Cause the Problem, Sell the (Fake) Solution

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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.

 

Food has to be grown on the basis of agroecology and distributed in accord with food sovereignty.

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

Ecocide Equals Genocide

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The economic civilization fights for the wholesale poisoning of the ecology and destruction of biodiversity. The attack is most aggressive on the front which is the original battlefront of civilization itself, agriculture. Modern poison-based agriculture long has been proven an agronomic failure, and it’s long been proven to increase hunger rather than alleviate it. Socially, agronomically, ecologically it’s purely destructive. We know the corporations, regulators, academia and corporate media don’t advocate poisonism for agronomic reasons. We know they’re willfully, intentionally committing ecocide and giving people cancer for the sake of nothing but power, profit, and destruction of biodiversity for the very sake of this destruction, since monoculture in itself (political, cultural, biological) is a totalitarian goal of the system. In 2017 the Monsanto Tribunal condemned Monsanto for these crimes, including ecocide.

 

The proposition that ecosystems have the same rights as humans follows rationally from any coherent concept of human rights, such as that upon which the Nuremburg tribunal based its jurisprudence. This is because humanity is inextricably part of the overall ecology. Therefore it’s both rationally and morally meaningless to conceive any human right, on a community or individual level, other than as part of a combined human-ecological right. At the same time “the individual” is a false construction in itself, a vestige of classical liberal/bourgeois ideology. In reality the individual can exist only within ecological and community contexts. Therefore individual rights can exist only within the context of ecological rights.

 

Most important of all, if genocide is a crime against humanity, then any broad-based destruction of the ecology is equally such a crime against humanity since humanity is inextricably part of and dependent upon the ecology.

 

Ecocide, in addition to being evil in itself, is equal to genocide.

 

 

 

Destroy the dinosaurs’ eggs every chance you get.

 

 

 

 

You Can Hoard, But You Can’t Hide (Svalbard’s Broken Freezer)

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“When we built the seed vault, there was not even discussion of the permafrost,” Hege Njaa Aschim, the press representative of the organization that oversees the project, told me. But the weather last winter, she said, was “like a Norwegian summer.” “We didn’t come up with the term doomsday vault,” Cary Fowler, the mastermind of the seed vault, told me. “The idea there was to provide an insurance policy, so if anything were to happen to those other facilities, it wouldn’t be an extinction event.”

 

Destruction of seed biodiversity is one of the worst crises and crimes of corporate agriculture. The proprietors of Svalbard – the agrochemical cartel and the governments that serve it – all want the total death of humanity and the Earth. For the ecology, agronomy, and human freedom it’s essential that we the living people breed our own necessary organic crops and sustain and expand a decentralized network of seed saving and seed exchange.

 

You won’t hear this in the corporate media. There you’re far more likely to find the hagiography of Svalbard, the “doomsday vault” which is going to save us all, the seed bank which in crisis is going to enable Monsanto and the Gates Foundation to continue to “feed the world” even though so far all they’re doing is starving it.

 

Svalbard is part of the system dedicated to centralized corporate control of all genetic diversity and committed to the destruction of agroecology, participatory breeding, networked seed sharing and conservation. Consider who controls the Svalbard project: Bayer/Monsanto, the Gates Foundation, Syngenta, DuPont, USAID, the CGIAR, the World Bank, all dedicated to totalitarian technocracy.

 

The project is a typical “public-private partnership” which fits into the decades-long pattern of CGIAR institutions traversing the global South to collect germplasm, convey it to the corporations (i.e. to perform corporate research with public money), and to proselytize on behalf of Western corporate agriculture among Southern officials, intellectuals and farmers, but using a “public” veneer. USAID and the Gates crew specialize in this. The seeds they heist and convey to the corporate vault then come under corporate control and will be used only for the elites’ purposes. The same system which is trying to enclose seeds everywhere will deploy its corporate vaults in the same way.

 

The doomsday vault is supposed to come in handy if the political and corporate elites ever were to have catastrophic need. In the meantime the place serves as a standard publicly-funded corporate gathering and research facility for Monsanto and the rest of the GM seed cartel. In that day-to-day way it represents doomsday for humanity and the Earth.

 

 

Beyond that, the idea of Svalbard – a centralized, literal fortress – is completely wrong ecologically. Here as everywhere else we need networked decentralization. We need a vast network of thousands of seed banks, all devoted to adapting landraces on a regional basis. Also, storing seeds is only second best. For varieties to remain attuned to the ecology people need to keep growing them. There’s no way to rely on the ecological viability of even the most carefully stored seeds as time passes while the plants aren’t being grown in the real world. You have to keep planting and growing them.

 

This also is the only way to restore seeds and crops as a core part of human culture, human spirit. They must be part of our living experience, our immersion in the flows of the ecology.

 

 

Svalbard’s broken freezer, its melting permafrost, is a reminder of how physically and politically vulnerable a bunker like this is, how it’s the wrong path. It’s ironic that the climate chaos being driven most of all by the industrial agriculture paradigm of which Svalbard is a devoted part is coming home to threaten the vault itself. This project of Monsanto and Gates does indeed represent doomsday: First human doom through socioeconomic attack, then ecological doom through poisonism and destruction of habitat and biodiversity, and above all total human and ecological doom through total climate chaos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For Book Draft: Chapter Introduction on Agronomic Failure and the Poison Mandate

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Decades of harsh agronomic experience proved the model of agriculture based on pesticides didn’t work and couldn’t be sustained. Rational and honest participants and observers rejected poison-based agriculture in favor of agroecology. We had a “Show Me” attitude toward Missouri-based Monsanto’s proposition that the GMO version of this poison model would be any different. The reality of the field quickly proved it the same failure.

 

The poison agriculture machine was successful for decades at driving billions of human beings off the land, exterminating wide swaths of ecological community, and concentrating tremendous socioeconomic, cultural, and biological power as well as venal wealth. But its agronomy was always a complete failure. Indeed, the corporate state production system depended on this failure for all its successes.

 

Herbicides and insecticides became more profitable as pests developed resistance to them. The more the poisons failed against their targets, and the more secondary pests moved in to exploit temporary gaps opened up where the targets temporarily were suppressed, the greater the array grew of different poisons which had to be applied, and the volume of application for each. The pesticides themselves were being “stacked” long before that became a term of art among GMO products. At the same time propaganda converted each failure into an imminent crisis which could be met only by stampeding more poisons into service. In this way the agrobusiness state stampeded minds, stampeded the culture, furthering its own power goals and reinforcing the general goals of instilling religious faith in corporate control and acceptance of the need for deregulation and bureaucratic speed.

 

Genetic modification technology had far reaching despotic monoculture and eugenic goals from the inception. But the operators soon zeroed in on agriculture as their first battle deployment. Attempts to engineer for agronomic and product quality traits like environmental hardiness, nutritional efficiency, and food quality always have been failures because genetic engineering is basically a stupid, brute force technology incapable of attaining the evolutionary precision and harmonies required to bring out such traits. But the engineers found that crops could be dumb-engineered to become poison plants: Engineering a plant to tolerate an herbicide or to produce its own insecticidal poison generally required only the rote insertion of a single “transgene”.

 

Therefore GMOs dovetailed perfectly with the existing paradigm of the pesticide treadmill. More herbicides could be sprayed directly on the crop at any time. In principle agriculture now could be subject to a limitless menagerie of herbicides coupled with seeds “stacked” with multiplying herbicide-tolerance traits. Monsanto’s Roundup Ready line opened up a whole frontier for the massive slathering of glyphosate, hitherto a lesser herbicide. As the weeds surged to resist glyphosate, the agrochemical bazaar offered seeds to tolerate glyphosate plus every kind of poison – glufosinate, 2,4-D, dicamba, isoxaflutole, HPPDs, and onward. The multiplication of the GM seed traits and the herbicides also multiplied the profits, the patents, the monopoly power, the cultural power, the biological power.

 

At the same time and by the same process insects developed resistance to the endemic Bt toxins of the GM poison plants. Here too the system’s solution was to stack more poisons and more of every poison: Each new GM seed was engineered to exude a greater variety of Bt poisons, while each seed also was coated in multiple neonicotinoid insecticides (along with fungicides, mitcides, nematocides, and so on). Farmers who were told that GM seed would eliminate the need to spray insecticides now needed to go back to spraying in addition to buying the ever more expensive stacked GMOs.

 

For poison-based agriculture, a power-seeking project, failure was success. Failure always was built into the business model and the geopolitical strategy.

 

 

Persistence Proves Intent. If governments, the agribusiness corporations, the scientific establishment and the corporate media see this inexorable failure of every poison in the face of simple natural evolution, and see how the paradigm’s one and only answer each and every time is to add more poisons to the stack, each poison guaranteed to fail in its turn, this proves that this failure is part of the effect intended and desired by these organizations. As a rule the major effects of a large-scale action always are the desired effects. If concentrated power desires different effects, if the government and political-intellectual class desire different effects, they always have alternatives which could preserve the “good” effects without the “bad”. There’s really no such thing as “collateral damage”. That’s a propaganda lie which pretends that some effects weren’t sought by the policy-makers and that they deplore these effects. Never mind that all the major effects are consistent, predictable, therefore premeditated. If there really were major effects which the government did not anticipate and found bad, it would change the policy so as no longer to produce those effects in a major way. Persistence proves either that the effect, if truly unanticipated, is nevertheless welcome, or else that it was anticipated and consciously intended all along. Morally and practically this makes no difference. The major effects of an action comprise an organic whole, and anyone who wants one characteristic effect of an action will anticipate and want its other effects and will welcome any major effect he didn’t anticipate.

 

In reality the agrochemical project has zero beneficial purpose and no redeeming qualities. It claims two purposes: To “feed the world”, yet it has done nothing but sow malnutrition, hunger, and famine; and to control crop pests, which has been nothing but a losing arms race. Meanwhile agroecology grows more calories and nutrition per acre than industrial monoculture, and it grows this as food for people, not commodities for Mammon; and agroecological methods are vastly superior for pest control.

 

But just as poison-based agriculture never wanted to grow food and did want to sow desperation and famine, so it never wanted to control pests, only to manage them so that pest afflictions become ever more severe. As we’ll see in the next chapter, this management ideology has a direct parallel in the regulator ideology of “managing” poisons in the environment, in part by gauging alleged human and ecological “tolerances” for these poisons. These versions of this false ideology are deployed because the program of poison-based agriculture is to maximize poison production and use as such, toward the goal of increasing system power and monoculture control. This is why industrial agriculture seeks the destruction of agricultural and ecological biodiversity as such: Dynamic diversity is impossible to control. This is why it seeks to maximize monoculture at every level from the most literally physical to the political and cultural: Because monoculture is easier to control. This is why it is waging biological and chemical warfare around the world at the most extreme levels possible: Because it wants to eradicate physical biodiversity and to eradicate political and socioeconomic diversity through total corporate control of political and economic life.

 

 

 

 

 

Science Has Abdicated

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Institutionalized “science ethics” always has been a contradiction in terms. The UK Nuffield Bioethics Council’s endorsement of genetically engineering human embryos for eugenic and designer baby purposes is one of the most grotesque examples.

 

This is typical of how genetic engineering has never been about anything but further concentrating wealth and power. In this case, both the fake “medical” rationale and the real eugenic rationale are reserved only for those with financial access to these extreme high-maintenance technological treatments. Indeed many erstwhile “anti-GMO” people believe the Heal the World lie, although this British eugenic gambit is so brazen that even the lukewarmists oppose this particular outrage.

 

Meanwhile the truth is that the Heal the World lie is identical in every way to the Feed the World lie which is universally refuted among GM critics. There’s far more than enough food for everyone on Earth to eat sufficient diets, but billions lack the money to buy sufficient calories and/or nutrition. This artificial Mammon condition is the only source of hunger and malnutrition. In the same way, good basic medical care easily could be available to everyone through a sane, humane economic system like single payer, which would deliver much better care at far less expense than the bloated parasite which is the private health insurance racket. Boutique high-maintenance “treatments” like gene therapy and this kind of eugenics could at most help a tiny handful. In both cases, “feed the world” and “heal the world”, the genetic engineering religion is based on nothing but lies. One of the main lies is that problems like hunger and disease aren’t socioeconomic problems with political solutions, but purely technical problems with purely technocratic solutions. That’s a gambit of corporate rule, and of neoliberal capitalism in general.

 

In the same way, it was always obvious that fantasies of genetic engineering, “transhumanism”, space colonization were about nothing but the power and depraved whims of the rich.

 

Chinese vaccine manufacturers make defective vaccines and lie about it. US manufacturers are no more trustworthy. Indeed the US system doesn’t even have the token fines the Chinese system does, only the subsidies.

 

Then we have the “eco-modernist” ideology, ardently embraced by the mainstream STEM cadre, which stems from mainstream “management”/sacrifice oriented corporate environmentalism. It hooks up seamlessly with both corporate power and the scientism religion. It flatters the consumerism of the Western middle class which always wants to “have it all”, total gluttonous license along with ecological and moral integrity. It promises that “growth” can continue. It promises that the Progress religion will come true. It promises all these things with a shiny techno-sheen, so attractive to all the retarded infants of this madhouse: GMOs (who cares that they’ve already proven to be an absolute fraud in every way), geoengineering, biofuels, fracking, the electric car, the “space” meme, all these genocidal-ecocidal frauds will turn magically into salvation at the ultimate moment of the Armageddon they’re currently generating, if only Homo domesticus stays the course, doubles down on the destruction, becomes ever more murderous and wasteful. Stalinist doctrine had it that the class struggle reaches its most extreme level of violence right before the complete victory of communism. Christian doctrine had it that the struggle of God vs. Satan reaches its most extreme level of violence right before the complete victory of Jesus over death. And now we have the terminal doctrine of the modern technocratic civilization, the same among all strains of its ideology, now including the “eco”-movement: The struggle of man vs. nature reaches its most extreme level of violence right before the complete victory of a suddenly sustainable and free civilization, where human lion will lie down with human lamb and civilization’s lion will lie down with the ecological lamb.

 

In reality, the evangelists of the “eco-modern” scam (such as the false prophet of “vertical farming” exposed in this piece) are speaking in code. Like the politicians and corporate CEOs they serve, they really intend for the vast majority of human beings to die of starvation and pandemics, most likely deliberately engineered. Biowarfare to produce pandemics goes logically with the entire technocratic ideology, and it’s the only explanation for the technocracy’s deliberate campaign to wipe out antibiotics as an effective medical treatment. Modern famines always are artificially and deliberately generated, without exception.

 

Just as agriculture is the basis of exploitative, destructive, wasteful civilization, so for the scientific establishment the number one purpose is to render agriculture as exploitative, destructive, and wasteful as possible. Thus the establishment’s absolute embrace, staking their entire future authority, of the GMO/pesticide regime. The poisoning is more slow and subtle, the repression is primarily economic rather than directly violent (though that’s increasing too), the forced mass expulsion from the land is primarily coerced economically. It’s all part of corporate neoliberalism’s strategy for domination, more refined than that of classical fascism. They realized they could attain the same results as the Nazis without generating similar resistance against themselves. (Indeed, via the EU Germany has attained something like the economic dominion in Europe which the Nazis sought.) As for scientists, today’s are the exact same type as those who served the Nazis and would do the exact same thing given the circumstances. Today’s Bayer is of course the exact same company which provided Zyklon B, its executives the exact same executive type. Monsanto should fit in just fine.

 

Science has completely abdicated, sold out, gone over. It is no longer trustworthy on any level and no longer there for the good of humanity. On the contrary science is completely encompassed by engineering imperatives and the corporate science paradigm. It seeks only profit and power, including its own religious will to power, and it’s an unequivocally enthusiastic participant in the productionist/consumerist/technocratic/corporate paradigm, the destruction of humanity and Earth purely for the sake of destruction and control.

 

Only some individual fugitives are working on a new ecological paradigm for science. The rest are fully committed to mechanistic reductionism, corporate science, science as waterboy for profit-seeking tech development, all the modes of boot-licking junk science.

 

What will have to die out isn’t a sclerotic generation of scientists in favor of a rising generation of ecology-minded scientists. This generation will not be forthcoming. Part of the reason for the STEM indoctrination onslaught in the schools is to foreclose this possibility.

 

What has to die out is the generation which still believes in “Science” as a religious idol. The scientism generation must die out and be replaced by a generation ready to go home to Earth, which recognizes that science in its modern form, irretrievably corrupted, distorted, demented, is toxic baggage we mustn’t take for the journey.

 

We can salvage and continue with ecology, agroecology, chaos theory, the purely intellectual aspects of physics, and related modes. The rest is malign and must be jettisoned.

 

 

 

 

 

Strict Mores

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The record is clear that the USDA and EPA intend and desire all the harms and failures of poison-based agriculture. Pretending to deal with the dicamba crisis the EPA explicitly endorsed part one of my corporate template with this quote: “We’re committed to taking appropriate action for the 2018 growing season with an eye toward ensuring that the technology is available, number one, to growers but that it is used responsibly.” Throughout the crisis the agency has provided Monsanto with its imprimatur, as per part three of the template. The EPA itself refused to perform or require volatility testing in the first place. Therefore both Monsanto and the EPA strictly admit the volatility of Monsanto’s XtendiMax. Such an admission is always implicit where those with the resources and responsibility to test refuse to do so and work to prevent anyone else from doing so. In the broad sense this is Strict Proof that the corporations and governments know or believe pesticides and GMOs to be harmful to human health. If they didn’t believe this they certainly would have performed legitimate safety tests instead of promulgating the religious lie of “substantial equivalence” along with a passel of methodologically fraudulent tests and rumors of “secret science”, a contradiction in terms. We know that the worst we can speculate is in fact true. The corporations and governments themselves admit this, proven by their consistent pattern of action.

 

In the same way, any consistent course of action on the part of those who can choose a different course proves their Strict Intent to cause all the consistent significant effects of their consistent course of action. Here we see the intent of Monsanto and the US government to wipe out all non-GM soy, as much of any other kind of farming, gardening, ornamentals, and wild plants as possible, and along the way to poison the soil and environment as totally as possible. Whatever human and animal health effects soon arise from the atmospheric suffusion of the dicamba zone also have been intended by these organizations.

 

Monsanto and the US government want to maximize dicamba use. The corporations of course want to maximize sales, from a mundane profiteering point of view. But far beyond mundane profits, maximal poison deployment is intended to masximize monoculture power and control. The corporate-technocratic system seeks this regardless of destructive effects, and intentionally to maximize the destruction. By Strict Intent there’s no practical difference between willful premeditated nihilism and the active will and premeditation to destroy. Therefore there is no moral difference, and there should be no difference from the perspective of the law or policy. This doctrine is necessary especially in a case like poison drift where it’s difficult to impossible to pinpoint responsibility for specific damage and where, even if this circumstance of non-responsibility hadn’t been anticipated and pre-planned, all the perpetrators rush to take advantage of it in a deliberate, systematic way.

 

Therefore it follows that abolitionist doctrine must be to impose Strict Liability upon all participants in the poison racket, from developers to sellers to users. It’s the same principle as for any other criminal conspiracy: The guy driving the getaway car is just as guilty of murder as the robber inside the bank who pulls the trigger, even though he never left the car. Everyone knows how toxic and destructive all these chemicals are, the corporations and regulators most of all, so no one can claim innocent ignorance. This is a core movement principle and the movement must promise to put this into effect wherever it gets the power. This principle follows practically from the principles of Strict Proof and Strict Intent.

 

The same principle applies to all programs of ecological and social destruction, all the actions of the economic civilization. If there was ever a time when anyone could claim to be innocently mistaken about the consequences of Mammon, of capitalism, of empowering corporations, most of all the consequences of treating our only home the Earth as a resource mine, waste dump, and subject of sadistic vandalism; if there ever was such a time (I doubt it myself), that time is in the distant past. No one has been innocent for a long, long time. Most of all, it’s beyond any dispute that the cadres of government, corporations, academia, and media are fully conscious, or willfully ignorant, of all the primary consequences of the system’s anti-ecological and anti-human assaults. They are all Nuremburg criminals to their rotted soulless core. We can no longer think in terms of questions or doubt. The crimes and the culpability are existential.

 

Everyone, abolitionists and reformers alike, should take up these doctrines, make them mainstays of philosophy and political communication, and promise to make them the law of the land.

 

 

To prevent confusion, I’m not saying there’s a master cabal somewhere consciously plotting out all the evils, though for example in the case of poison agriculture Monsanto certainly is conscious of much of it. I’m describing an existential inertia and a biological campaign. Therefore we’re only dealing proximately with conventional moral philosophy. Rather, we’re dealing with an elemental process whose morality we must view more primally in terms of its consistent action rather than foolish speculation about the “consciousness” of the creatures driving it. You might as well speculate about the consciousness of corporations, patents, and dollars while you’re at it. Anyway, in this case the primary organisms involved are Agrobacterium tumefaciens; soybeans, corn, and cotton; weeds like Palmer amaranth; pathogens like salmonella and botulins. The humans involved behave according to the same patterns. The technocratic propagandists who exalt corporate personhood, artificial intelligence, and robots are similarly disparaging their own role on the other, “post-human” end.

 

We see how inadequate conventional moralizing is to the crisis. Rather we need the strict morality of Strict Intent, Strict Proof, Strict Liability. We must apply it to the corporations, the regulators, the scientific establishment, academia, the mainstream media, the technocratic political class in general.

 

 

Adapted from part four of my series on the dicamba crisis.

 

 

 

 

 

The Lying Media-“Political” Culture of the Climate Crisis

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“The corporate media has failed abysmally at preparing the public for a climate changed world, let alone reporting on it. According to a Media Matters survey:

 

Throughout the recent record-breaking heat wave that affected millions across the United States, major broadcast TV networks overwhelmingly failed to report on the links between climate change and extreme heat. Over a two-week period from late June to early July, ABC, CBS, and NBC aired a combined 127 segments or weathercasts that discussed the heat wave, but only one segment, on CBS This Morning, mentioned climate change.”

 

Ten years ago the mainstream media was full of stories about the real effects of climate change. They ran regular features summing up the science and the prognosis.

 

Today the coverage is very different. As the survey cited above demonstrates, the media has jettisoned most real-world reportage on the climate crisis. Instead they’ve gone back to reporting on “natural” disasters: (1) as if they actually were natural rather than man-made; (2) as ad hoc things that happen at random rather than part of a coherent trend.

 

The media’s coverage of climate change has departed from the real world and instead focuses only on certain fake political angles, such as “Trump” taking the US out of the sham Paris agreement, as well as the alleged virtue of the sham agreement itself. This normalizes the climate crisis, or more specifically having fervid opinions about it, as just another lifestyle ornament. Just another part of fake celebrity and culture-war pseudo-politics.

 

The main reason the media used to report on the climate crisis in a semi-serious way is that it took some years for the corporate sectors to reach a consensus on downplaying/denying the crisis. At first they left this to Big Oil, led by ExxonMobil. Other sectors were uncertain what it all meant for them. Wall Street seriously considered trying to blow up a bubble based on cap-and-trade, “offsets”, and derivatives based on such scams. The frackers took potshots at the coal industry. Monsanto and the biotech sector touted the scam of “climate-smart agriculture”, as well as fraudulently citing climate denial in their propaganda even though they themselves are climate deniers. Those are examples of why climate change used to get more play in the corporate media. But by now, although there’s still some of this exploitative propaganda, the corporations largely have decided they want to deny the whole thing. Some still engage in de jure denial, most have joined the liberals in de facto denial. This means expressing “right belief”, paying lip service, shedding crocodile tears, emitting sham proposals, but never really proposing to do anything but continue to emit and destroy.

 

The hand-wringing, virtue-signalling, and fake prescriptions of the climate crocodiles – Keep Shopping! Shopping Uber Alles! for example, replacing fossil fuels with corporate-industrial renewables; Keep Driving! hybrids and electric cars of course; never mind that most of the emissions and environmental destruction are bound up in the initial manufacturing process – fits in well with this since little of this is actually going to be done, and if it were done it merely would add to civilization’s consumption and destruction maw while doing nothing but making the climate crisis worse.

 

Meanwhile for as long as modern civilization staggers along, emissions will continue to rise and sinks will continue to be destroyed. All the other ecological crises will continue to get worse.

 

But it’s always been true that there is one and only one solution to avert the worst of climate chaos:

 

Stop emitting; stop destroying sinks; rebuild sinks.

 

All else is a lie. Most of all, the Big Lie is that that anything constructive can be done within the congenitally destructive framework of the economic civilization.

 

 

 

 

 

The Dicamba Crisis Part 5: Waging War to Seize Territory

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Parts One, Two, Three, Four.

 

1. There’s never been a clear line of demarcation between chemical weapons in war, civilian use of such weapons, and agricultural use of poisons. In World War I poison gas weapons were developed while the Haber-Bosch process was used to manufacture explosives. Following the war these technologies were seamlessly refurbished to manufacture pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. The militaristic rhetoric didn’t change at all: Pesticides were advertised as enabling the farmer and society to wage war on pests, which were demonized as evil.

 

In World War II the same factories went back to producing munitions and herbicides for military use. After the war the factories were retooled for a massive new agricultural poison onslaught which eventually developed into the “green revolution”. War use never ceased. From Vietnam to this day in Colombia and elsewhere Agent Orange and other poisons are used for military and paramilitary purposes, for war and police action. Chemical weapons always have been used for tyrannical political goals.

 

This conjunction of poisonism and militarism occurs in the context of the religious separation of “man” from “nature” and the false doctrine that these are adversaries. Man vs. nature in turn is an extension of man vs. man. Ecological domination always has been conjoined with social domination, and the former never occurs except as part of a strategy toward the latter. The war on nature always is the war on humanity. In the end, ecophobia, biophobia, are expressions of misanthropy. Civilization can be defined as a system which enables a cadre of elites to force surplus production and steal it in order to build structures and organizations which maximize their own wealth and power. This system always has been totally destructive toward humanity and the Earth. Agriculture always has been designed for enclosure, dispossession, physically destroying the land through denuding and poisoning the soil, desertification. Modern poison-based agriculture is one of the most extreme manifestations of this total destructive assault on people and ecology.

 

Agribusiness consolidates maximum control over farming and the food supply and launches a general assault on the ecology, all toward the goal of maximizing human and ecological monoculture. This is the scorched-earth terrain which provides the best habitat for pest, weed, and disease infestation, and therefore the maximum ideological and political habitat for the power claims of agribusiness, the scientism cult, and all who hate humanity and nature and who seek total domination. Poisonism therefore generates the maximal habitat for the propaganda campaign of lies, fear-mongering, and fraudulent promises that the solution is right around the corner if farmers and society only stay the poison course. This is proven every day in a hundred new articles and press statements from corporations, governments, Wall Street, academia, and the mainstream media, all speaking as one proclaiming that the only solution to the escalating crisis is to escalate the emissions and the poison.

 

2. One way to write the history of the 20th century is to trace the history of the Rockefeller Foundation and similar organizations, culminating today in the Gates Foundation, as the bodies which coordinate de jure war and sublimated agricultural war, with the close cooperation of corporations and the military.

 

As we said there never was a clear distinction between massive use of chemical weapons in Vietnam and elsewhere and massive use of chemical weapons in the green revolution. In both cases Western globalization has treated the global South as a free-fire zone, wherever a vacuum exists.

 

The corporate-technocratic elites have brought this war and its ideology back to the home countries. The pesticide/fertilizer onslaught has engulfed the West itself. Based on this historical record we know the corporate state considers America itself a free-fire zone for every kind of weaponized assault, from militarized police to militarized agriculture, wherever the state considers necessary.

 

What’s the objective difference between the Agent Orange defoliation campaign in Vietnam and today’s defoliation campaign in America based on dicamba and 2,4-D (itself one half of the Agent Orange blend)? We recognize the dicamba campaign as at least intermediate between a “regular” agricultural poison campaign and a de jure war defoliation campaign.

 

Corporate agriculture’s mass expulsion of farm communities from their land, part of the US “food weapon” strategy, is sublimated war. There is no logical difference between driving people off their land and into slums where they are utterly dependent, and physically killing them. Anyone willing to do or tolerate the former is willing to do and tolerate the latter.

 

The Rockefeller Foundation played a major role in coordinating the green revolution, pesticide/fertilizer deployment, and the development of GMOs ancillary to the poison regime. The Gates Foundation subsequently has taken the lead in aggrandizing the GMO/pesticide poison project. Gates provides organizational leadership and fraudulent “philanthropic” propaganda cover for what’s nothing but brutal corporate colonialism. This colonialism is also a testing ground for other totalitarian assaults.

 

In spite of its “humanitarian” lies (always embellished with Randroid spin that all good things can come only from total corporate control), the Gates Foundation really stands for total corporate control of agriculture and food on a monoculture commodity export basis. For decades this has been proven to do nothing but increase hunger, famine, and disease. The Gates Foundation is an extreme activist on behalf of globalization export agriculture and seeks systematically to eradicate African food production, and therefore to maximize food insecurity, hunger, and famine. Africa and elsewhere in the global South also serve Gates and Monsanto as testing grounds for ecological domination technology designed to be deployed in the Western countries as well. All of humanity which lacks monetary wealth, not just the people of the South, are slated for liquidation.

 

Today the Gates Foundation is the primary propaganda coordinator on behalf of these ideological and anti-political assaults. It’s the main coordinator among the various branches of the corporate state – the US and UK governments, the Big Ag corporations, the G7, the universities, the corporate media, and various system NGOs.

 

Economically, politically, ecologically, the corporate-technocratic state works to impose maximum monopoly monoculture control with minimum real-world apparatus or indeed contact with physical reality at all. The sector comprising corporate agriculture and food, along with its lead enablers from the state like USAID and the USDA, all coordinated by the quasi-governmental 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. This physical control and destruction without responsibility is the grail of all corporations.

 

In 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.

 

3. The military-agricultural complex I describe here is best epitomized in the Gates/DARPA joint project to develop gene drive technology. This is the most extreme example yet of a dual use military/agricultural weapon. In general, genetic engineering is becoming increasingly militarized.

 

This is the context for the propaganda campaign for gene drives being deployed against so-called “invasive” plants and animals such as rats. “Rats” should be taken as a symbolic place-holder for more far-reaching land-cleansing plans. Consider the Nazi propaganda films which equated Jews with rats, then compare the coupled campaigns of gene drive deployment vs. rats and other “invasives”, and GMO deployment as part of corporate agriculture’s onslaught seeking to drive all of humanity off the land. When we compare these we start to get a picture of where all this is heading.

 

DARPA often has partnered with Monsanto, from the deployment of Agent Orange to research into robotic bees. Continuing this partnership, Monsanto has been a key player in the anti-“invasive” propaganda. The theme of glyphosate being ecologically necessary to combat “invasive” weeds laid the propaganda groundwork for the gene drive strategy. With the collapse of glyphosate, dicamba and 2,4-D are being deployed as the “new”/old weaponry allegedly necessary to wage this allegedly necessary war.

 

Gates teams with Monsanto, Gates teams with the military, Monsanto teams with the military, we have consensus on intent and goal.

 

4. The primary agronomic feature of poison-based agriculture is the arms race between the ever escalating, ever more toxic brew of pesticides, and the resistance evolution keeps producing in the weeds, insects, fungi, and other so-called “pests”. This arms race, which in civilian language is also called the pesticide treadmill, is the context in which Monsanto and its Gates/military allies are resurrecting two obsolete herbicides, dicamba and the Agent Orange constituent 2,4-D, for a renewed assault. Monsanto, the USDA, and the media originally promised that these poisons, even more toxic and destructive than glyphosate, would be rendered permanently obsolete by the Roundup Ready GMO system. These herbicides are indeed obsolete from any sane ecological and agronomic point of view, but of the corporate-technocratic system is not sane, nor is it honest. The corporations and the US government always were lying about dicamba and 2,4-D, and in recent years they’ve been bringing them back on a massive scale, with GMOs engineered to accompany them: Monsanto’s dicamba tolerant Xtend soybeans and cotton, and Dow’s 2,4-D tolerant maize, soybeans, and cotton. The result has been the ongoing dicamba disaster. As the Enlist system is more widely propagated a 2,4-D disaster will join the dicamba disaster.

 

The dicamba GMO crisis builds on the failure of Roundup and of the pesticide model as such. It simultaneously denies evolution and drives a specially destructive mode of evolution. Herbicide tolerant GMOs systematically select for weed resistance. Dicamba-resistant weeds already are on the rise. The greater the atmospheric suffusion of volatile dicamba vapor, the faster it’ll drive weed resistance along with every other ecological and health harm. Monoculture as such, by its very simplicity, drives the development of resistance, accelerates the arms race.

 

The deliberate goal is to render all agriculture which is not engineered to resist dicamba and/or 2,4-D impossible. Both herbicides are extremely volatile and inevitably will attack and kill all other plants – row crops not engineered to resist; fruits and vegetables (commercial growing and personal gardens); trees; ornamentals; as much as possible all wild plants. This extreme volatility renders the GMO/herbicide tandem an effective weapon for area denial, seizure and domination of territory. Monsanto is succeeding in driving out all non-Xtend soybean production in the main production zones. Monsanto and Dow intend the same result for maize and cotton. 2,4-D intrinsically contains dioxins as part of the manufacturing process. (Called “by-products” or “impurities”, really premeditated and therefore deliberate.) The end goal: Vast landscapes where literally nothing grows but these three crops in their Xtend and Enlist versions. The GM seed is the vehicle to force full-season deployment of this volatile chemical warfare.

 

Volatility is dicamba’s most insidious and destructive mode of drift. Under common conditions of warmth and humidity liquid dicamba resting on plants and soil is prone to volatilize, turn into a gas, lift off the surfaces and float on the air often many miles from the site of spraying before weather conditions change and cause it to resettle on whatever plants are in the vicinity. The more dicamba is sprayed in a region the more all-pervasive the suffusion becomes. This is called atmospheric loading.

 

Dicamba’s volatility effect is well known. Monsanto and BASF promised that their new dicamba formulations, XtendiMax and Engenia, had solved the problem and would not be volatile. In 2017 when university researchers were able to purchase XtendiMax and Engenia at the store and test it for volatility (Monsanto forbade them pre-market access to XtendiMax, thus proving it was lying about the product) they found that these brand name formulations are nearly as volatile as the earlier cheap formulas. The fact is that all dicamba is volatile. Indeed there’s evidence that dicamba’s volatility is essential to it having any proximate herbicidal effect on weeds in the first place. It’s impossible to use dicamba under warm humid conditions, i.e. the way it’s intended to be used under the Xtend system, and not have it promiscuously volatilize, move off site, and kill any broad leaf crops and plants it resettles upon.

 

This proves that by design all dicamba is highly volatile and nothing can prevent it from moving off site and killing other crops and plants. Co-existence with the Xtend system is impossible. This has been a deliberate campaign. In 2018 all soy farmers have had no choice but to buy Xtend GM seeds or run the great risk of having their crop destroyed by chemical warfare. In the same way much vegetable farming and gardening as well as the existence of many other plants and trees is becoming impossible in the dicamba free-fire zones. This proves that Monsanto’s goal remains the same as it’s always been, the goal it enshrined in what it calls its “Expanded Trait Penetration” program. Monsanto’s goal always is to force farmers to buy as many stacked GM traits as possible. Xtend is the most extreme version yet of this program. Monsanto’s goal is to extort all soybean farmers, under threat of the drift destruction of their crop, into buying the Xtend seeds and the XtendiMax herbicide.

 

In turn, the dicamba offensive is the most potent assault yet seeking to bring all land and ecology under technocratic dominion. It’s an expression of the fanatical monoculture mentality which wants to wipe out all natural plant growth and reduce all cultivation, all plant growth as such, to corporate-controlled industrial monoculture. The ultimate monoculture goal is nothing less than to wipe out all biodiversity except for the pests themselves and replace it with a technocratic blank slate. The cultists and operatives first deny evolution in principle, then seek to wipe it out in practice. The goal is to use violence, technological and where necessary physical, to force their nightmare vision of technocratic “progress” onto natural succession.

 

5. This is a campaign to seize land: Economically (maximum acreage) and through physical assault. The poisoners must drive out non-Xtend/Enlist crops; drive out all food production, thus all fruit and vegetable production, because this kind of farming is closer to being actual food production for human beings; seize the land for consolidation, monoculture, and power. In this way agribusiness works to attain domination over farming. The fewer and bigger the farms, the easier they are to control.

 

They’re also looking ahead to when money will be worthless and land paramount. To forestall competition they’re not only locking up legal control of land through land-grabbing, but through poisons and soil-mining they’re destroying the land for any use but their industrial monoculture. This is a contingent salting of the earth.

 

So-called “off-target” destruction is really the destruction of a different kind of target, indeed a more important target than the weeds themselves, which are privileged plants because they provide the pretext for the whole paramilitary campaign against the real targets. By strict intent we know this is all deliberate and premeditated. (Pathogenic bacteria such as salmonella and botulins also are privileged organisms under this system: Dicamba, 2,4-D and glyphosate are antibiotics which selectively kill beneficial bacteria while sparing pathogens and creating good terrain for their proliferation, as well as helping to drive the evolution of antibiotic resistance among these bacteria. Thus the GMO herbicide campaign takes its place alongside gross antibiotic abuse in factory farming and genetic engineering as part of corporate agriculture’s deliberate campaign to foster resistant pathogens, eradicate antibiotics as a medically effective treatment, and generate lethal pandemics. This too is part of clearing the land of its human inhabitants. To say again, this is war in the most literal sense even if most people can’t yet fathom it.)

 

The entire system of poison-based agriculture is designed to bottle up and destroy the entire ecology replacing it with a technologically controlled monoculture. In this way the biotech/agrochemical cartel joins the finance sector and other core corporate sectors working to bottle up all elements of nature and the real economy, replacing these with the purely fake economy of money, corporate personhood, finance, and patents. The corporate-technocratic accumulation of wealth and power directly corresponds with the technosphere’s physical poisoning and destruction of the Earth. Accumulation naturally indicates an ecological bottleneck. Accumulation equals waste. It is pollution. Those who manipulate such wastes are merely using poison as a weapon. The modern agrochemical onslaught is the latest, worst, most literal use of poison to destroy the Earth in order to hoard power.

 

And this goes with the legal and physical condemnation of the land. The corporate agricultural campaign ultimately is a campaign of land seizure whose goal is to force all human beings off the land and enclose it within a system of a few big corporate-controlled robot-managed plantations. Herbicide tolerant GMOs are a milestone in the corporate enclosure program, designed directly to eliminate all hand-weeding jobs while enabling farmers to manage much greater acreage, thus accelerating farm consolidation and the forced exodus of humans from the land. By rendering impossible all competing forms of soybean farming and many other kinds of farming, the Xtend-dicamba system is designed to escalate this totalitarian process. The systematic refusal of government and private insurers to cover drift damage, a massive consumer fraud, is another example proving that this is economic warfare against all but the biggest farmers. As is the concurrent campaign, even among the same state governments and weed scientists who deplore the dicamba crisis, to force 2,4-D tolerant crops upon agriculture. The clear goal is an agriculture where no crop (or any other plant) not resistant to both dicamba and 2,4-D will be able to exist at all.

 

The industrial monoculture and land enclosure system also is meant to render food production as tenuous as possible by forcing all people into a condition of complete dependency upon money and the corporate system while deliberately rendering food production as vulnerable as possible to drought, erosion, pest ravages, soil degradation, intrinsic crop failure, and ultimately the guaranteed shortages of necessary fossil fuels. The corporate food system already systematically generates hunger. It also is preparing famine.

 

The dicamba GMO system seeks to eradicate actual food production at fruit orchards and vegetable farms and gardens, all of which the corporate-technocratic system views as the real “weeds”. It wants to render anything but dicamba-based commodity soybean production impossible. This is a case study in the real goal of poison agriculture. The will to continue this onslaught on the part of the corporations, the US and state governments, academia and the media proves their Strict Intent to reach an outcome of total destruction.

 

The pesticide model of agriculture is conjoined with the GMO ideology of technologically overriding and obliterating natural evolution. Pesticides are dedicated to the scorched earth monoculture model of agriculture and the ideology which regards the natural world as something to be wiped out. Poisonism is a radical rejection of biodiversity in principle and practice and comprises the will to wipe out all life except that specially selected to be part of the technocratic socio-ecological engineering.

 

The dicamba crisis is the latest and most extreme example yet of how co-existence with GMOs is impossible. It’s obviously impossible for organic farming. It’s impossible for non-GM conventional farming. With Xtend Monsanto has upped the ante, stepping up the assault on organic and non-GM farming and even rendering all previous GM soy varieties untenable. This is the first effective example of what the cartel projects as an indefinitely re-writable blank slate it can force to be continually wiped clean and rewritten, a process of destruction and re-destruction redolent of waging war to destroy in order to generate space profitable to rebuild. This is the essence of disaster capitalism. Monsanto dreams of an agriculture totally subjugated by the most profitable GM varieties, until these too are rendered obsolete and wiped out by even higher-stacked, more expensive, more extreme varieties. The technocratic civilization wants an entire planet brillo-scrubbed this way.

 

This is a modern replay of the legendary Roman salting of the Carthaginian earth. This too is a scorched-earth act of war. The system’s vision is to turn Earth into a desert and call it civilization. This requires the total deployment of the monoculture and Humanfrei imperatives. Regimentation and order, death and destruction, are the desiderata. Anathema is lack of control, wildness, diversity, beauty, freedom, “anarchy”, “chaos”.

 

(The psychotic hatred of trees and drive to murder them, from the institutionalized logging sector to the average suburban parasite, is part of this overall religious psychosis. Dicamba takes its place here as a systematic mass murderer of trees.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To Cross the Bridge At All You Have to Burn It

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And if you don’t cross it you must burn the Earth

 

 

Another lament from a science-concerned liberal. Science ethics professor Sheldon Krimsky is typical of the breed, coupling the usual factual demolition of Monsanto’s lies with hand-wringing about the honor of “Science” which often spills over into attacking the people who really threaten to destroy the basis of the power of Monsanto and the technocracy as a whole, something the good liberal establishment could never do and doesn’t want to do:

 

“This short aphorism [a slogan on a button he saw*] brought into focus two unfortunate realities. First, there are growing segments of the population who have lost confidence in science and choose to act on un-scientific or pseudo-scientific truth claims. And second, other segments of the population view scientists as just another stakeholder group subject to the same market influences in the competition for producing credible knowledge.”

 

On the contrary, these are promising realities. They indicate one of the widening fissures in the corporate prison wall. It is of course nothing but plain truth that establishment scientists are nothing but another stakeholder group which cares about power, money, prestige, not “truth.” (They may or may not seek scientific truth insofar as they can do this within the corporate science paradigm. But this paradigm always dictates the limits of allowable “truth”, as well as dictating the research agenda in the first place.)

 

And it’s equally plain truth that the people are acting rationally and adaptively (in a Darwinian sense) when they reject the nostrums of corporate “science”. It was never any different, at least not since “science” became an institutionalized capitalist profession rather than the domain of independently wealthy generalists such as Darwin. (And even they usually theorized scientifically in accord with the dominant socioeconomic theories of their class. Thus Darwin framed his depiction of evolution in terms of competition and natural selection of individuals, not because the evidence demanded such framing – the evidence at least as readily supports depictions based on cooperation and group selection – but because he was thinking along the lines of a commercial animal breeder, and more broadly in terms of Smithian capitalist ideology.)

 

Let’s see who really acts according to pseudo-science: For example, in the first third of the 20th century who believed most ardently in eugenics? That’s right, it was almost the entire scientific establishment, and educated “progressive” types in general. Just as these comprise the vanguard of the resurrected eugenics movement today. (Meanwhile in the 1920s the opposition was led by the despised “un-scientific” churches. That’s not the only time the churches have been on the side of actual scientific truth while the institutional science cadre was anti-science. Today organized religion hasn’t done humanity all that much good in opposing today’s eugenics. But today as then the most virulently anti-science group on earth is the STEM establishment. It’s no accident that in both cases the most cherished notion of scientists is eugenic control over life, and especially over human beings.)

 

But Krimsky, as an establishment cadre, has far more in common with Monsanto than with the people, which is why his criticism must remain within technocratic elitist bounds. But this guarantees that the criticism never becomes more than criticism, never becomes total war to abolish those who are murdering us and would murder us all.

 

Krimsky may think he’s fighting Monsanto, like some knight errant rushing to save the honor of the fair damsel “Science” from the foul clutches of the evil wizard. But in reality anyone familiar with the history of scientists knows there was little honor to save in the first place, and none today. Krimsky, by continuing to propagate good civics fantasies like “independent science” and “peer review”, is really reinforcing the corporate propaganda line that what’s really a biological and socioeconomic war should be viewed merely as a technical dispute within technocracy which should be disputed only on Monsanto’s chosen fake battlefield, that of establishment-vetted “science”. He’s trying to help Monsanto stop the people from freeing their minds by rejecting the whole fake scientism ideology.

 

 

*The slogan: “Science is Peer Reviewed, Not Politician Approved.” This is ahistorical nonsense. Power always has chosen what research is done in the first place and what the allowable results are. By the time one gets to “peer review” the research already has jumped through several far more important hoops which have zero to do with any exalted notion of scientific “truth”.

 

No doubt the button is supposed to be worn especially at fake “climate” demonstrations put on by tear-shedding liberal climate crocodiles who actually oppose all meaningful climate action every bit as much as their bugbear Trump does. The de facto climate deniers are vastly more pernicious than the de jure ones, since they pretend to care about the crisis and pretend to have the solution, when in fact their fake “solutions” have zero purpose but to let them feel smug while they buy time for civilization to destroy the Earth completely.

 

Their alleged solutions all involve the continuation of productionism, capitalism, consumerism. Just as George Bush said the right response to 9/11 was to keep shopping, so our climate crocodiles assure us that the right response to the climate crisis is to keep shopping. Just like their Monsanto-critical counterparts like Krimsky say is the right response to the ecological catastrophe of poisonism: Keep shopping, and only in system-approved venues. Thus his despair over the plummeting legitimacy of corporate system science.

 

Sure enough, Krimsky has declared that he cherishes the fantasy of “a livable planet without setting limits on economic growth.”

 

Economic “growth”, of course, never has been anything but cancer, in every figurative as well as literal sense. It is one of the most evil psychoses humanity has developed, and by far the most insane and self-destructive.

 

To reprise what I’ve written innumerable times at this site, there is one and only one solution to avert the worst of the climate crisis:

 

Stop emitting greenhouse gases at anything close to an industrial level; stop destroying carbon sinks; rebuild sinks on a mass scale.

 

Anything short of this is a lie. (Needless to say, no room left there for “growth”.) The only answer to every other ecological and human crisis is the same kind of answer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Billion Dollar Bug, Indeed

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“That which the borer has left, the earworm has eaten; and that which the earworm has left, the rootworm has eaten…”

 

The treadmill of planned obsolescence continues. The goal, as proven by the corporate state’s pattern of action, is to cause insect resistance to pesticides to evolve ever faster, to provide a rationale for the ever faster development of ever more complex GMO/pesticide packages. The real purpose of this technological deployment, beyond mundane profit motives, is control, war, and the total destruction of the ecology.

 

All prior anti-rootworm Bt GMOs are admitted failures. Rootworm now resists them all. Monsanto’s “SmartStax Pro” AKA “Corn Rootworm III” (MON 87411), currently in development, is the next GMO “solution” being touted for rootworm control. SS Pro is being developed with the RNA interference mode. RNAi is simply a more aggressive gene driving attack on the ecology than the regular GM contamination already driving its toxic genetics.* As for pest control, this is the exact same product as prior insecticidal GMOs and will fail just as quickly in the exact same way.

 

The piece GMWatch links, a pro-poison outlet, admits that all GMOs are a failure and that farmers have to spray just as much as before, as well as rotate crops and observe insects in the field (what radical ideas, those last two). A neutral observer might think they should admit that the pesticide paradigm is a proven failure. A neutral observer might think they have an ulterior motive for continuing to shill for pesticides even as they admit pesticides don’t work. Rootworm is indeed a “billion dollar bug” for Monsanto, Syngenta, and Dow.

 

Today most Bt GM seed in the US is sold in the form of a “refuge in a bag” (RIB). This means that non-GM seed is scattered in among the bulk of GM seed. RIB abrogates the entire notion of non-Bt “refuges”, which already were a propaganda scam in the first place.** The fact that the EPA lowered the percentage requirement from 20% for discrete “structured” refuges (entomologists originally insisted that at least 50% was necessary, but were bought off at 20%) to 5% for the diffused “RIB” shows their twisted sense of humor. To make the joke complete, they should have lowered the RIB to 0%. It would be just as effective. This is further proof that the pesticide arms race is an intentionally escalating planned failure.

 

 

*All GMOs have unstable genomes riddled with mutations, and almost all are driven by the Cauliflower Mosaic Virus promoter which has a recombination hot-spot. For both of these reasons GMOs are more likely to be vectors of horizontal gene transfer than natural plants and are more aggressive in this transfer, forcing their alien genetics into any available place including the genomes of animals that eat them. Therefore every GMO is inherently a gene drive agent and seeks to force its brutish promoter-amplified alien nucleic acids into every possible organism: Related plants and plant-eating animals. Every GMO is a cancer agent in a precise sense, just as each is a cancer cell from the perspective of the ecosystem as a whole. GMOs are cancer amid the ecosystem, and they seek to sow cancer within individual animals. In this way they work to weaken animal populations from below, while gross ecocide exterminates them from above.

 

**The pesticide treadmill of planned, deliberate obsolescence gives the lie to the whole notion of “refugia”, which are stands of non-Bt corn which the EPA and similar regulators in other countries require poison farmers to set aside. The idea is supposed to be that the non-Bt stand provides a “refuge” for insects without innate resistance to survive and interbreed with the naturally resistant ones who have survived feeding on the Bt crop. Their offspring will be less likely to inherit the resistance trait, and therefore the overall conversion of the pest population to a resistant variety is supposed to be delayed.

 

As we see, the theoretical setting aside of refuges has done little to halt the march of Bt-resistant rootworms and other resistant insects. Refuges were really a political scam in the first place. Neither the EPA nor regulators in other countries enforce them, nor were refuges ever supposed to be enforced. The idea of the refuge, as a way for regulators and corporations to reassure skeptics that the product will work, always had more significance then the real world application.

 

This is proven by the fact that, in the same way that regulators set allowable pesticide levels in water and food, not according to public health or any other scientific measure, but simply according to whatever level will result from the amount of pesticides corporations need to sell and farmers are driven to spray, so the refuge percentages aren’t set according to any scientific measure, but according to the lowest politically justifiable level.

 

Therefore although USDA entomologists recommended 50% refuge planting if the policy was supposed to have any chance of being effective, the EPA originally set the requirement at 20% for single and then double trait Bt poison crops. Needless to say Monsanto originally opposed the refuge concept as such and has always lobbied for the lowest possible level. The EPA was happy to accept the cartel’s argument that stacked varieties, by incorporating multiple poisons, would attack target insects so many ways at once that the 20% refuge was no longer necessary and could be reduced to 5%. This “reduced refuge” requirement was inaugurated with SmartStax corn in 2009, and we have indeed seen rapid results where it’s come to the evolution of rootworm resistance. RIB has further accelerated the arms race.