poison delivery systems (they either produce insecticide inside their own tissues, and/or can withstand having herbicide sprayed upon them, which then suffuses all their tissues), the core propgagnda gambit of the GMO cartel, that GMOs are necessary to “feed the world”, seems suspicious on its face. This has actually long since been proven to be false. Since corporate agriculture has been in control of global agriculture and food systems for over fifty years, and the world now produces enough food for 10 billion people, and yet of 7 billion alive now over 1 billion go hungry, it’s a proven fact that corporate agriculture cannot feed the world and does not want to. Which stands to reason, since corporate agriculture doesn’t produce food, it produces commodities.
 
When you think about it for a moment, and add the fact that GMOs do nothing but double down on every aspect of corporate industrial agriculture, it becomes obvious that “feed the world” is nothing more or less than a classical Big Lie.
 
That’s the huge hurdle the pro-GMO liars have to surmount in their propaganda. How to get people not to think! The “golden rice” hoax was concocted toward this goal. It’s said to be humanitarian, it’s about vitamins rather than poison, it piggybacks on the immiseration/helplessness theme of the Green Revolution and 80s-era celebrity philanthropy, it’s allegedly being offered to the disadvantaged “Third World” as charity.
 
These are all standard lies. What the global South needs is the revitalization and strengthening of its own agricultural systems in order to produce food for itself on its own land, rather than the accelerating destruction of its self-sustaining community agriculture in favor of corporate commodity plantations on stolen land.
 
The epidemic of vitamin A deficiency is a direct result of this destruction of sustainable agricultural communities. Throughout agricultural history people have grown a plethora of regionally-adapted nutrient-rich crops, including the root crops and leafy vegetables which are rich in vitamin A. But all this is lost to industrialized farmers who grow not food but export commodities, and the much vaster mass of ex-farmers driven off their land and into shantytowns. Those who are driven off their land lose all ability to provide any food for themselves and their people, while those who hang on as industrial farm laborers also lose their ability to grow nutritious food, since they now grow only commodities.
 
The epidemic of night blindness is a typical proof that those economically destroyed by commodification cannot use cash to buy what they need. Specifically, it’s one of many pieces of proof that corporate ag cannot “feed the world”. Since it was the corporate control of agriculture which generated the epidemic in the first place, why would any sane person trust them to provide the solution using their own methods? It’s self evidently a lie.
 
Meanwhile in the Philippines a government program of vitamin A supplementation has already temporarily treated the symptom, and vitamin A deficiency is no longer a major problem, or won’t be so long as this program exists. So why is such a golden rice propaganda offensive being undertaken there? Precisely because the corporate system seeks to eradicate the few effective government programs which still exist. The successful Philippine program is an ongoing affront to corporatism. The privatization of all “solutions” is of course a major goal in itself.
 
Of course supplementation is no real solution. The problem is the destruction of humanity’s organic presence on the land and the naturally nutritious diet which goes with this. The true solution is to transform our agriculture on an agroecological basis and our communities and economies on a food sovereignty basis. This is the only way forward, from the point of view of big problems like the unsustainability of industrial agriculture, the wholesale toxification of our natural environment, climate change, and escalating economic and political tyranny, all the way down to specific problems like vitamin A deficiency disease.
 
Meanwhile “golden rice”, if it worked, would be nothing but a glorified vitamin supplement. But this vitamin supplement would be the result of a properly configured “public-private partnership”, where the public pays all the costs and bears all the risks while the corporations glean all the profit. Although Syngenta claims to have “donated” its patents on golden rice, this only contemplates the product’s targeted humanitarian “demonstration” stage. If the product were ever truly commercialized, this commercialization would be on the standard proprietary basis. Even the IRRI explicitly reserves the right to take out patents. But the fact that Syngenta seeks to drum up such an altruistic propaganda nimbus is in itself a strong indication that the product is not expected to ever work in a practical way, but is intended to never be anything more than the sum of its hype.

>

October 7, 2013

The “Golden Rice” Myth Will Always Be With Us (For the Real Thing, Keep Waiting)

>

In spite of the decades-long, massive propaganda barrage by governments and the corporate media, the people have always been skeptical of GMOs. It doesn’t work for proponents to tell the truth, and most of the lies are similarly unimpressive. The flacks need special angles to try to make their cause look sympathetic.
 
For fifteen years now the “golden rice” scam has been a big part of GMO propaganda. Golden rice is fraudulently called the answer to vitamin A deficiency in the diets of children in many parts of the non-industrialized world. In spite of the golden rice scam having been debunked a long time ago, it’s still chugging along in the corporate media to this day, promoted by the cartel’s go-to hacks like Mark Lynas, Patrick Moore, and Stewart Brand. (These same clowns are shills for nukes, geoengineering, fracking, nanotechnology, climate change denial, etc.)
 
The original golden rice, called “GR 1”, had such a meager amount of vitamin A that you’d need twelve times the normal daily intake to get the nutritionally necessary amount. Meanwhile even this amount must be accompanied by the sufficient right kinds of fats and oils in the diet to digest it. This tends to be lacking in the overall diets of the people this rice is supposed to be “fed to”. So this alleged vitamin A source is also non-holistic with the diet of the people who would be eating it, and would for that reason be ineffective, even if it contained significant amounts of the vitamin, which it does not. African diets, for example, are not holistic with it. As for addressing famine (caused by corporatism itself), another alleged miracle of golden rice, by definition people who are starving won’t be consuming sufficient fats to properly digest rice, so it’s a fraud to give a hungry person rice and claim he’s getting the micronutrients from it.
 
The new paradigm is “Golden Rice 2” (GR2), which allegedly would provide enough vitamin A in a normal serving. (It still wouldn’t work outside the right cuisine.) But this version, just like its forerunner, has languished in the test fields for years as breeders try to backcross the Japonica cultivar (the only type which has actually existed in the laboratory, but which isn’t suited for field production) with Indica varieties actually grown by farmers. So far an Indica variety of golden rice doesn’t exist. And there’s lots of other technical difficulties which still haven’t been worked out over these fifteen years.
 
The fact is that “golden rice” is a technical boondoggle, and all the claims that “environmentalists” are obstructing it are false. If everyone on Earth supported golden rice, it still wouldn’t be ready for prime time, and probably never will be. But then, this bogus claim is part of the propaganda value of the idea of “golden rice”, which is far more valuable to the cartel than the actual rice itself will ever be. That’s why Syngenta’s made such a big show of “donating” its patent. It has no expectation that golden rice will ever be widely commercialized. (Of course, the donation is contingent on this lack of broad commercialization, and applies only to some Potemkin “humanitarian” distribution. Any real commercialization would take place under the normal circumstances of enclosure, indenture, domination. That’s why Philippino farmers are united in opposing golden rice, to the point of engaging in direct action against field trials.)
 
(Meanwhile the propagandists, telling one lie about environmentalist obstruction out of one side of their mouths, out of the other side are simultaneously claiming that golden rice is already saving lives. Obviously these can’t both be true at the same time. In fact neither are true. The rice doesn’t really exist, and the reason for this is technical, not political.)
 
The main front group working on and publicizing golden rice, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), has itself admitted that not only is golden rice nowhere near ready for field production, but that even if it ever becomes so, it’s not clear that the rice would do anything to relieve blindness caused by vitamin A deficiency.
 
(Meanwhile in the Philippines there are already programs in action right now which are using dietary supplements to alleviate VAD and visual problems related to it. These programs are far less expensive than golden rice research, and far less expensive than the subsidies required for its commercialization would be.) 
 
Of course, “golden rice” is not in fact intended to supply anyone with sufficient dietary vitamin A. It’s intended to be a media ploy, and it’s been very successful at that. The GMO complex, as part of its “Feed the World” Big Lie, propagated the fraud that golden rice was an imminent miracle food. All around the world the corporate media took up and amplified the message: Golden Rice, and GMOs in general, were a wondrous boon to humanity. Picture if The Loch Ness chamber of commerce were to fabricate a press release declaring that there was documentary proof the monster is a dinosaur and that tourists from around the world should rush to the Loch to see it while they can, and the New York Times were to uncritically plaster this on the front page. That’s exactly what’s happened with ”golden rice” and similar GMO publicity stunts. 
 
This kind of PR campaign has been necessary because the facts of GMOs are more prosaic and mercenary: There are only two “real” kinds of GMOs, those engineered to resist insects (almost all of them are modified to express the insecticide Bt, Bacillus thuringiensis, in their cells), and those for herbicide tolerance (HT; so far they’ve been engineered to resist glyphosate; but with the rise of glyphosate-resistant superweeds and subsequent collapse of glyphosate as an effective herbicide, there are new generations of HT varieties in the pipeline, resistant to ever more toxic herbicides – 2, 4-D, dicamba, etc.).
 
All other alleged GMO types are really conventional varieties with a particular trait, engineered to be Bt-expressing and/or HT. For example the USDA itself admits that so-called “drought resistant” GM corn is really no more drought resistant than the conventional varieties which the corporations pirated, but is merely these same varieties engineered to be Roundup Ready.
 
That truth is the reason the GMO complex needs poster children which will allegedly “feed the world”, cure disease, serve as nutritional panaceas, etc. That these are all lies, that these varieties either never effectively exist in the first place (for example the Kenyan GM sweet potato), or are redundantly engineered versions of things that already conventionally exist (for example the allegedly cancer-fighting purple tomato), are irrelevant to the corporate media, which slavers over these stories. Even the rare MSM outlets which are usually skeptical of GMOs tend to turn into Monsanto groupies where it comes to these kinds of stories.
 
These ploys are also Trojan horses. “Golden rice” is pushed by USAID and other corporate front organizations posing as “humanitarian”. In the guise of offering GMO-based ”humanitarian aid” they try to get countries to lift import restrictions on GMOs. If this works they can then dump the “aid”, further ravaging the already-devastated indigenous food production of these economies (all hunger on Earth today is artificially caused by corporate globalization). Then the “humanitarian” GMOs will be followed through the protective door they kicked down by the regular onslaught of Bt and HT varieties, whose only purpose is commodification, enclosure, and enslavement.
 
Meanwhile, as always the true solution is ready at hand. Indigenous farmers can supply all the vitamin A any population needs with a regionally adapted diversity of green vegetables. But this would help keep communities intact, organic, and self-reliant. It would maintain community prosperity and happiness. It would decentralize power and freedom. It would hinder corporate hierarchy, enclosure, and tyranny. That’s why in the eyes of corporations, government, and media, it’s a non-solution.
 
So even if golden rice worked, it would still be just a stopgap within the same industrial agricultural framework which created the problem in the first place. The IRRI itself admits it doesn’t know if GR2 can ever work. GR1 definitely doesn’t work.
 
But the fact is that golden rice is far more useful in theory, as a propaganda ploy and as an example of the wickedness of “obstructionists”, than as a deployed reality. In this case it simply wouldn’t work. It would fail according to its own unique promises, and it would fail in the usual ways all GM crops fail (yield, increased pesticide use, superweeds/superbugs, crop and environmental contamination, soil degradation, endemic crop weakness, health problems). It would fail, and the hacks wouldn’t be able to blame obstuctionists. They’d be back to their usual dismal position of telling outright lies about how it’s performing.
 
That’s why we can expect “golden rice” to remain a permanent mirage.

>

December 13, 2012

The “Golden Rice” Fraud Continues: China Feeding Experiment

>

Question: Who, by its action, shows more concern with being accountable to the people, the Chinese government or a typical corporatized US university, Tufts?
 
In August 2012 Greenpeace broke the story of a joint US-China human feeding experiment with GMOs conducted upon Chinese schoolchildren. The feeding experiment took place in 2008. A Tufts cadre smuggled “golden rice” into China (which has strict import restrictions for GMOs). This GM rice was then fed to schoolchildren in the Hunan province. Chinese technicians presented the parents with consent forms which concealed the fact that GMOs were to be used. They told them it would be normal rice.
 
When the crime was made public and the government launched an investigation, the lead Chinese experimenter tried to cover it all up. This didn’t work, and the government has now fired three upper-level technocrats who led the experiment. That’s impressive in this age of shameless, openly criminal hierarchy.
 
More typical is the reaction of Tufts University, which issued a bland statement, in an annoyed tone, dismissing the Chinese action and referring to its own “investigation”, which we can be sure will be swift, thorough, and seek truth and justice, and won’t be a whitewash at all. 
 
Anyone want to bet on what the consequences will be for the Tufts “professors” involved? Probably a bonus to compensate them for their hurt feelings, what with the nasty things the Chinese parents are saying about them.
 
[This isn’t meant to call the Chinese central government accountable. It’s no more accountable or legitimate than the US central government. “China” is a technical power concentration just as organically fake as “the United States”. Nevertheless, this instance demonstrates how, the rare times you can see any difference, it’s the US system which is the least accountable to the people and the most congenitally contemptuous of us.]
 
The purpose of the experiment, as with all system-funded GMO experiments, is to further the corporate imperative: Total economic and political domination, through total enclosure and control of all food.
 
The “golden rice” scam is part of the publicity wing of the onslaught. Golden rice is fraudulently called the answer to vitamin A deficiency in the diets of children in many parts of the non-industrialized world. Even the mainstream media pieces reporting on this non-consensual feeding experiment repeat the lie that golden rice is intended to do this and can do it. (The MSM pieces I saw were from Britain and China, none from the US.)
 
The facts are that golden rice has such a meager amount of vitamin A that you’d need “12 times the normal intake of 300 grams” a day to get nutritionally necessary amount. Meanwhile even this amount must be accompanied by the sufficient right kinds of fats and oils in the diet to digest it. This tends to be lacking in the overall diets of the people this rice is supposed to be fed to. So this alleged vitamin A source is also non-holistic with the diet of the people who would be eating it, and would for that reason be ineffective, even if it contained significant amounts of the vitamin, which it does not. African diets, for example, are not holistic with it. As for addressing famine (caused by corporatism itself), another alleged miracle of golden rice, by definition people who are starving won’t be consuming sufficient fats to properly digest rice, so it’s a fraud to give a hungry person rice and claim he’s getting the micronutrients from it.
 
Of course, “golden rice” is not in fact intended to supply anyone with sufficient dietary vitamin A. It’s intended to be a media ploy, and it’s been very successful at that. The GMO complex, as part of its “Feed the World” Big Lie, propagated the fraud that golden rice was an imminent miracle food. All around the world the corporate media took up and amplified the message: Golden Rice, and GMOs in general, were a wondrous boon to humanity. Picture if The Loch Ness chamber of commerce were to fabricate a press release declaring that there was documentary proof the monster is a dinosaur and that tourists from around the world should rush to Loch Ness to see it while they can, and the New York Times were to uncritically plaster this on the front page. That’s exactly what’s happened with “golden rice” and similar GMO publicity stunts. 
 
This kind of PR campaign has been necessary because the facts of GMOs are more prosaic and mercenary: There are only two “real” kinds of GMOs, those engineered to resist insects (almost all of them are modified to express the insecticide Bt, Bacillus thuringiensis, in their cells), and those for herbicide tolerance (HT; so far they’ve been engineered to resist glyphosate; but with the rise of glyphosate-resistant superweeds and subsequent collapse of glyphosate as an effective herbicide, there are new generations of HT varieties in the pipeline, resistant to ever more toxic herbicides – 2, 4-D, dicamba, etc.).
 
All other alleged GMO types are really conventional varieties with a particular trait, engineered to be Bt-expressing and/or HT. For example the USDA itself admits that the soon-to-be-commercialized “drought resistant” GM corn is really no more drought resistant than the conventional variety it pirated, but is merely this same variety engineered to be Roundup Ready.
 
That unattractive truth is the reason the GMO complex needs poster children which will allegedly “feed the world”, cure disease, serve as nutritional panaceas, etc. That these are all lies, that these varieties either never effectively exist in the first place (for example the Kenyan GM sweet potato), or are redundantly engineered versions of things that already conventionally exist (for example the allegedly cancer-fighting purple tomato), are irrelevant to the corporate media, which slavers over these stories. Even the rare MSM outlets which are usually skeptical of GMOs turn into Monsanto groupies where it comes to one of these stories.
 
These ploys are also Trojan horses. “Golden rice” is pushed by USAid and other corporate front organizations posing as “humanitarian”. In the guise of offering GMO-based “humanitarian aid” they try to get countries to lift import restrictions on GMOs. If this works they can then dump the “aid”, further ravaging the already-devastated indigenous food production of these economies (all hunger on Earth today is artificially caused by corporate globalization). Then the “humanitarian” GMOs will be followed through the protective door they kicked down by the regular onslaught of Bt and HT varieties, whose only purpose is commodification, enclosure, and enslavement.
 
Meanwhile, as always the true solution is ready at hand. Indigenous farmers can supply all the vitamin A any population needs with a regionally adapted diversity of green vegetables. But this would help keep communities intact, organic, and self-reliant. It would maintain community prosperity and happiness. It would decentralize power and freedom. It would hinder corporate hierarchy, enclosure, and tyranny. That’s why in the eyes of corporations, government, and media, it’s a non-solution.
 

>

October 5, 2019

Cause the Problem, Sell the (Fake) Solution

>

GMOs help cause this and cannot help fix it

 
 
As climate chaos worsens, over most of the world drought tolerance will become an ever more critical trait for food crops. Conventional breeding on a regional basis for agroecological horticulture is the great need and is proven to be the only framework which is effective. Industrial agriculture is doomed to collapse for any of all of its many intrinsic fatal flaws: Fossil fuel dependency; fossil water dependency; fossil phosphorus and potassium dependency; soil toxification, malnourishment and physical erosion; the destruction of the genetic base of crops; the rising strength of pests and diminishing possibilities for combatting them; global heating which suppresses more yield for every degree of temperature rise; the general collapse of the ecology upon which monoculture agriculture is completely dependent. Corporate crop varieties geared to commodity production are developed for a system which has no future and offers no guidance for what needs to be done.
 
Even within the industrial commodity framework conventional breeding is proven to be superior to genetic engineering in every way, especially where it comes to agronomic traits like drought tolerance. Here the record has been clear for many years: Conventional breeding works and GM does not.
 
As is typical, most governments have not listened to the facts or conformed to reality, and so subsidies, regulatory approvals and mainstream media propaganda campaigns have emphasized GM drought tolerance as yet another way GMOs are going to “feed the world”, however much of a lie that is in detail and overall.
 
GM-based drought tolerance has been a special feature of the propaganda for the Monsanto-Syngenta-Gates Foundation colonial assault on Africa. Several African governments have approved these corporate products for cultivation in spite of their proven agronomic inferiority and socioeconomic and ecological malignity.
 
So it’s a significant victory for food sovereignty, democracy and deep ecology that the South African government has rejected Monsanto’s application to commercialize one of its so-called “drought tolerant” products:
 
“After more than 10 years of battling Monsanto’s “bogus” drought tolerant maize project, the African Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) has welcomed the decision by the Minister of Agriculture, Ms Thoko Didiza, upholding the decision by the Executive Council: GMO Act and the appeal board to reject Monsanto’s application for the commercial cultivation of its triple-stacked “drought-tolerant” GM maize seed.
 
This landmark decision is a win for the ACB and other civil society organisations on the continent that have resisted the introduction of these GM varieties in South Africa, Mozambique, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.
 
The Minister’s decision was made following the failure of the GM varieties to increase yield under drought conditions during repeated field trials in South Africa.”
 
The notion of “drought-resistant GMOs” is one of the most common PR scams found in pro-GMO propaganda. Along with similar hoaxes like golden rice and the GM Kenyan sweet potato, the purpose of the drought-resistant GMO trope is to misdirect attention from the fact that GMOs were created for no reason other than to sell poison. The two kinds of GMOs which actually exist on a significant economic level are those tolerant of herbicides, and those which generate their own Bt insecticidal poison in every plant cell. These also consistently fail in the field.
 
Drought-tolerance, on the other hand, along with traits like real pest and disease resistance, salt tolerance, improved nutrition, and improved nitrogen uptake, is solely the province of non-GM conventional breeding. This breeding, like any other, builds upon the accumulated work of thousands of years of farmer breeding, a collective human heritage. This status was reinforced in the 20th century, as all significant modern crop breeding was done using public money. Anything corporations do with this heritage is at most a minuscule contribution to a monumental and ongoing collective human project. That’s part of the reason it’s morally and rationally impossible for seed patents to have any legitimacy.
 
At best modern commodity breeding is a person standing on the shoulder of a giant. This “at best” is 100% within the realm of non-GM conventional breeding. A “drought-resistant” GMO, on the other hand, is nothing but a drought-resistant conventional variety which has one or more of the poison-enabling transgenes inserted. Thus we have the conventionally drought-resistant variety with an added Roundup Ready and/or Bt trait extraneously added. This then fraudulently is called a “drought-resistant GMO.”
 
The corporate GMO propaganda sounds especially bogus when we take into account the fact that of all economic sectors the industrial agriculture/food system is the primary driver of the climate crisis. Any big corporation, especially an agribusiness concern, which offers any sort of product touted as part of climate mitigation or adaptation, is engaging in straight disaster capitalism, seeking to profit off the crisis they themselves take the lead role in driving and having caused in the first place.
 
They [agribusiness] cause the problem [industrial agriculture is #1 driver of the climate crisis which is driving changing chronic drought and extreme drought events], then want to sell you the solution [drought tolerant maize], which doesn’t even work [the technology fails to produce greater yield under drought conditions] and is harmful in itself [as a typical GMO it drives escalated pesticide use; drives the crisis of antoibiotic resistant bacteria (ABR) through its use of a antibiotic resistance marker in the development process, as well as contributing to herbicide-driven ABR ; GM-driven mutations are never legitimately tested for safety].
 
Such “solutions” based on profit-seeking product and hi-maintenance technology also work to reinforce the technocrat ideology, that drought and farmer dependency aren’t socioeconomic and political problems but purely technical ones to be solved only by technology deployed by technocrats. But again this is precisely the mindset that has caused and driven the crises all along. No part of this framework can ever be anything but counterproductive and destructive, just as there can be no constructive action which doesn’t include rejecting and breaking free of this framework.
 
 
This particular example is typical of the overall economy and civilization which causes the climate crisis and general ecological crisis, then wants to sell you the solution of “green” capitalism, green hi-maintenance tech, technocratic carbon-trading schemes and “carbon neutral”, “offset”, “zero net carbon” regimes. These are solutions which don’t work (for over thirty years they’ve been deployed in various places and invariably are proven to be failures and often scams; overall emissions keep rising and accelerating their rate of rise, atmospheric carbon keeps rising and at increasing rate, deforestation and ecocide continue to rampage, often with the direct encouragement of climate policy as in the case of the Paris accord’s drive to accelerate deforestation by escalating subsidies for burning of wood pellets for electricity, biofuel, and heating*, aka the “biomass” scam/atrocity; plus the whole concept of “industrial renewables” is a fraud in that it remains completely dependent upon a fossil fuel foundation) and are harmful in themselves (industrial fake-renewables directly require massive mining destruction, poisoning of water and the environment, and then the electricity is put to harmful uses; hydroelectric generation is founded upon the enslavement of rivers and massacre of river ecological communities, most notoriously wiping out salmon; the whole concept is designed to prop up the inherently ecocidal economic system).
 
We see the overall recursive pattern. From the grandest “Green New Deal” perspective to the nitty-gritty detail of a particular product like Monsanto thirst-corn, this system offers nothing but malign scams designed to prop up profitable cancer/growth capitalism and herd the sheep away from real ideas and real work for the good.
 
There’s an endless number of such scams. They cause the problem then want to sell you the snake oil, while slandering and where possible forcibly suppressing the real cure. In the case of the climate crisis this means:
 
End all industrial emissions; stop destroying carbon sinks; allow all natural sinks to resume their natural ranges.
 
 
All else is a lie.
 
 
*Heating is done effectively in a low-impact way through passive solar and using the underground as a thermostat. Industrial electricity and fuel are inherently ecocidal, there is no sustainable or “eco-friendly” way to produce or consume them, we don’t need them, and would be better off spiritually and socioeconomically without them.
 
 
 
 
 

January 26, 2019

GM Trees (Plantations Part 2)

>

 
 
“Already forests are suffering the impacts of climate change, over-harvesting, and the introduction of invasive species, diseases, and pests from out of control globalization. The last thing the forests need are risky GE trees.”
 
– BJ McManama, Save Our Roots Campaign Organizer for the Indigenous Environmental Network, opposing the cynical opportunist program to engineer blight-resistant American chestnuts.
 
In Part One we discussed the evils of industrial monoculture tree plantations. They are purely alien to the land, purely invasive even where they amass “native” species in such an anti-ecological way, purely destructive.
 
GMOs by definition are invasive and will escalate every one of the pathologies we surveyed in part one: Destruction of forest, wetland, grassland habitats; generation of desert; all at the expense of food for human beings; destruction of carbon sinks thus driving the climate crisis; biodiversity loss and mass extinction; genetic monoculture; driving people off their land and destroying their way of life; sowing poverty, hunger, malnutrition; radically escalating wildfires; slathering of agricultural poisons; corporate consolidation and land concentration, land-grabbing, socioeconomic inequality; the sham “climate movement” fiddling while Earth burns.
 
Genetic engineering automatically is non-native and invasive to Earth itself, to ecology and evolution. So in itself, even leaving aside ulterior motives and deliberate lies, GM “solutions” automatically are just building the Tower of Babel higher and more top-heavy.
 
GM trees are designed to expand the invasion range and biodiversity erasure. That’s why the corporations and governments do the research: These are guaranteed primary effects and therefore are primary intended effects. That’s why they’ve set up the plantations in the first place.
 
Plantation trees automatically spread their pollen to any related species within wind range. This is long documented with non-GM trees everywhere – poplar, willow, acacia, birch, pine, others. This genetic contamination inevitably will include GM contamination to whatever extent GM trees are deployed in the environment. This contamination already is documented in China with GM poplars. China is a world center of poplar diversity, and this already imperiled diversity is now under GMO attack as well. Meanwhile US attempts to engineer poplar sterility, allegedly in order to prevent such contamination from GM poplar plantations, have been a failure.
 
Pro-GMO activists, disaster capitalist ideologues they are, cite the many crises driven by globalization, its industrial agriculture including tree plantations, the climate crisis and other ecological crises these are causing, as the reasons society now must deploy GM trees, in order to “solve” these problems in a Tower of Babel way.
 
This already is a proven lie: Poison-based agriculture as such is a proven agronomic failure going back to the 1950s when it became incontrovertible how this model denudes the soil and sets humanity on a pesticide treadmill and arms race the resistant pests will always win. The GMO deployment since the mid 1990s has only intensified this failure. As always, the poison treadmill and the Tower of Babel never are intended to solve the crises they cause in the first place. On the contrary they depend on crisis for their power and expansion.
 
Thus tree monocultures have taken advantage of their own disaster. These can’t even pretend to be food the way GM crops pretend to do. And then their GM form is engineered to be even more disastrous: More expansive, more aggressive, more destructive, more literally scorched earth.
 
Eucalyptus plantations have a special wildfire dynamic of deliberate disaster which then is used as propaganda and pretext for the Babel tech deployment. Eucalyptus monoculture drives out most other life forms, summoning a bio-dead, pesticide-slathered space where it then dries out the land and generates wildfires. These trees evolved over millions of years to thrive on aridity and fire, to the point that they depend on fire for their reproduction since their seeds open only when subjected to the temperatures generated by wildfires. That’s why they produce such dry conditions and such copious resin-laden tinder, in order to produce the most fire-friendly conditions. Many species of pine do the same, and these same species regularly are paired with eucalyptus in mutually reinforcing plantations, as both work toward the same arid fire-scoured environment.
 
Where growing in such masses as in plantations, eucalyptus wrings the water from the soil and causes depletion of groundwater and stream flow. The ecological impact hits far beyond the plantation borders. Everywhere it’s been introduced eucalyptus soon goes feral and aggressively invades the surrounding habitat, driving out native species and proceeding to transform the environment to its further liking: Aridity and fires.
 
Even natural eucalyptus-dominated ecology in its native Australia is less diverse than other woodland communities. It drives out the southern beeches who prefer moister conditions and marginalizes even such fellow arid inhabitants as Callitris, araucarias and she-oaks. Australian plantations are worse. Invasive plantations outside Australia are much worse.
 
GM eucalyptus is designed to greatly expand the space condemned to these plantations of fire. In Brazil, agribusiness is working to develop faster-growing eucalyptus (the project is a failure so far in spite of government approval for commercialization in 2015) while in the US ArborGen is trying to develop a cold-tolerant version in order to bring the plantations to the Southeast, where the climate is still not reliably warm enough for commercial eucalyptus production though several species are invasively established.
 
Wherever they expand, GM or non-GM, in the plantation or wherever they inevitably escape, eucalyptus will be aggressive against moist forest land, aggressive against native trees and plants, aggressive in turning landscapes into wildfire alleys. Much like the introduced killer bees of the 1970s, these killer trees are driving South America’s campaign of deforestation and desertification and will soon bring their paradigm of destruction to North America if the genetic engineering project prevails. A GM eucalyptus which grows faster will more quickly deplete the soil’s water. A GM eucalyptus grown in monocultures over an ever greater northward range will bring all its pathologies with it.
 
Eucalyptus is our prime example of the intrinsic psychopathy of industrial monoculture tree plantations and the escalation which genetically engineered forms would add to the destruction. Eucalyptus automatically is destructively invasive outside Australia. GM eucalyptus would be doubly invasive.
 
Beyond eucalyptus, trees targeted for genetic modification include Loblolly pines (plantations of these already infest the US southeast; genetic engineering will attempt to render their wood more dense, for use as biomass and lumber), poplars (Bt insecticidal strains of black and white poplar have been grown in China since the 2001; current projects are trying to engineer lower-lignin types for biofuel production), the American chestnut (for decades ravaged by a fungal disease, engineers want to develop a GM fungal-resistant gene drive type even though ongoing conventional breeding programs are having some success), bananas, plums, and papayas (types resistant against viral disease; GM papayas are commercially planted in Hawaii and China and already are failing in China as the virus is overcoming the resistance gene; this is guaranteed in all cases of engineered resistance), and the “Arctic apple”, now appearing in stores, engineered to suppress visual signs of incipient rot, a pure consumer-vanity product, purely worthless.
 
We can enumerate many more harms from GM trees, both harms intrinsic to GMOs and destructive escalations of ongoing plantation harms.
 
*Tree pollen is widely wafted on the wind, and poplars and pines freely hybridize in nature. Plantations of introduced species automatically contaminate native species, harming their genetic diversity. GM contamination also will happen automatically, as it already has in China where introduced species of poplar, several varieties genetically engineered and therefore doubly invasive, contaminate native poplars amid this center of world poplar diversity.
 
*Any advantage the engineered trait confers may help feral invasives to become entrenched in the environment. Thus faster-growing and/or cold-tolerant eucalyptus, or lower-lignin poplars, may become even more aggressive weeds than feral eucalyptus already is.
 
*The known harmful effects of escape and entrenchment include how eucalyptus drive out native plants and animals and dries out the land. Then there are the unknown chaotic effects, by their nature unpredictable. We’ve seen examples in the failed field trials of GM trees themselves, the failure of FuturaGen in Brazil to sustain higher-yield GM eucalyptus results across several trial sites, and the failure of Oregon engineers to sustain uniform genomes and the engineered sterility trait in their GM poplar trials. These are two examples of how chaos quickly ensues the moment the trials leave the greenhouse lab and enter the environment, even though these were still carefully controlled field trials. Imagine the chaos of the less controlled plantation environment, and then the uncontrolled wild environment where the escaped GM trees will sojourn.
 
*If the GM chestnut project goes through, it will be the first environmental deployment of a gene drive GMO. Such GMOs are explicitly designed to contaminate all wild individuals of the same or related species. Here the pro-GMO activists admit that GM contamination is inevitable in every case, since here the technology depends on total contamination. Whereas the Terminator trait renders seeds sterile, the gene drive Exterminator trait is designed deliberately to drive one or more species extinct.
 
In this obscene inversion, the fungal epidemic which has decimated the American chestnut but which nevertheless has left some naturally resistant individuals, which in the eyes of a non-psychopath would be sought as the genetic basis to conventionally breed a resistant variety, instead is being used as the pretext to launch an extermination campaign whose explicit goal is to render the natural species completely extinct, thereby completing the work of the fungus, and replace it with an alien semi-artificial engineered species. The campaign wants to drive native chestnuts extinct (and of course render organic production impossible under the current rules).
 
*The ecocidal psychopaths working on the GM chestnut openly avow that they are using it only as a Trojan horse to help grease the skids for subsequent, directly commercial GM trees. So the anti-blight GM chestnut is first and foremost a propaganda gambit on behalf of the commodity GM regime as such, exactly like the “golden rice” hoax.
 
*As with all Bt crops, Bt poplars and any other tree engineered to resist insects harm non-target insects, birds and other animals, and damage the soil ecology. Bt toxins and crops engineered to produce them are named after the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, which naturally produces these toxins under ecologically balanced conditions in balanced amounts. Bt crops, from leaves to roots, grossly exude the poisons overcoming all balance. Typical of all industrial agriculture practice.
 
*Epidemic disease and infestation is inherent to all monocultural practice. The GMO deployment is designed to prop up this doomed, destructive, self-destructive system for a few years longer, years neither humanity nor the Earth have. GMOs and poison-based agriculture directly contradict everything we know about the climate crisis, the ongoing mass extinction event, and the general ecological crisis, everything we know needs to be done. GMOs, including GM trees, are intended to prevent any meaningful action, in mitigation or adaptation, until it’s too late.
 
*GM disease resistance won’t work in the real world. Genetic engineering is too fragile and too reliant on perfect lab conditions ever to work well in the environment. As with all pesticides since the big spray commenced in the 1950s, and as with all poison plants, all GMOs designed to express insecticides, resist herbicides, and/or resist disease, so GM trees as well will fail in the field against the insects, fungi, and viruses they’re allegedly deployed against. The pests always will overcome. And to roll out new trees is logistically a far more complex undertaking than to roll out new maize brands.
 
In reality all GMOs are hoaxes, really just carriers of an idea designed to generate profit, power, and for the scientism cult, lunatic religious exaltation.
 
*No testing ever has been done on the potential health harms of breathing GM pollen for humans or other animals. GM trees will send their toxic pollen travelling farther and wider than the much shorter maize or cotton.
 
*No legitimate testing ever has been done on the safety of humans or other animals eating GM foods (only completely irrelevant weight-gain trials on CAFO inmates, which the paid liars then fraudulently call “food safety” tests). GM apples and papayas already are tree-grown direct unprocessed GM foods in the commercial supply. If GM chestnuts are developed and deployed, this also will be a direct Frankenfood. (To say again, the GM chestnut project would use the aggressively contaminating gene drive technology. Chestnuts freely hybridize in nature already so a GM deployment in the environment, if it works as intended, will drive all existing chestnut species on the continent extinct and replace them with nothing but the GM type. Non-GM food chestnuts will cease to exist.)
 
*The successful engineering of low-lignin eucalyptus and poplar will escalate the biofuel scam.
 
*For many tribes of the First Nations, the genetic engineering of poplar is a desecration as the tree is sacred to them. At the same time, Oneidas being proselytized on behalf of the GM chestnut have said that “GM trees have no soul.”
 
This desecration is as deliberate as when the Romanized Christians cut down the Greek groves of Athena in order to insult the pagan religion. Today it’s the fundamentalist cult of scientism and technocracy which has embarked upon a fanatical crusade to eradicate all of nature and replace it with only engineered organisms. The boosters and technicians of GM tree plantations are such religious maniacs.
 
 
Every problem, every aspect of the ecological crisis, is in part directly driven by industrial monoculture, and directly or indirectly driven by the commodity system. It is impossible to solve or ameliorate any of these crises within the framework of industrial agriculture, or within any productionist framework. Genetic engineering is nothing but building the Tower of Babel higher and more top-heavy. Any time you hear any PR flack in any guise alleging any “need” for any form of genetic engineering whatsoever, you can ignore the specific words since they invariably boil down to, “We need to prop up corporate profit and the production economy no matter what the damage.” Or as George Bush put it, “The American way of life is non-negotiable. Keep Shopping!”
 
In the end it all boils down to we who recognize that globalization, commodification, production-consumption, capitalism, extreme energy, must end if humanity is to survive at all, versus those who religiously believe that these must continue and who are willing to pay the price of total global murder-suicide for the sake of this fundamentalist commitment.
 
All GMOs are hoaxes and frauds in addition to their many other evils. GM tree plantations, which add a great escalation of the direct destruction of forests to the direct and indirect deforestation driven overwhelmingly by corporate industrial agriculture, comprise a new level of criminal destruction and evil being premeditated and carried out by those responsible, from the engineers to the media propagandists.
 
GM agriculture, indelibly part of corporate industrial agriculture, offers nothing to humanity and the Earth but social and economic destruction, environmental destruction, famine, pandemics, war, and death. It’s clear that here is no way forward, only the deadest of dead ends.
 
The only way forward to survival, transcendence, and victory is the return home to the Earth. The broad highway home is the necessary global transformation to agroecology and Food Sovereignty. We must turn the clock forward.
 
The fake “solutions” of genetic engineering are nothing but the Tower of Babel. But if we have a babeling chaos, we need to stop shouting, not shout louder.
 
 
 
 
 

August 2, 2018

This is Fishy (Salmon CAFOs and GM Camelina)

>

 
 
Factory farming of salmon, allegedly a more “sustainable” alternative to industrial mining of wild salmon, depends to a large extent on using ground up anchovies as feed. Thus it decimates another wild fishery. This generates the problem of declining anchovy populations and insufficient feed to fuel the overproducing salmon factory. The government, corporation, scientific establishment, and mainstream media then use this purely artificial problem as the pretext to tout GMO “solutions”. They do this for mundane profit purposes and toward more far-reaching goals of political power and eugenic control of GM animals and eventually GM humans.
 
In this case, anchovy-based feed as well as non-GM algae (also used extensively, and still available in adequate volume) are slated to be superseded by feed based on GM camelina modified with algae DNA to cause it to produce long-chain omega-3 oil. The fish fed on this material then will be touted as “healthy” to eat.
 
A laboratory feeding trial with this GM camelina currently is underway in Britain. As always with such trials, it’s not a food safety trial but only studies whether the animal quickly reaches slaughter weight. Nor will there ever be a study on the food safety for humans who eat animals fed this way. Once GM salmon are fed on GM feed it’ll be double exposure.
 
Note how the so-called “scientists” quoted in the piece think exclusively in terms of capitalist ideology, especially the Orwellian lie that government-subsidized supply-driven overproduction (in this case CAFO feed and farmed salmon), supplemented by consumerist propaganda, equals some natural mechanism of supply and demand. In reality there is no such “demand” except where artificially juiced by propaganda and retail prices kept deceptively low by hiding most of the costs and simply refusing to pay the environmental costs. But this environmental debt is vastly greater than the national debt. (National debts are denominated in money and owed to other money-mongers, and therefore can be written off without much trouble. But civilization’s mounting debt to Gaia is existential, biological, not financial; and it cannot be written off. On the contrary the Earth, perhaps at first slowly but all the more surely, will insist on payment in full, with interest.)
 
Reject the false Mammonist way of thinking, and the gratuitous idiocy of the whole CAFO/GMO paradigm becomes clear.
 
 
Fish farming is as bad as any other factory farming. Good land is condemned in order to grow the feed while human food production is driven onto more marginal land or just driven out completely. CAFOs are disease incubators, in the case of salmon frequently spreading disease to already beleaguered wild populations. CAFOs especially are designed to drive antibiotic resistance among human pathogens leading to the collapse of antibiotics as a medically effective treatment. Factory farming drives many socioeconomic evils, destroying community ways of life and community economies of farming and fishing for human food rather than for mass commodity production. CAFOs are ongoing atrocities against the animals exploited by them, physically and morally the descendants of Auschwitz. Anyone who could do this to non-human animals also would do it to humans, and anyone who could tolerate this level of animal cruelty would tolerate this level of cruelty to people. Nor is there any good reason to believe it’s less cruel for salmon than it is for chickens, pigs, cows.
 
And then in cases like this, the self-generated problems of factory farming are used as a pretext for the existential aggression of the genetic engineering regime.
 
 
On the other hand, no wild fish have evolved to withstand industrial fishing methods. All commercial fisheries are unsustainable. Salmon also are the special targets of dams. The attempted murder of rivers also murders the salmon who migrate up those rivers.
 
There is no ecological way to consume commercially extracted fish. Those who work toward an ecological way of life have to abjure commercial fish completely. This also would purge many poisons from the diet, from the mercury which accumulates in big predator fish to the incipient danger of GM salmon, the most dangerous kind of GMO for food safety because unlike commodity GM maize or soy it’s a true direct GM food designed to be eaten directly. Any food safety danger from genetic engineering itself will be maximized by such direct frankenfoods as GM salmon, “golden rice” if it ever got beyond the hoax stage, RNAi potatoes, botox apples and others.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

April 18, 2018

CRISPR: Utopian Religious Fantasies, Shoddy Reality

>

In their fantasies and propaganda, it’s a palace

 
 
 
This is just the latest proof that all the high-falutin’ advertising come-ons about “second generation” GMOs boil down to the same old poison plants and pesticides. That’s all agricultural GMOs in themselves were ever about and all they’ll ever be about.
 
This is just as true of hoaxes like “golden rice”. Even if golden rice ever were to be developed to the point that it could be commercially deployed, it would be deployed only in a Bt-expressing, herbicide-tolerant poison plant form. And while Syngenta has made propaganda hay out of its alleged “donation” of the beta carotene transgene (though the IRRI has reserved the prerogative of taking out its own patents on this technology), it certainly will not donate its pesticidal transgenes.
 
Agricultural GMOs do have two more profound long-run purposes. For the pro-GM activists of the scientism cult, the idea of GMOs and genetic engineering as such is far more important than the real thing. This manifests in two ways.
 
1. Agricultural GMOs are a stalking horse for animal and human eugenics on a GE basis. This is what the cult and the technocratic power structure really care about. Do you think the Western STEM fraternity really cares about a GM eggplant in Bangladesh for its own sake? They similarly don’t care how CRISPR actually is used in the short run, whether to engineer herbicide tolerance or glow-in-the-dark fish or bigger muscles for geeks or whatnot. These are all just practical and political experiments toward their goal of literally sculpting human bodies and minds according to corporate-technocratic specifications, for corporate-technocratic purposes.
 
2. The political/propaganda experimentation is part of the idea of GMOs serving as an organizational principle. “GMO” is a clarion call, a dog whistle, a way for every cadre and fellow-traveler of the scientism/technocracy cult to recognize one another, come together on a militant basis, and get used to waging fanatical culture war. This in turn is preparation for literal civil wars and escalated imperial wars as the eugenic control project gets fully underway. “GMO” is a fascist slogan in the most precise sense.
 
The goal of technocracy is the total blank slate, the total eradication of messy, hard-to-control wildness, indeterminism, freedom, all to be replaced by strictly engineered and controlled technological entities. The goal of replacing all human workers with robots is just the tip of the iceberg.
 
This is the ultimate culmination of the Judeo-Christian pathology which has sought relentlessly to sunder humanity from nature, depict humanity as being in a war with nature, and hail the destruction of nature as the ultimate goal. Ironically, this destruction has been called “reclamation”. The idea is that the wilderness is the domain of Satan, and destruction of the wilderness and its replacement with every kind of monoculture is a process of restoring the Garden of Eden.
 
But the truth is the exact opposite. The living Earth is Eden. Humanity is inextricably part of the Edenic ecology and can never truly be sundered from it. Humanity never was driven from the abundant Garden, but merely has embarked upon an infantile campaign of mutiny and vandalism within it. This death wish is more suicidal than homicidal, and it destroys freedom instead of attaining it. We had the freedom of the forage but chose the slavery of the tilled field. Industrial agriculture and its biotech escalation work to lock down this enslavement as permanent by physically eradicating all possible biological basis for truly reclaiming the Garden in all its biodiversity and freedom.
 
Of course the technocracy, according to its projections of a robot economy and agriculture, thinks it will need only a few slaves. The rest of humanity is, in the technosphere’s eyes, nothing but toxic waste which has to just go away, one way or another. The goal is to render the Earth Humanfrei, an exact reprise of the Nazi goal of rendering Europe Judenfrei.
 
Step One: Drive them out of the economy. We see the ongoing liquidation of all living-wage jobs and the campaign to replace workers with robots and other machines regardless even of profitability let alone any other value. The real goal of capitalism isn’t profit but control and domination. The profit system is just one mode of organizing power. We see the centuries-long aspiration of monocultural agriculture to drive all people off the land. And where were the people supposed to go from there? The system never had an answer to this. They briefly were supposed to go into the factories, but only until they could be replaced by machines. Today they’re supposed to go to ghettos and shantytowns where they’re supposed to rot and die. Exactly the original Nazi plan for the Jews.
 
Step Two: Drive emigration, if there’s anyplace for the dispossessed masses to go. As we see, globalization and its wars have set great masses of refugees in motion. The imperial countries who have destroyed the people’s homes refuse to accept any of these refugees except on an illegal basis, according to the cheap labor needs of the corporations. There’s nowhere the people can go where they can find security to build new lives. There’s noplace even to set up new ghettos. This too is exactly parallel to the Nazi persecution. They tried to force the Jews to emigrate but weren’t surprised to find that none of the sanctimonious Western countries wanted these refugees.
 
In both cases, the Nazi persecution and today’s corporate globalization persecution, we have a vast mass of people who the system considers worthless and dangerous. In both cases there’s nowhere for the people to go, no moderate “solution”.
 
We know what Step Three was for the Nazis. What do you think Step Three will be for the corporate technocracy, if they’re able to continue their onslaught?
 
The biotech deployment, and the ideological-religious propaganda of GMOs, are a key part of this onslaught. The “CRISPR” meme is the latest and most sleek propaganda model. The tawdry facts of its actual deployment are just as irrelevant to the true believers as the tawdry facts of the entire history of GMOs. That’s why pro-GMO activists do nothing but lie, like any other kind of religious fundamentalist: Facts mean nothing, only the fundamental faith.
 
 
 
 
 
 

December 15, 2017

Fool’s Gold

>

Golden rice is only about one kind of gold

 
 
No form of “golden rice” has ever gotten past the test stage. The pro-GMO activists lie when they tout this hoax product. All lies: That the product exists, that it’s ready to go, that it’s only being held up by the likes of Greenpeace. The truth is that golden rice has never worked in reality and has never been anything but a media hoax. The lies are part of the hoax.
 
In its test form the original “golden rice 1” contained only a meager amount of vitamin A. To use it as a vitamin supplement would’ve required eating unthinkable amounts of it every day.
 
These days they’re working on “golden rice 2” which allegedly produces greater amounts of vitamin A so that people could eat it without turning into a big grain of yellow rice. But they’re having all sorts of technical problems back-crossing it from the japonica variety they first engineered to any kind of indica variety which is readily commercial. It’s not only a media hoax but a very expensive technical boondoggle.
 
And let’s say this hypothetical product ever did become ready for release.
 
1. By design it would be the first direct-to-eat Frankenfood which is meant to be consumed on a mass basis. Compare it to other direct-food GMOs: Virus resistant zucchini or papaya, Bt sweet corn, GM salmon, the “non-browning” apple, GM potatoes. As dangerous as these may be, none of them is designed to be a daily dietary staple. But the designers of golden rice want for the first time for a direct-food GMO to be a daily staple.
 
There’s only one place where significant numbers of people have eaten GMOs directly on a large scale, and that’s among the farm workers and rural population of South Africa who eat large amounts of the Bt corn from the farms where they labor. No funding being available, the effects haven’t yet been subjected to a scientific study, but many severe neurological and organ damage effects have been documented on an anecdotal basis.
 
Michael Hansen of Consumers Union has theorized that there could be a severe problem with retinoic acid oversignaling if a product like golden rice were to be eaten in large amounts, which is how the engineers intend for it to be eaten. This would be a pathway to cancer and birth defects. This is just one of the potential dangers of making a GMO the very basis of one’s diet.
 
2. Any deployed golden rice would also be engineered to be herbicide tolerant and/or to express Bt toxins. So this direct food will also be laden with endotoxins and herbicide residue. Not only is the idea of golden rice meant to distract from the fact that the only real-world GMOs are pesticide plants; any real world version of golden rice would itself be such a poison plant.
 
3. Syngenta’s promise to donate its patented golden rice transgene applies only to pilot “humanitarian” programs. It would not apply to any general commercial deployment. That’s why the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), the organization in charge of actual development, has reserved the right to take out patents of its own. Beyond that, Syngenta wouldn’t give away the herbicide tolerance and Bt traits free of charge. So the alleged “humanitarian donation” aspect of the thing is also a scam. (We also don’t know how ChemChina’s imminent purchase of Syngenta will affect the disposition of the patent.)
 
 
The idea of golden rice is part of monoculture ideology. Vitamin A deficiency disease is the deliberate result of how corporate industrial agriculture has driven millions off their land and stripped them of their ability to grow nutritious food for themselves. Therefore both in principle and in practice the deployment of golden rice or any other “biofortified” GMO would be the disaster capitalist treatment of a symptom caused by the same system which deploys the “cure”.
 
This puts in perspective the 2013 direct action of Philippine farmers against the IRRI’s golden rice field trials. The people took action in self-defense against the corporate program to economically liquidate them, drive them off their land, and doom them to the same misery and illness which the “golden rice” slogan mocks with its fake solicitude.
 
So, ultimately, must we the people, everywhere on Earth, take all necessary action to abolish corporate agriculture and undertake the necessary transformation and renaissance of agroecology and food sovereignty. This and only this will solve vitamin A deficiency, and every other problem and crisis afflicting us.
 
 
Propagate the necessary new ideas.
 
 
 
 
Older Posts »