The Lies of the CRISPR/Gene Editing Media Campaign

>

 

 

The allegedly “new” GMOs are nothing but retreads of the old in every way. This is the case no matter whether the flacks call them by a technical name like CRISPR or Zinc Finger Nuclease, “gene editing”, “new breeding techniques”, or the more internet-colloquial GMOs 2.0 or what have you. The alleged novelty of these retreads is just the latest lie designed to rehabilitate all the same stale old lies.

 

GMO critics often have noted the self-contradiction between the original lie that genetic engineering was “precise” and the more recent hype touting CRISPR as “more precise than earlier methods”, thus conceding that these methods weren’t all that precise. This Wall Street Journal piece goes further, openly acknowledging that the GMO cartel wants simply to start over and “reset” all the lies. It doesn’t even say “more precise” but that “gene-editing technology…enables scientists to make precise changes to plants’ existing DNA”, thus admitting the complete lack of precision of the earlier methods. They’re also simply starting over with the lie equating genetic engineering with conventional breeding. The idea, evidently, is to pretend they never deployed these same lies for the earlier generation of GMOs, and that these lies weren’t all completely debunked.

 

Of course the same liars who tout the alleged greater precision of the retread GMOs still claim in other contexts that the old GMOs are “precise”. So we have two mutually exclusive versions of the “precision” lie being double-thought at all times by the same pro-GM activist liars. Then there’s the stealth version of the lie where a pro-GMO activist, pretending to be reasonable, concedes the failure of GM-based agriculture and pays lip service to emphasizing better farming practices over technological magic bullets, but in the very course of this smuggles in “gene editing” as “…a very different thing to GM [which] will change the whole picture.” This is the furthest I’ve seen a pro-GMO activist go in denigrating earlier GMOs while stealth-touting gene editing as something completely different and with completely different future prospects. In the same way as the more brazen liars he’s trying to get a do-over, a new beginning, for the products of genetic engineering. This fits with my analysis of agricultural GMOs as a stalking horse and preliminary experiment toward GE human eugenics, with animal modification a mid-point. And indeed pseudo-precise gene editing already is being used in human eugenic experimentation.

 

There’s more propaganda along those lines in these pieces, including a typical, indeed standard example of the reporter himself asserting “CRISPR is a far more accurate method of modifying genes than scientists have had access to before” instead of reporting this as a claim being made by the developers and sellers, the way a bona fide journalist would. This and other installments comprise a coordinated mainstream media propaganda campaign dedicated to ensuring the retreads are exempt from the meager, usually farcical regulation earlier GMOs were subject to, and to persuading the public to rescind its suspicion of GMOs as such by trying to convince them of all the same “precision” lies which were so evidently false the first time around.

 

This campaign also is a good example of a much greater confusion and lie. In principle science and technological development (engineering) are two completely different, although often related, things. I stress often but not necessarily related, since in the case of genetic engineering we have one of the cases where the technical deployment has nothing to do with the state of the science and indeed runs counter to it. Genetic engineering is based on nothing but determinist junk science and brute force empiricism (best symbolized by the fact that they literally shoot the transgenes into tissue cultured cells with a gun; read Lords of the Harvest for the image of how gene gun experimenters literally got splattered with onion gore; “precision” indeed!) and has almost nothing to do with science. Indeed, the more the actual science of genetics learns, the more geneticists realize how basically ignorant they are about how the genome works, and how impossible it is to attain any kind of “precision” with artificial genetic manipulation. Here’s a recent book (published in 2016) on the state of genetic science, written by a geneticist who is typically pro-GM. That is, no one could accuse her of slanting anything in an anti-biotech way. And yet the book completely demolishes any claim that genetic engineers could ever have the slightest idea what they’re doing and what the effects will be. (The author seems unaware of this; she’s an example of the double-think I described above.) Yet the propaganda of genetic engineering always systematically has conflated engineering with “science”. The media’s propaganda campaign touting gene editing is a typical example.

 

This leads to one of my basic points, that today’s establishment “science” is indeed nothing but the corporate science paradigm. (Cf. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions for his use of the terms “science paradigm” and “normal science”.) Under the corporate science paradigm, “science” is indeed defined as nothing more or less than the development of profitable technologies. From that point of view, GMO deployment would be called “science”. But this has zero to do with the mythology of the scientific method like we were taught in school, and in fact directly contradicts it. Yet the professional liars depend upon the average pseudo-educated reader to conflate the two in their mind.

 

The CRIPSR media campaign boils down to one of the fundamental political lies: [Insert failed policy] had this-or-that problem the hundred times we touted it before, but THIS time we really promise it’ll work, so believe us again and keep submitting. The most amazing thing is that this self-evident mode of lying works, so long as there’s enough people who are still desperate enough to believe the lie. In the case of genetic engineering, the idea and its toolkit of canned lies comprise a proxy for the crumbling, ever more desperate religious faith of middle class Westerners in technocratic “progress”. As I’ve long said, GMOs are most of all a propaganda campaign. Until enough Westerners are willing to face reality and psychologically burn their ships, the GMO idea, and from there the real-world deployment, will continue to have traction. That’s why the “anti-GMO” people as well are so peculiarly ambivalent and modest in their prescriptions: Most of them too are pro-technocracy consumerists whose opposition to one facet of that system (GM/pesticide food) is more a personal fluke than anything based in a coherent opposition to the system of which genetic engineering and eugenics comprise the supreme idea and product.

 

 

Propagate the necessary new ideas.

 

 

 

 

The Primal Mammalian Movement

>

From the smallest beginnings, and the power of a seed.

 

 

One of the mainstream media’s primary tasks is to convince each individual media consumer that he’s all alone with any critical or dissenting thought he might have, so it’s best to suppress those thoughts. It’s part of the “softer” neoliberal alternative to fascism: Rather than de jure censorship and violent repression of dissent, get the mass of atomized individuals each to censor himself, use crimestop, never listen to thoughtcrime or entertain any cognitive dissonance.

 

Hierarchical, professionalized science, including its hyperspecialization, is inherently authoritarian and pro-status quo. This is especially true of the technocracy paradigm under which science is assumed by almost all practitioners and fans to be equivalent to the development of technology. Under this paradigm, science = engineering. Most of all it’s true under the corporate science paradigm where this tech development mission automatically is assumed to be in the service of profit-seeking corporations. Putting that together, we have the modern scientific paradigm where what Kuhn called “normal science” quite simply is what otherwise would be called “corruption”.

 

I propose to overthrow this scientific paradigm and replace it with a paradigm of science rededicated to seeking knowledge for its own sake and for the well-being of humanity and the Earth. In the same way that every branch of politics must be socialist if it’s to have any legitimacy at all, so all branches of science must become the ecological versions of their respective disciplines. Therefore the ecological sciences, inflected by chaos theory, must become paramount. In the same way, technological design must adhere to the ecology rather than strive for domination and control. In particular, only agroecology offers a way for humanity to restore the soil, avert the worst of climate chaos and all other environmental crises, eat sufficiently and well, and organize society in a way combining the best of reason, humaneness, and ecological holism. This is the vision of food sovereignty.

 

There’s lots of people already doing good work toward that eventual goal. We need to scale that up, first as a campaign of ideas. As for our personal lives, the Earth’s call to anyone is to commit your life to the cause. That’s a very hard sell in this Mammon theocracy where even among the people who superficially have the right ideas and good intent, most still are objectively Randroids in the way they view the world. Even fellow travelers of the necessary ideas fundamentally don’t understand the concept of having no private existence, existing fundamentally as a political animal, a public citizen. All we can do for starters is to keep propagating ideas which are fundamentally against the whole grain of this theocracy, and try to find fellow atheists versus the superstitions of Mammon, technocracy, scientism, productionism who want to work on that atheism-propagation project. This is one of the basic building blocks necessary to build a true cultural, spiritual, existential movement dedicated affirmatively to the necessary agroecology/food sovereignty transformation, negatively to the total abolition of poison-based agriculture.

 

That’s the ultimate need. What individuals and small groups can do right now:

 

1. Take on as much of the propagation work as one can.

 

2. Become active building up the community food sector as much as one can. Growing some of one’s own food in a garden is a good first step, and the actions quickly scale up from there.

 

3. In one’s personal lifestyle get as independent of the system, as “off-grid” (using that term both literally and metaphorically) as possible.

 

4. To the extent one has to remain enmeshed in the system for the time being, at least be clear in thought and word that this is under duress. I still have to drive a car, but I never think or say anything other than that the car as such has to go. This is contrary to the climate crocodiles who wring their hands and then tout hybrids and electric cars (i.e. fracking cars, nuke cars, coal cars) as some kind of answer. No, that’s just a more pernicious form of climate denialism.

 

5. In general: Do the most good you can and never do evil. I have never once heard of an example of an evil action that was necessary in any way. That’s always a lie.

 

Much of this focuses on ideas and propagating ideas. I’m forced to be a writer since for now I lack any greater scope for action. In Eric Hoffer’s terminology, I’m an activist by nature who’s been forced into the role of the “man of words”. For now there really is no greater scope for action in America, since the necessary movement doesn’t yet exist in any tangible, coherent form. Or, any rudiments which may be cohering are not yet visible to the general culture of dissent.

 

So it follows that the first, prerequisite step toward building this movement is to propagate the necessary ideas for this movement. Not even at first to convince people, but to force the existence of truly alternative and practicable ideas into the public consciousness so that, when the cultural tipping point suddenly comes (history demonstrates that we have no idea when it will come or what proximate cause will trigger it) and lots of people are suddenly looking for a new idea, this set of ideas will be one of the sets laying around ready to be taken up.

 

Toward that great goal, the second necessary preliminary step is to form at least the nucleus of a future mass movement in the form of coherent organizations, of whatever size attainable, which will undertake whatever wedge actions are possible for the time being but whose primary action will be to propagate the ideas as far and wide as possible.

 

 

And then all this must take place in tandem with building up the community food sector. We especially need more local retail producers, and processing infrastructure, and political organization against the state’s repressive campaigns. The community food movement already exists as a vibrant movement with great scope for all the action one could desire (in addition to my so far intermittent market gardening, I’ve worked at a farmers’ market, herbal medicine garden, and am director of two community gardens). We need for the whole thing, from organic horticulture to market gardening to abolition of pesticides/GMOs to a global agroecology transformation, to evolve into one coherent cultural force.

 

 

Propagate the new and necessary ideas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Corporate Science Establishment Vs. the Scientific Method

>

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Corporate Scientists “Mostly Say, Hooray for Our Side”

>

It’s a space-age church, all right.

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

 

Help propagate the necessary ideas.

 

 

 

 

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

>

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.

.

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.

.

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.

.

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.

.

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.

.

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.*

.

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.

.

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.*

.

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.

.

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.

.

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.

.

.

*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.

.

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.

<