Monsanto Stole Everything, Innovated Nothing

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There’s many reasons to abolish Monsanto and GMOs. They’re agriculturally and environmentally totalitarian. They inevitably contaminate all other crops and the environment. They accelerate soil, water, air, and habitat destruction. They aggravate and accelerate climate change and every other environmental crisis. The more that GMOs are field tested and commercialized, the longer they exist at all, the worse their ecological ravages shall become, and the more we’ll pass points-of-no-return where the contamination shall become significantly malign and irreversible.

 

GMOs are economically and politically totalitarian. The GMO cartel is leader of the corporate agricultural onslaught dedicated to driving all people off the land. The cartel is escalating what’s already a non-competitive monopoly concentration in the seed sector. It aggressively uses this position to build horizontal and vertical monopoly power, enforce its dictates up and down the food production and distribution chains, drive non-GM seed varieties out of the market and out of existence, greatly jack up seed prices, force obscenely lopsided “contracts” upon farmers, persecute farmers with harassment, thuggery, and lawsuits, and get governments to enact repressive seed laws designed to escalate and accelerate this whole process.

 

That’s just one way the agribusiness cartel has seized control of governments around the world. Under capitalism, governments intrinsically are controlled by corporate power such as the kind of control being exercised by the GMO corporations. The unique threat to humanity and the Earth posed by such corporate control over agriculture and food render corporate control over government particularly nefarious. People can waste time trying to argue about the malevolence of corporate power in other sectors, but there can be no argument here: Humanity must purge this clear and present danger to our freedom, our democracy, and our literal survival.

 

Pesticides/GMOs also present a clear and present danger to our health. All independent studies, as well as almost all the corporations’ own rigged studies, find reason for concern or alarm. The genetic engineering process itself, and the massive pesticide residues in our food and water, wreck our microbiome (our internal gastrointestinal microbial community which with our bodies comprises as symbiotic joint organism cooperating for mutual health), cause gastrointestinal inflammation which leads to every kind of disease, trigger escalations in allergies, asthma, autism, and every other kind of autoimmune disease, cause cancer, organ damage, infertility, miscarriages, and birth defects. These are just the best documented effects. Glyphosate-tolerant crops also are nutritionally denuded. To ingest the processed foods made from these merely adds to the nutritional deficiency already inherent in diets centered on such “foods” and adds to the many diseases this can cause or aggravate.

 

Most of all, the fact that governments and corporations always have refused to perform legitimate full-length scientific safety studies on GMOs is strict proof that governments and corporations believe the results of such studies would be devastating to the GM products. In the same way that Monsanto and the US government have known since the early 1980s that glyphosate causes cancer, so they’ve always known or suspected the severe health dangers of GMOs. That’s why they’ve systematically refused to test them and disparaged the very idea of testing them. That’s proof of bad faith which can come only from the worst suspicions of the worst. Here we must agree with Monsanto, any real safety test of any GMO would give evidence of the worst.

 

The most amazing thing is how all this is over such a pathetic, worthless product. GMOs are cheap, shoddy, worthless, highly expensive products which don’t work for any purpose which could actually help people. Their yield is poor, no improvement over non-GM conventional agriculture; they require far more pesticides than conventional agriculture; they systematically help weeds and insect pests build resistance to pesticides, and thus resistance to themselves, uncontrollable by the same poisons which were alleged to be the reasons for having these GMOs in the first place; the “special” GMOs – those for drought resistance, vitamin fortification, nitrogen-fixing, etc. – are all media hoaxes.

 

 

Another big hoax is that Monsanto and other agrochemical corporations have accomplished any of this so-called “innovation”. In reality, the existence of GMOs, for worse or worst, has been the work of not-for-profit operatives who then had their work stolen or otherwise lifted by the big corporation. I’ll list some examples which include all the big milestones in the development of the main GMO types. My main source is the pro-Monsanto corporate history, Lords of the Harvest by NPR corporate-liberal columnist Dan Charles (page numbers will be tagged DC), with some additional information from The World According to Monsanto by French investigative journalist Marie-Monique Robin (MMR).

 

1. The most commonly used vehicle for insertion of the transgene into the target genome is to attach it to a plasmid from the bacteria Agrobacterium tumefaciens which in nature is a parasite that inserts itself into the DNA of plant hosts. The extracted plasmid with an attached transgene can accomplish the same genetic transfer with many kinds of plant cells. Monsanto did nothing to come up with this idea or to figure out how to do it. Instead, Monsanto took the basic idea of using A. tumefaciens and some DNA snippets from a hired consultant from academia, Mary-Dell Chilton (DC 18).

 

2. Once a mess of transgenes has been shotgunned into tissue cultured plant cells (no matter which insertion method used, bacterial plasmid or gene gun, it’s a purely brute forcible, messy, wasteful, scattershot process with no hint of “precision” about it), the engineers need a way to identify which cells have successfully received the transgenic insertion. The most common way to do this is to include within the “gene cassette” (the transgenic material being inserted) an antibiotic resistance gene which was extracted from another bacterium. (Thus genetic engineering contributes to the corporate campaign of antibiotic abuse and intentional spread of antibiotic resistance, all dedicated to eradicating antibiotics as an effective medical treatment.*) The engineers then douse the lot with the antibiotic, usually kanamycin. The cells which survive are those which successfully received the insertion.

 

But it was technically difficult getting the bacterial gene to work in the recipient plant cells. Monsanto couldn’t figure it out themselves. In order to render the kanamycin antibiotic resistance marker active, they took the idea of using the promoter and terminator sequence from A. tumefaciens itself, along with some more genetic snippets, from another consultant, Michael Bevan (DC 18-19).**

 

3. Early in 1983 Monsanto rushed to patent the A. tumefaciens insertion process even though they knew it was prior art. Charles quotes Monsanto patent lawyer Patrick Kelly: “We knew that Schell and Chilton were going to be [at an upcoming conference], and they were going to generate a set of publications which would be held as prior art.” In the demented world of intellectual property, a patent usually is awarded not to whoever can prove they were the first inventors of something, but merely whoever gets their patent application in first. (This time Monsanto didn’t get things all their own way. It turned out Chilton and Schell had also filed patent applications, and multi-decade litigation ensued.) (DC 21-2)

 

4. In nature, genes will be actively expressive or not (“switched on” or “off”), and at varying levels of expression, depending on timing and environmental conditions. This is an exquisitely developed evolutionary mechanism. In defiance of evolutionary safeguards, and therefore existing in a state of evolution denialism, in contempt of evolution, genetic engineering is dependent upon artificially forcing the transgene to be switched on at full power at all times, 24/7. This requires that the transgene for the particular trait have a special genetic promoter harnessed to it. The main workhorse promoter used in genetic engineering is the Cauliflower Mosaic Virus promoter (CaMV35S). Once again Monsanto couldn’t figure out any of this, the idea or how to do it. For the idea to snip and deploy the CaMV promoter they engaged in corporate espionage. They lifted ideas and data from Calgene and from a Rockefeller Institute consultant. Monsanto then used laboratory brute force to get the thing to work, and in 1984 they patented it (DC 34-5).

 

5. Consultant Roger Beachy was studying viral cross-protection among plants, wherein a plant exposed to one virus may develop resistance to others. Although in the long run little came of it, at the time the idea of using viral transgenes to induce broader viral resistance seemed to be a promising line of research. Monsanto didn’t know how to do it, but they were able to exploit Beachy’s work. (DC 35-6)

 

6. Everyone had the same idea for a synthetic Bt gene. Only Monsanto had the financial resources for the laboratory brute force to do it quickly (DC 46). Any other mode of social organization besides the private corporate person could have done so just as easily.

 

7. Hired consultants did all the work engineering bovine growth hormone (BGH), which became the Monsanto product Posilac (MMR 91).

 

9. Monsanto’s flagship product since the 1970s has been the herbicide Roundup, and its primary GMO product has been the Roundup Ready line. To this day, despite desperate hype campaigns, Monsanto remains financially dependent upon the Roundup Ready system. Yet Monsanto never was able to isolate and engineer glyphosate tolerance. (Calgene did figure out how to do it (DC 67).) This was in spite of years of extremely expensive, futile attempts. But in the end nature handed them the genetic tolerance as a gift which had evolved among bacteria in the polluted ponds surrounding a lowly glyphosate factory. (DC 68-9)

 

 

We see how it was nature, messed with by consultants dependent upon the socially built infrastructure of technical research and development, who did all the work. Monsanto, evidently, did nothing but reap the right to tax all this. So who created GMOs? In descending order of importance, each standing atop the foundation of the previous levels:

 

1. Nature, which always provides the near-absolute basis and resources for all human endeavor. That right there absolutely demolishes any claim that profit ever can be justified.

 

2. The common project of society, which completes this basis. No “individual” (let alone any corporate “person”) ever has accomplished anything requiring the existence of any infrastructure, other than as a networked part of the ecological and socio-ecological basis.

 

3. Farmers carried out the empirical practice of ten thousand years of selecting seeds, developing crop types, breeding landraces. Empirical farmers built 100% of this foundation. Empirical farmers are 100% responsible for developing agricultural crops in the first place and deserve 100% of whatever credit this warrants. And these farmers largely were dependent upon the social structures of those ten thousand years, albeit not as much as modern industrial agriculture and corporations are dependent upon the modern social structure.

 

4. The modern science of plant breeding, completely developed and almost completely practiced by public sector plant breeders.

 

5. The public funded most research in genetics and genetic engineering. The public paid for the corporate state to construct the planned economy of industrial agriculture and food. The public has always funded most of the propaganda for this system. All corporate sectors are elements of a planned economy of neoliberal globalization wherein all the corporations are completely dependent upon corporate welfare, starting with the planned monetarist system itself, in order to exist at all. Big Ag is second only to the finance sector itself in this absolute dependency.

 

6. Within the sector itself, the corporation seldom does any actual work, but exploits a galaxy of consultants and contractors (cf. Naomi Klein’s No Logo). Monsanto exemplifies this paradigm to perfection.

 

7. I can’t figure out what Monsanto contributes at the end.

 

 

So there we have it. Monsanto and corporations like it do nothing but steal and enclose natural and human resources, usually perverting and destroying them along the way, and use these to build massive power for nothing but to escalate their campaigns of robbery and destruction.

 

Genetic engineering (and poison-based agriculture as such) is a shoddy, hyper-expensive, destructive technology which doesn’t work and was never necessary for any human purpose. Corporations also are extremely expensive and destructive, a pure loss and plague on civilization. The Big Ag corporations like Monsanto therefore redouble the evils they perpetrate, the thefts (public domain crops) and enclosures (the goal is to drive non-“protected” varieties out of the market and eradicate all crop biodiversity and bio/cultural diversity as such), the destruction (the agricultural and wild germplasm; and as always everything which is destroyed by poison-based agriculture – the soil, the air, the water, forests, the environment, human and livestock health), all toward their goals of power and control.

 

 

 

Propagate the new and necessary ideas. Only these can be the seeds of the next ten thousand years.

 

 

 

 

*Remember this next time you see someone shrieking about the alleged threat to public health from a handful of non-vaccinators. Demand to know what he’s doing about the systematic campaign of governments and corporations to wipe out antibiotics via their profligate abuse in CAFOs and genetic engineering. This is a campaign which intentionally generates maximal antibiotic resistance among pathogens. Of course the cultists do nothing and say nothing about this. On the contrary, they actively support all the crimes of corporate agriculture including the campaign to wipe out antibiotics. This proves that they couldn’t care less about public health, and that their hysteria and hatred toward non-vaccinators has zero to do with public health. Rather, as authoritarian cult members they’re enraged by this form of civil disobedience as an affront to their statism and scientism. These fundamentalists see non-vaccination as blasphemy against their religion. So the surface arguments about vaccination are just a proxy for a religious culture war. That’s why the techno-cultists, insofar as they shriek about non-vaccinators, should be called proxxers. Always let your first thought be: “These supporters of the CAFO/GMO system want to eradicate antibiotics. They want antibiotics to cease to exist.”

 

 

**This business of hiring consultants brings us to a far bigger truth. We’re often told that society has to allow profiteering and intellectual property and corporate personhood in order to encourage necessary innovation. Now, much so-called “innovation” is worthless and destructive and humanity would be much better off without it. But let’s say for the sake of argument that a given innovation is worthwhile. Similarly, corporate personhood is perhaps the worst idea humanity has ever had: It serves zero purpose but legally to shield criminals from liability for their crimes, and gamblers from having to take losses. But’s let’s say for the sake of argument that even the corporate form is worthwhile. Still, must this corporation be allowed to own patents and profiteer?

 

Monsanto never thought so. That’s why they felt they could do just fine hiring consultants for nothing but a fee, no percentage at all. And they turned out to be right: Consultants were willing to work, to “innovate”, for nothing but the fee.

 

Given that fact, if society decides that it does need corporations to perform certain tasks, why shouldn’t society hire these corporations in the exact same way, as consultants, as contractors, for a fee, while retaining control of society’s own common property? We have the incontrovertible testimony of the corporations themselves, led by Monsanto, that this would work just fine. So why is anyone stupid enough still to believe that society must offer “personhood” and “property rights”, profiteering sovereignty, the right to tax, to private actors in order to get them to innovate? The fact is, even if you think the services and products of corporations are worthwhile, and even if you think only corporations can most effectively deliver them (another disproven lie), that’s still no reason to give them a cut of what only nature and the common labor produces. You can just hire ’em for a fee. Does Monsanto believe this? They’ve counted on it!

 

 

 

 

 

GMO Field Trials and the Deliberate Contamination Campaign

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Corporate agriculture sows disorder and chaos.

 

 

The British government has approved the Sainsbury lab’s application for open air field trials of GM potatoes which not only have not been subjected to controlled greenhouse tests but don’t yet even exist.

 

As I wrote a few weeks ago, Sainsbury’s application for an as yet nonexistent product, and its invitation to the regulator to assure the public of the safety of this product which doesn’t yet exist, is the best commentary on the fact that everything the corporate system tells us about GMOs, in addition to being always a lie, is always a pure fabrication. The corporations and governments tout nothing but the idea of “GMOs” as such, while in reality the actual GM crops are always poorly-designed, shoddy, backward, failure-prone products.

 

This is also the best commentary on the fact that field trials have no scientific basis or purpose, but rather are propaganda exercises. They propagate the fraud that GMOs are tested for environmental safety and agronomic performance when in reality the tests are designed to give no meaningful information on either of these, just as corporate feeding trials test nothing but industrial parameters irrelevant to food safety.

 

Therefore field trials are designed to serve as propaganda vehicles. They’re meant to normalize the GMO ideology as such and to impress upon the people the sense of the alleged ubiquity and necessity of GMOs and the alleged inevitability of GMO domination.

 

We see how GM field trials serve as a stage of the GM propaganda process just as they comprise a stage of the GM crop development process. This parallel is poetically appropriate since GMOs as such serve only fictive purposes, including an overall propaganda function. Their ultimate purposes – profit, power, control – have nothing to do with natural reality, but only with the totalitarian will to obliterate existing reality and replace it with a malign, ideologically determined reality. And thus it’s also appropriate, and was always inevitable, that all of the real-world effects of GMOs – environmental, health, agronomic, economic – are purely destructive.

 

 

Therefore the GM regime won’t be content with just the verbal propaganda threatening total GMO domination. Propaganda is never separable from action, and GM propaganda always accompanies the aggressive campaign physically to propagate GMOs as far and wide across the surface of the globe as possible. This includes not just the legal deployment of commercial GMOs but illegal deployment as well as the systematic contamination of non-GM crops and wild relatives with GM genetics.

 

We can sum up what we know:

 

1. GMOs in the open environment cannot be controlled. They automatically contaminate non-GM crops and wild relatives. This is true of field trials as well.

 

2. The intent and goal of corporations and government regulators is maximal contamination. This is proven by the systematic illegal cultivation of GMOs by corporations such as Monsanto and the way the briar-patched governments such as those of Brazil and India then legalize this illegal campaign. It is proven also by the consistent pattern of action of regulators.

 

3. We know field trials have the propaganda goals I described above.

 

4. So we can deduce that, although the experimentalists may not yet have used field trials this way, they hold in reserve the intent to launch new experiments in GM contamination by turning “field trials” (always a pretext and proxy) into a general, uncontrolled environmental release.

 

 

Consider the example of a joint corporate-university algae agrofuel experiment. Agrofuel GMOs are most symbolic of how wasteful and worthless GMOs are, and therefore are emblematic of the overall destructive goal of the corporate-technocratic project.

 

Here the experimenters tout how the GM algae “disperse[s] from the cultivation ponds” though they claim they’ve been unable to document aggressive “colonization…with increasing distance.” But they’ll keep trying. If the reader is in any doubt about the kind of language used in this study, consider this proclamation: “[T]he gains in productivity measured in GE terrestrial crops are predicted to be mirrored in GE algae..” Since these gains are known to be zero, indeed negative, here’s the experimenters acknowledging that the GM algae project is part of the project of waste and destruction, and broadcasting the Orwellian character of their communication throughout. We must apply this knowledge to our assessment of their real purpose in gauging the what the experimenters themselves call the “colonial” potential of their monster. Did any monarch ever send out a colonial expedition without intending far-reaching violent conquest? We already know that this algae is intended to be deployed worldwide. Only a fool thinks the difference between controlled and uncontrolled deployment, legal and illegal, is anything but purely methodological in the minds of the experimenters.

 

For another key example, the USDA’s ongoing GM grass approvals in the aftermath of the permanent escape of GM creeping bentgrass from a field trial and its subsequent environmental colonization proves:

 

1. The USDA agrees with the corporations and experimenters that all GMOs should be given full release with zero regulation and zero concern for the consequences except insofar as these provide data toward future controlled experimentation.

 

2. The USDA wants to maximize GM contamination. This is its intent and goal.

 

3. This is the ideology of regulators, prior to any mundane corruption and revolving door careerism.

 

This regulator consciousness, this willful intent, is proven by the fact that even as the USDA washes its hands of the earlier disaster it is allowing new releases. This proves that the regulator actively, consciously wants total contamination. Therefore “co-existence” is a lie, and not just physically. In cases like GM grass, alfalfa, canola, maize, cotton, and many others, where the physical impossibility of controlling the spread of the transgene is proven, regulator actions prove that governments want the eradication of all non-GM crops.

 

It’s appropriate that so many of these trials and releases are for products that are worthless even by GMO standards – crops for fuel, herbicide tolerant grass for golf courses. It goes to the core of the culture of the lie incarnated in the very idea of GMOs: The most ardently touted GM products are those which most directly, in principle, contradict the #1 GMO lie, that they’re supposed to help “feed the world”.

 

And this in turn exposes the entire GMO endeavor as having literally zero to do with anything which could ever benefit humanity. On the contrary genetic engineering is a campaign of corporate and government power and the object of religious worship by a particularly noxious strain of vermin, the scientism cult.

 

 

Therefore all the pro-GM activists cherish the program of spreading GM contamination as such. It forces corporate power upon agriculture and food, it concentrates government power, it destroys the integrity of communities and the environment, it’s a campaign of uncontrolled human experimentation as a step toward controlled eugenic experimentation and technological development, and it’s a form of fundamentalist proselytization, propaganda by deed.

 

GM field trials offer great opportunities for expansion of this deed of deliberate contamination. This campaign which transforms propaganda into action is the logical extension of the general propaganda character of the whole field trial endeavor.

 

The contamination campaign has the goal of finally forcing through attrition the mindset of “you just sort of surrender” which Monsanto long ago verbalized as the mindset it works to force upon humanity. But this is just the beginning of its goals. All totalitarians regard the initial physical conquest as just the beginning of their aggression and violence.

 

The pro-GM activists are betting that the result of their contamination campaign will be to sow this surrender mentality rather than to spur real movement resistance and counterattack.

 

 

Co-existence with GMOs is physically impossible. The goal of government regulators, corporations, and GM farmers is total contamination of all crops. Therefore co-existence is politically impossible as well, and the only viable political position and goal is total abolitionism.

 

For as long as the GMO deployment continues the contamination will become worse and worse, and the chances of it becoming indelible, with all the agronomic and ecological destruction that will follow, will increase. Which is all the more reason to Abolish GMOs Now.

 

 

 

Help propagate the necessary actions.

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Retread GMOs

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The trendiest new lie about GMOs is the only thing new about them. This is the lie that there’s “new” kinds of what are really the same old GMOs.

 

Even the lie itself isn’t new. In form it simply repeats the hoary old debunked lie about the alleged “precision” of genetic engineering. The new version goes, “These new technologies really are precise, honest and for true this time!” These fake “new” versions of the same old extremely imprecise GMOs include CRISPR “gene editing” and similar “new breeding technologies”, RNA interference, gene drives, and synthetic biology. Sites like Independent Science News and SynBioWatch do excellent work describing in detail how these function and how scattershot and dangerous they are. As a group these need an appropriately informative and disparaging term like “retread GMOs.”

 

You don’t like GMOs? Look how they’re making GMOs even more radical, less precise, more chaotic, more potentially destructive. We already know there’s no overall precision and that genetic engineers have no idea what they’re doing. Therefore every time you hear anyone from the system say they’re becoming more “precise” you know this is nothing but a measure of their deepening delusion, and of their constant will to force their kind of manipulation and control over all of humanity and nature.

 

In general “experts” never sustain competence because their egomania and congenital drive toward ever greater manipulation and the idea of control always trump any desire they may have for true understanding and competence.

 

Thus, even if on rare occasions knowledge and practice actually were to stabilize, and the experts of the moment really did understand what they were doing, they could never remain stable at this position. They quickly would drive the situation into chaotic territory, and therefore they quickly would revert to incomprehension and incompetence. The more extremely high-energy and high-maintenance technology and its support structures become, the more wasteful and destructive the results of this incompetence become. The only thing reliably constructed is the further concentration of wealth and power, for as long as the corporate technocratic system exists, until its incompetence, wastefulness, and destructiveness become so extreme that the system consumes and destroys itself. Therefore a core task of the abolition movement is to conserve itself through this period of technocracy’s self-destruction.

 

If the Peter Principle is a law of system hierarchies (and goes some way toward describing the self-wastefulness and self-destructiveness), we can adduce a companion principle which applies to every type of technical expert: Their inertia always is strongly toward the zone of incomprehension and incompetence. Experts are not conservatives and never seek to conserve understanding and competence. They’re always nihilistic radicals, bomb-throwers. A core task of the abolition movement is to conserve real knowledge, real science, real competence, and abolish the fake versions along with the nihilism that drives them.

 

With the retread GMOs the engineers simply are retreading their previous paths of imprecision, incomprehension, willfully driven chaos, willfully driven waste and destruction. As with previous GMOs, they have no idea of the complexity of the effects of their “new” techniques. Even where the technical procedure seems superficially more “precise”, its chaotic effects are every bit as unpredictable as the most blunderbussing gene gun. Even the most precise cut can have extreme chaotic effects. Meanwhile, faster “sequencing” capabilities give engineers only the same small, uncontexted fragment of information they had before. It merely speeds up ignorance and enhances the arrogance of stupidity which is the defining trait of technocrats.

 

Genetic engineering aspires to bring all of life under technological control and eugenic manipulation. The escalated use of computerized mechanization to perform the engineering is designed to escalate this program of control and manipulation by further removing the concept of life from the realm of ecology and into the realm of software and data manipulation. This is the better to deny evolution and disparage ecology, and bring real life under the conceptual, and eventually the actual physical control of eugenic technology and legalistic computer and intellectual property fictions. This is another manifestation of Monsanto’s original plan to become the “Microsoft of agriculture”, with its transgenic traits serving as the hegemonic “software” controlling all the stupid “hardware” of agriculture and food. The ultimate goal of course is to attain this reified control over all of physical reality.

 

This notion of attaining physical dominion and control via computer data and its synthesized physical extension, including fantasies about artificial intelligence, is a typical fiction of the Mammon and scientism religions. Bits of code are just another fictive number, and all cults stemming from them are just another branch of numerology.

 

Mammon usually is conceived as greed or, more precisely, the belief that money is real, and the religious worship of this reified money. But this can be boiled down further to the belief that fictive numbers are real, and the worship of these numbers. Love of money is just the most common and visible form of this cult worship. But this kind of worship also is the core of the scientism/technocracy religion.

 

If science is the branch of philosophy that focuses on developing methods to produce precise numbers as a conception and reflection of the qualitative diversity of reality, then scientism is the religious cult which then is built by the practitioners of science and their followers. They reify these numbers, convince themselves the numbers in themselves are “real” rather than a philosophical abstraction, and turn reality completely upside down by convincing themselves that this superficial abstraction of reality is actually the true reality, and actual reality just the abstraction. (Thus they recapitulate the program of the British and German solipsistic philosophers.) They come to worship these numbers. And since they can manipulate the numbers at will, it follows that actual physical reality, to them a mere abstraction, also is infinitely manipulable at their command. In this way they use the religious vehicle of numerology to transform themselves, in their own minds, into gods. This sums up their religious belief system.

 

Their preferred propaganda term “new breeding technologies” (NBT) is a window into their mindset. They claim we need new techniques since sexuality within the framework of evolution is, according to technocracy, insufficient. This begs the question, “insufficient for what?” Self-evidently evolution is sufficient for the entire reality of humanity and the Earth. It could be insufficient only from the perspective of a radically anti-human, anti-ecological, anti-evolution agenda. This is indeed the totalitarian agenda of technocracy.

 

 

From there it’s easy to see how the worshipers of pseudo-scientific numbers join hands with the worshipers of monetary numbers, and how easily these fraternal sects always have worked together. They’re two shades of the same color. Because they share the goal of using their numbers to attain control of humanity and the Earth, they’ve always easily formed a strategic and tactical alliance for their political, economic, and ecological assaults.

 

 

It’s self-evident that such a monstrous campaign of religious fanaticism cannot be “regulated”. To use the terminology of the system regulation paradigm, it can’t be “managed”, can’t be “risk-assessed”, humanity cannot set “tolerances” for it. The fact is humanity and the Earth cannot co-exist with corporate scientism. We must abolish it, its mindset, its crimes. Therefore we need to propagate the abolition idea and build the abolition movement.

 

Unfortunately there’s another standard retread going on, and that’s the retread among critics of GMOs and poisonism who seem unable to liberate themselves from the “regulation” paradigm. Indeed, this paradigm is itself part of technocracy, and the unreconstructed pro-regulation types reveal themselves to be waging a campaign of reformism within the framework of corporate technocracy, including the framework of considering corporate dominion and genetic engineering to be normative. Indeed, by their own testimony many of these persons are pro-GMO. Often they openly admit their support for laboratory testing of GMOs and for fraudulent medical applications of genetic engineering. They oppose only specially selected agricultural applications, evidently on an arbitrary basis.

 

But this basis cannot provide the necessary philosophical and spiritual foundation of humanity’s great resistance and liberation movement. Worse, it seeks to keep all thought and action imprisoned within the framework of “co-existence” with poisonism within the technocratic framework. But co-existence is impossible, and propaganda for it is evil.

 

It often is worthwhile to condemn the system’s refusal to perform real safety tests, refusal to undertake real regulation, refusal to properly label GMOs, refusal to enforce existing laws which require banning cancer agents, and its general refusal to act according to the principles of need, alternatives, and precaution, when this criticism is undertaken within the context of an explicit abolitionist framework. (Most pertinently, these derelictions comprise strict proof that the system knows or believes pesticides and GMOs to be extremely harmful to human and environmental health. Therefore its motive in forcing them upon humanity and the Earth must be malignant.) But to cite these for their own sake automatically presumes the impossible and pernicious co-existence framework. And of course to still advocate, as one’s actual program, things like labeling, “better testing”, and the precautionary principle, all those ships that sailed so long ago, is by now nothing but reactionary.

 

Therefore the point no longer is to say “we need better EPA regulation of pesticides”, or “CRISPR needs to be regulated as other GMOs” (the same people who say this also acknowledge that regulation of regular GMOs was never adequate), but rather:

 

We know that all pesticides are cancerous, don’t work anyway, and never can be “regulated”. Therefore we must abolish them completely.

 

We know that all genetic engineering is extremely imprecise and chaotic, highly dangerous, has never worked for its avowed purposes, and has no constructive purpose. Therefore we must abolish it completely.

 

 

 

 

 

Help propagate the new and necessary ideas.

 

 

 

Humanfrei

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They hate food. (They hate the fact that we have to eat.) They hate the Earth. They hate the literal soil, the “dirt”. They hate the human body.

 

If for the time being they have no choice but to inhabit bodies which need food, they want to render it all as abstract, fictive, clinical, bureaucratic, technological as possible. For the same reason they want as much as possible to remove all direct human participation from food production and remove all contact with nature. They want to render the soil as inert and sterile and dead as possible and then jolt it with synthetic fertilizer. They want to sunder its contact with the rain and wind by rendering it dependent on irrigation water supplied by high-energy systems. They dream of covering all crop fields with black tarps and using only artificial light for photosynthesis. They want to use poisons to kill, not just “pests” but all life other than the crop itself. The fact that industrial agriculture is extremely wasteful in its use of fertilizers and pesticides, and the fact that GMOs are designed to maximize the use and waste of pesticides, is wasteful only from a rational point of view. From the point of view of technocracy and the scientism religion, maximal deployment of synthetic poison, through external application and by engineering crops to ooze poison from every cell, is an ideological value in itself. They do it on principle.

 

Besides maximizing pesticide use, from the cult’s perspective the main purpose of GMOs, and of corporate control of seed in general, is the religious principle of enclosing the seed and the genes, and therefore the physical crop, within the ritual of patenting. However artificial and fictive this is from a rational point of view, if the technocracy cult can convince enough people religiously to believe in intellectual property, and especially the patenting of life, and if this cult can convince the thug arm of the state to use force and the threat of force on behalf of this fiction, it becomes real. The crop now verily is something “new”. In some way it has been abstracted from the hated ecology.

 

Throughout the history of industrial agriculture and its Green Revolution, culminating in herbicide tolerant GM crops, the system has striven to be “labor saving”, aka job destroying, has been designed to purge as much human participation from the system as possible. Human beings are to be wiped out as farmers, wiped out as laborers, wiped out as communities, wiped out as people living on the land. This campaign has been most overt across the Global South, but it intends to encompass all of humanity. Human beings are to be wiped out as producers and eaters of food, since each of these human activities are odious to the technocrats and scientism cultists. Only as agents conveying money, as moneyed consumers, are human beings to be granted the right to exist at all.

 

In all the goal is to render food as abstract, technocratic, mechanized, chemical, biotechnological as possible. Monsanto’s goal always has been to remove all nature from the seed. Robert Fraley envisioned Monsanto becoming the “Microsoft of seeds”. By this he meant not just the mundane goals of greed and monopoly power. More profoundly he thought Monsanto’s transgenes would comprise the fundamental software of all agriculture, with the physical seeds and crops being just the stupid, fungible, cheap factory-produced hardware. Lots of people tried to tell them agriculture doesn’t work that way, that on the contrary the transgene is a stupid, messy gewgaw dependent upon the quality of germplasm in which it resides. For a long time the company wouldn’t listen.

 

After some years of stubbornness Monsanto had to concede to reality. But the company fixed its ignorance of agronomy only under duress. Their attitude has not changed. To this day they resent having to temporize, they resent having had to buy all those seed companies. They’re still trying to figure out how to impose maximum monopoly control with minimum real-world apparatus or indeed contact with physical reality at all.

 

This is the grail of all corporations, themselves such fictions rendered real only by the violence of the state and the inertia of the people. The sector comprising corporate agriculture and food, along with its lead enablers from the state, like USAID and the USDA, and from the world of private philanthropy, led by the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, thinks exclusively in terms of Mammon’s fictive numbers. The measure of agriculture is never food for human beings but sanctified fake numbers like GDP, trade balances, sovereign debt, commodity and stock prices, corporate profits, money as such. These pure fictions are rendered real only by the corporate state’s violence and the tolerance of the people. Thus the corporate/government/NGO structure is able globally to impose and enforce the agricultural model which conforms to these measures and eradicates, as much as possible, all actual food production for human beings.

 

In all these ways the goal is to render it as literally true as possible that food is produced by money, that food comes from the supermarket.

 

The entire corporate system is dedicated to enforcing the religion of Mammon to its ultimate extreme, where the only relationships which shall exist shall be between sterile objects, preferably legal fictions like corporations, patents, titles and money, while all ecological relationships, all relationships between human and human, human and Earth, shall be eradicated. These relationships are to cease to have any right to exist, and then cease to exist in the most literal sense. This is the logical end of all theory and practice of the profit-seeking corporation. As we see every day, the corporations at all times are working aggressively toward this end.

 

So we have the situation:

 

Corporations regard human beings as superfluous, potentially dangerous, and would prefer they simply disappear from the earth.

 

Technocrats regard human beings as superfluous, potentially dangerous, and would prefer they simply disappear from the earth.

 

Corporations regard the Earth as literally nothing but a resource mine and waste dump.

 

Technocrats regard the Earth as literally nothing but a resource mine and waste dump.

 

Here we have perfect accord on an ideology, an economic system, and a technology set dedicated to rendering the vast majority of human beings superfluous and worthless in the most literal sense of the term. In the same way there’s perfect agreement on the complete destruction of the global ecology.

 

What do you think follows from that? Especially as the people stop being so patient, so tolerant, so inertial.

 

 

 

Black Horse Chronicle, October 3rd

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1. The black horse bears its balances across a blasted, haunted landscape hung with the night of ignorance. You stare hypnotized at the scales as they seem to weigh all love and food in exact proportion to a cairn of coins, and don’t see how the whole world comes unbalanced, tips and turns over.

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2. Break free, shake off, lift your eyes and look! The world is upside down. The world – the great trinity, God, Humanity, Earth – is sprawled in devastation. All degree is disrupted, all balance is lost. The black rider is the master of illusion and the propagator of conceit.

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(3. We see why the devil’s most cherished playthings are not even the material products of technology but the propaganda chimeras of scientism, the things which barely exist at all except as fantasies and delusions and lies, such as genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, space travel, or the peaceful use of nukes. This especially resides in anticipation of the all too real use of them in war.

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4. But we see the great confluence of fantasies of Mammon as the economic golems, the government’s corporate persons and the Fed’s money and Wall Street’s securities and the devil’s own “intellectual property” clasp and fuse with the technological golems of the scientism cult. If the term “seeds” may be used to encompass the Satanic patenting onslaught upon life itself, literal life enclosed within the false and fictive slave bounds of patents, then we can take the longstanding political acronym FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate, as the first three great horsemen of the apocalypse of the false, self-cannibalizing meta-economy) and amend it to the FIRES sector. Verily it does describe the great bonfire of all human productivity, prosperity, happiness, and hope. This tyrannical economy of Babylon is based upon literally nothing but fictions and lies.)

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5. Thus Belial once again earns his title, Lord of Lies. The devil wouldn’t stand a chance without the multitudes who yearn to believe his lies. He’s not even a good liar, and his worldly minions are pathetically incompetent. But with the sinful credulity of masses, all things become possible.

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6. As the legion of corporate demons rampages over the earth and throughout our minds and souls, as the black rider of Revelation brandishes the scales as broadcast by the book, the book’s descriptions of the churches of John’s time still reverberate. The divisions are timeless. Thus book still sends its word to the Ephesians: You’ve worked hard, “not fainted”, supported the true activists both of radicalism and of reform, and rejected the explicit corporate liars. But you still dream of a solution within the corporate Babylon and even contemplate the “leaving of your first love” to the corporate demon state’s control. Thus it is with anyone who still yearns to place the business of the ecotrinity of God, Humanity, and the Earth under the domination of the corporate state; they all leave and lose their first love. Co-existence is impossible and such surrender will never be anything but complete and forever. “She that hath an ear, let her hear what the Spirit says unto the churches; To him that overcomes will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God.”

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7. To Smyrna goes the exhortation to keep fighting as you have, and continue your works, in spite of the tribulations you must face. “She that overcomes shall not be hurt of the second death”, but “shall receive a crown of life”. “He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says unto the churches.”

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8. Pergamos endures amid a bedeviled circumstance and has “held fast” and “not denied faith” while Thyatira demonstrates exemplary “charity, and service, and faith, and patience, and works; and the last to be more than the first.” But they are spiritually confused and prone to backsliding, as their affinity with Babylon and yearning for compromise and co-existence blinds them to the ultimate impossibility of their path. Worse, their blindness and corruption extends to toleration and embrace of idolatry and superstition toward various corporate hoaxes and civics textbook lies. “You suffer that woman Jezebel, which calls herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols.”

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9. Today’s Sardis “has a name that you live, and are dead.” Indeed we endure daily an invasion of the undead hordes, dead names which still find sinfulness and credulity with which to conjure among the masses. Today the very word “politics” is the deadest of names and most virulently mesmerizing of zombies. The true politics of life is a fully participating way of life and is as growing food and pumping water. And so every idea of the mind and vibration of the spirit may proceed along the line of life, which leads resolutely away from Babylon forever, or down the pit of death. “He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says unto the churches.”

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10. The good word hails the stalwarts of Philadelphia. Especially across the bright crest of the Earth the faithful and courageous fight with clear minds, brave hearts, pure souls.

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“I know your works: behold, I have set before you an open door, and no man can shut it…Because you have kept the word of my patience, I also will keep you from the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world, to try them that dwell upon the earth…She that overcomes will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and she shall go no more out: and I will write upon her the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, which is new Jerusalem, which comes down out of heaven from my God: and I will write upon her my new name. She that has an ear, let her hear what the Spirit says unto the churches.”

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11. Scraping the bottom of the barrel, the lukewarm Laodiceans are still with us and still seek to smother all sparks which bring fire and life. “I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot: I would you were cold or hot. So then because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spit you out of my mouth.” Jesus deplores the lukewarm and prefers to them even the cold, not because he endorses the cold, but because recognition of the cold and confrontation with it is necessary for the hot to attain its full flame and spread its sparks to all possible tinder. We need the great conflagration, we need the majestic speedy wildfire. But the lukewarm, falsely in the name of warmth, want to dump the swill to douse all sparks and preempt all future life.

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Let Jesus make it clear once and for all: “How can Satan cast out Satan? And if a kingdom be divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand. And if Satan rise up against himself, and be divided, he cannot stand, but has an end.” (Mark 3:23-26)

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This ultimately shall be part of the downfall of Babylon and the corporate dominion, as there is such division among its constituency. But a faithful few forced into dissidence and exile do not have the luxury of dividing against ourselves. We haven’t this luxury in mind, where so many divide a corporation, or a government bureaucracy, or a technology, or a propaganda campaign, or Babylon as a monolithic whole, into a schizophrenic duality and seek to find the devil to love and cherish amid the devil to oppose. We haven’t this luxury in action, which follows divided on account of this duality, derelict from the great need and necessity even as it acknowledges the need. We haven’t this luxury in spirit, where every sign in heaven and earth calls us to a triune ecological holism, God and Humanity and Gaia, unbroken, seamless, One.

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The Fox and the Framework (Rejecting the Corporate Science Paradigm)

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Under the corporate science paradigm there’s no such thing as a conflict of interest. Colloquially, we often say journalists or scientists or government officials have a “conflict of interest”, though usually it’s difficult to detect any conflict whatsoever; they’re clearly 100% for the corporate imperative. This is often in part because of mundane corruption. But there’s a deeper reason for this lack of a conflict. The fact is that usually there is no conflict except on the most superficial propaganda level (i.e. the person lies about being something he’s not and doesn’t see himself as). But structurally the very notion of a conflict of interest is a misunderstanding and a myth.

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By definition a corporation can have no conflict of interest. Corporations are sociopathic in principle and always in the practice that derives from this principle. In principle the only corporate value is maximizing power as measured by profit. Scientific truth and public health do not exist as values for the corporation.

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Therefore in principle the corporate version of science is supposed to produce, not an objectively truthful result, but the result which is most useful propagandistically for the corporation. This is no abuse of science. Rather, it’s quite simply what normal science is in any context dominated by corporations. This science paradigm, where “science” means whatever the corporate marketing department says it means, I have dubbed the corporate science paradigm.

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This is the first, principled, structural reason why anyone who does value public health, environmental health, and scientific truth must reject out of hand all testimony from corporations and their factotums, including testimony from the corporate regulators and corporate scientific establishment which operate under the corporate science paradigm.

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The second reason is that no sane, rational person would ever trust the fox to guard the hen-house. This would be true even if we didn’t know a particular fox. This was always straight rationality and common sense. By now we also have the entire historical evidence record proving that the corporation will always lie whenever its profit is at stake. We can call this the Fox Rule. This, as we discussed above, is what a corporation is supposed to do, in principle. If we don’t want to live with organizations which are designed with this mission, if we recognize that it’s impossible for humanity to coexist with formally psychopathic organizations, then we must abolish the corporate form.

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The Fox Rule is always true of every big corporation. Monsanto and Dow are especially egregious examples. Their records of falsehood are perfect. Therefore no rational person or agency would place any value other than zero on the testimony of Monsanto and Dow or any chemical corporation where it comes to the safety and scientificality of their products and research. We must reject out of hand all corporate testimony attesting to itself.*

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Yet under the corporate science regime, regulators always accept the corporation’s own testimony about its profitable products as the state of science. This is because corporate regulators exist to serve the corporate “client”, as the regulators call them, so it follows that from the point of view of a regulator like the EPA or FDA or USDA science is nothing more than whatever the corporation says it is. So the regulator accepts the corporate version of science on ideological principle. The regulator not only accepts the corporation’s self-testimony but accepts only this testimony while defining independent science and epidemiological science in general out of existence. Therefore we must reject out of hand all pro-corporate regulatory declarations. These are regurgitated directly from the corporate decree and convey nothing but the original corporate lies.

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A third reason to reject all testimony and findings of corporations and their regulatory counterparts is that corporate science is also overwhelmingly secret science. But “secret science” is a contradiction in terms according to the Popperian idea of the scientific method. On the contrary, by definition the only data which could count as part of the scientific record is public data, and the only scientific conclusions are those derived from public data. Therefore by definition anything secret or derived from secrecy cannot be part of science, but is merely anti-scientific innuendo and rumor puffed up into propaganda. We must reject out of hand all “secret science”, on principle.*

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The proximate reason for all the secrecy is of course that these corporate products don’t work and are extremely poisonous to humans, animals, and ecosystems. Therefore the corporation requires extreme secrecy in order to cover up the gross evidence even its own fraudulently designed research uncovers.

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But a bias in favor of secrecy is also inherent to the corporate science paradigm. This is because corporations are bureaucracies, and bureaucracies are inherently autocratic and secretive. It’s also because corporate capitalism is based heavily on pseudo-“competition” and intellectual property. These phenomena require each corporation to maintain a high level of secrecy about all its actions including its scientific affairs. Therefore it follows that the corporate science paradigm allows and privileges secret science. This proves that corporate science is the radical antithesis of Popperian ideas of science, enshrined in the conventional notions of the scientific method, falsification, and science as a constructive contributor to an open society. To whatever extent practicing scientists and the citizens of a democracy claim to embrace these ideas of science, they must recognize that the corporate science paradigm embodies the exact opposite, the most extreme rejection of these ideas, and they must in turn reject corporate science as a whole, completely, as nothing but a pure mass of lies.

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Corporate science is exactly upside down. It is exactly, perfectly wrong. We can state as axioms: Corporate science is a lie; Regulator-vouched science is a lie; Secret science is a lie.

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*The only exception is where the corporate practitioners themselves are unable to cover up adverse results. It’s highly significant how, in spite of the most strenuous efforts on the part of the foxes to deploy false study frameworks, bogus methodology, fraudulent interpretations, and suppression of data, to strip the hen-house bare, nevertheless so many corporate studies still were unable to cover up completely and provided significant evidence of the harmfulness of pesticides and GMOs.

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In such cases we can use this adverse data, assuming all the while that the truth must be far worse. In these cases the truth is so bad that even these masters of obfuscation couldn’t cover up completely.

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Religion is All Good and Well….

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….but sometimes they take it to extremes.

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What’s real? Human communities, the interactions among flesh and blood people, our individual and group networks among the earthly ecology. This is what Martin Buber called the “I and Thou.”

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But then people start reifying abstractions. Not just using terms as necessary conceptual placeholders, but believing in the reality of the terms they’re using. These include government, law, money as a unit of account, nation, sect, race, reason, science. In reality none of these are anything but superficial terminology for ecological interactions. But people religiously believe in their existence as if they were physical objects or ecological relations within physical reality. We can call these the first abstraction.

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So far we’ve mentioned the reifications almost everyone engages in, the ones which are part of human nature and may be necessary for human life to flourish. But things get malign when we reach a second abstraction. This is when we take the items of the first abstraction and use those to reify the next exponential level of reification. This is when we use government and law to “create” things like corporations, patents and copyrights, fiat money, and then convince ourselves that these are real. This second religious abstraction is abstraction squared, meta-abstraction.

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It gets worse. The third abstraction is where we so devoutly believe in the corporation that we allow it to create money, and allow it to own patents, and allow it to write the law in both a de facto (through lobbying) and de jure way, and allow it to dictate to the government through the kinds of regulatory agencies which see their duty as to obey and assist the corporate “client”. Those who originally created corporations were aware of the religious radicality of what they’d done in squaring the abstraction, and they were so leery of cubing it that they didn’t allow corporations to own patents or stock (another religious abstraction) in other companies. Those safeguards were eroded and abolished over time, as the religion became more fanatical. By now the religion is becoming extraordinarily self-referential, hermetic, alienated from reality because it’s so wrapped up in its own fictive reality. It’s become a cult.

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The fourth abstraction is where we reach such a fanatical extreme of wretched abasement in our self-loathing worship that we want effectively to abolish all the first abstractions as being still too close to human reality. To whatever extent we still maintain them it’s only as hollow shells to be filled out by the aggrandizement of the second abstractions, the corporation and its dogmatic weapons.

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At this fourth abstraction the corporation is the de jure author of the law, and even more powerfully it controls government by direct decree. This decree power is autocratic in the most unaccountably and capriciously divine sense.

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People clearly believe in these fictive things on a religious level, they have religious faith in their actual existence. This is exactly the same as believing in a god. Money is “real” because enough people believe it’s real and act as if it were, in the same way as with belief in a god and action on behalf of that belief. Belief in the existence (and beneficence) of corporations and intellectual property and corporate “science” is the same kind of religious belief, albeit vastly more destructive and self-destructive than any other religion.

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In abolishing the first abstractions such as nation, (any other) religion, government, law, science, reason, the real target of this evil god is real humanity and the real Earth. The extremist religious cult of the corporation is veritably a murder and suicide cult in the most physically literal sense. We the people need to discredit the idea of corporations and intellectual property, subvert belief in them, and wipe out this noxious cult.

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But to fight such an entrenched religious idea, no matter how wavering the faith in it may be among many of its adherents, requires a more potent spiritual and ecological idea. We must conjure the new idea out of the ecology. It must come from the Earth.

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Adapting the Populist Lecture Series for Today’s Food Sovereignty

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Here’s some basic information about 19th century public and farmer education through public lecture programs, as conducted by the Grange and especially the Populist Farmers’ Alliance movement. I’d like to contribute to building a new movement to rebuild community food and agriculture, and abolish corporate agriculture, organized in a way similar to the Populists. We’d have the advantage of trying to build outside the commodity system, rather than being in a race against time to reform it from inside, which is what ultimately undid the Populists.

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For a great book on the history and handbook for true democratic organization, see Lawrence Goodwyn’s The Populist Moment.

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Once upon a time I thought of adapting this idea to what I called the land scandal involving systematic property fraud on the part of the big banks. Did you know that, strictly speaking, most alleged bank-owned residential real estate is arguably not really owned by the banks at all, but rather their claim is an imposture? In 2009-10 many bloggers and commentators thought this fact, if effectively propagated, could become a major political theme. Well, that never happened, and it seems like the whole idea fizzled out. Probably both too “fringey”-seeming, even though legally it’s true, and too abstruse to boot. I ended up moving on from the idea to the more down-to-earth matter of food. Of course there’s plenty of policy mysticism here as well, such as patents, which I’ll soon be discussing in depth. That’s why I’ve long referred to the FIRES sector, adding “Seeds” (i.e. intellectual property in them) to Finance, Insurance, Real Estate. And of course corporate agriculture is more than the physical phenomena of land-grabbing and poison. Under the neoliberal globalization regime it’s also a sham campaign trying to reify fictive numbers – commodity pricing, profit, GDP, trade balance, “growth” in the biotech, agricultural, food, and finance sectors – and induce worship of these, or at least surrender to their domination. One of the greatest evils of corporate rule (the most mystical, bizarre fiction of all is that of the corporate person) is how it has made our literal bread hostage to the insane rule of these pure fictions and superstitions. We intuitively know a few basic principles for the counterattack – all commodification of food and critical natural resources is illegitimate, there can be no patents on life, and a “corporation” cannot own or control land, especially farmland. My background writing about Wall Street will come in handy for all these elements.

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How Does Monsanto Plan to Deploy the Terminator on a Mass Scale?

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According to lore, Monsanto halted its drive to commercialize GMOs containing the Terminator gene when Gordon Conway of the Rockefeller Foundation warned the company that its extreme aggressiveness was becoming so politically reckless and counterproductive as to put the entire GMO project at risk.

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Whatever the motivation, it’s true that Monsanto announced in 1999 it was not pursuing commercialization of the Terminator. This was followed in 2000 by an international moratorium on development and commercial approval of this technology, voted under the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The moratorium was reaffirmed in 2006 at the CBD meeting held in Brazil.

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[The Terminator, AKA a “GURT” (Genetic Use Restriction Technology), is a transgene which would cause the plants containing it to produce sterile seeds. This would render patent enforcement moot, since it would become physically impossible to save and replant seed from such a GMO. Some versions can be rendered fertile, i.e. the Terminator gene can be counteracted if the seed is coated with an antibiotic or some other chemical. So we see how, in addition to simplifying seed monopoly, the Terminator allows those deploying it to dream of inserting it into all commercial crop seed and then forcing all seed growers to buy the antidote from them.

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Could the Terminator spread chaotically to other crops and wild plants, rendering them sterile? As usual with genetic engineering, no one has the slightest idea. Anyone who claims to know this wouldn’t happen is a liar.

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The Terminator was developed jointly by Delta & Pine Land seed company and the USDA. These jointly hold the patent. In the late 1990s Monsanto’s attempt to buy DPL fell through, in part because of political outcry over the prospect of Monsanto’s gaining control of the Terminator technology. But in 2006 Monsanto was able to buy the company with little opposition.]

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We can take it for granted that Monsanto’s own Terminator moratorium has been purely a temporary expedient, and that their plan remains the same as always, to deploy the Terminator on a mass scale. The GURT must look especially attractive as GMOs expand beyond the range of the secure Western intellectual property regime. Brazil is troublesome for IP control in seeds, with many farmers allegedly saving and replanting GM soybeans without paying Monsanto’s tax. This has led to politically draining court battles and the very difficult process of Monsanto’s attempt to force traders to collect the tax on its behalf. Monsanto faces similar headaches collecting its taxes in Argentina. China of course is a problematic market from the point of view of patent enforcement. Africa’s an unknown quantity even if the US/UK/Monsanto colonization plan is able to conquer significant territory. Monsanto’s dream of conquering Iraqi agriculture, impeccable on paper as decreed by the US occupation regime, fizzled out for the inability to enforce it in physical reality.

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It’s clear that Monsanto needs to deploy the Terminator if it’s to have any hope of gaining the total control and power it seeks. So what’s one way this might happen? Here’s a way which seems plausible to me. Let’s list some facts.

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1. Monsanto’s Intacta soybean, developed specially for cultivation in Brazil and commercially introduced in 2013, is the first Monsanto product developed for a non-US market. (Intacta is a stacked product which is Roundup Ready and contains the Cry1AC Bt toxin vs. lepidopteran pests. But in Brazil glyphosate is failing against resistant superweeds and may render the soybean crop more susceptible to fungal infections. Across the world Cry1AC has widely failed in cotton, generating resistant superbugs. Just as Cry1F, deployed in maize GMOs, has widely collapsed in Brazil against the target armyworm, so we can anticipate Intacta’s vulnerability. According to Monsanto itself, feeding upon it may even strengthen some of the intended target pests. A 2015 study also found that Intacta yields less than non-GM conventional soybeans. So Intacta is triply a plagued, failing product just two years after it was put on the market.)

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2. In 2013 Brazilian officials negotiated a deal to export Intacta soybeans to China. In spite of some early indications that China would insist on a non-GM supply, it eventually agreed to accept Brazil’s general soybean commodity stream.

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3. For years China has been trying to develop its own GMO industry. Chinese state enterprises have worked on this themselves (many entries in the Developer list to the right), and perhaps in collaboration with DuPont (the story here is sketchy). In 2015 ChemChina made a bid to buy Syngenta.

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4. China is notorious for being an intellectual property scofflaw. Western patents and copyrights are frequently disrespected there.

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5. Soybeans are the most easily pirated crops, since they’re not hybrids like commodity maize, but open-pollinated.

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6. Obviously Monsanto’s Intacta patents are at some risk here.

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7. In late 2013 pro-Monsanto forces in Brazil launched a new attempt to gut the country’s 2005 Biosafety Law and have the country break the 10+ year moratorium on the Terminator. (These legislative attempts have been ongoing since 2005.) This is ironic since the moratorium was last reaffirmed in Brazil. Proponents claim to want to put the Terminator only in GM eucalyptus and other vegetatively propagated crops, but the proposal has enough loopholes and vagueness as to be indefinitely stretchable. So far this attempt has been beaten back, largely as the result of massive international grassroots pressure organized by the ETC Group. But the pro-GMO activists in the legislature continue to reintroduce the bill.

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8. Brazilian regulators approved GM eucalyptus in 2015.

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There’s the facts. What can we deduce from there? Obviously if the Terminator were to be incorporated in one product, it would quickly be deployed in others. In this case GM eucalyptus would be the camel’s nose in the tent. All of Monsanto’s interests say that Brazil and China are two places it would find the Terminator most useful. Therefore the indications point to Intacta as being the first major GMO into which Monsanto would want to engineer the Terminator gene. Grown in Brazil, exported mostly to China and other non-Western countries – perhaps it might not immediately generate a political firestorm in the West. (Some Intacta is exported to the EU for use in food and feed. European campaigners, recently seconded by a Norwegian government scientific assessment, have opposed it on food safety grounds. But no doubt the EFSA would deem a Terminator version of Intacta not to require a new review.)

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And then, once the Terminator was deployed in one major commercial GMO, it would be expanded to many or all of the others.

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So there’s one plausible scenario for the Terminator’s future.

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Campaigners around the world need to join with ETC and Brazilian campaigners to hinder the GM eucalyptus project and thwart the plan to have Brazil break the Terminator moratorium.

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