How to deal with those one hates and wants to destroy? There’s three basic modes of destroying humanity and the ecology. Each of these three modes has its direct practitioners and its support structure.

1. Kill them outright. This was the Nazis’ preferred “Final Solution”, and has been enacted in several other genocides. Ecological examples include campaigns to exterminate predators. Poison-based agriculture claims in theory to want total monocultural sterility and the total extermination of so-called “pests” and “weeds”. Similar anti-scientific theories of medicine and food safety also claim in theory to want the total extermination of all biology not specifically cultivated by man. (I say “in theory” because this paradigm’s record of failure and counterproductive results is so long-proven and complete by now, that we must assume its practitioners really want the opposite of what they claim. E.g., poisonism really seeks to maximize the destructiveness of agricultural pests and disease.)

2. Enslave them with the calculated goal of working them to death. The Nazi system made extensive use of this mode. Where it comes to natural resources and the ecology, most capitalists think and act this way by default. This is the way industrial agriculture practices upon the soil, crop biology and genetics, and the ecosystems upon which agriculture depends.

3. Enslave but conserve. This is the difference between a Nazi slave labor program and an antebellum US Southern cotton plantation. This is the allegedly “good”, paternalistic form of slavery and exploitation.

This is the utopia of all pro-capitalist reformism. It’s the ideology of conservatism/liberalism as such. This is the position of “moderates” within productionism, globalization, technocracy. In particular, this is the essence of the corporate version of every kind of social and environmental movement, and the NGOs which have helped the corporations co-opt those movements.

As for the ecological philosophy, science, and practice which rejects enslavement and exploitation completely, instead building the cooperative symbiotic ecological good of all humanity and the Earth, this paradigm is still only a seed today, especially in the West.

We won’t find it anywhere amid existing “politics”. If we want this revolution and restoration, we have to build it anew ourselves, completely from outside the existing system, in complete rejection of this system.

The ultimate wet dream of the scientism cult. Of course by “peace” they really mean more war, always maximal war, forever.

(By that title I refer to the current STEM establishment, the body of practicing scientists and technicians. At any given time that’s the only meaningful measure of what “science” is. Other modes of scientific emphasis are possible, for example a body of scientists who truly would be devoted to peace and security. But today this doesn’t exist.)

Why, one might ask, would SciAm be running op-ed pieces by pro-corporate hacks dealing with purely political matters such as when it’s appropriate to use nuclear weapons*? The answer is, for the same reason they run op-eds about such purely political, non-scientific matters as GMO deployment: The procedure of technocrats always is to deny politics as such, and to claim that inherently political matters are really nothing but technical problems which call for purely technical solutions. This, of course, always implicitly supports the existing power structure, in our case the domination of corporations.

Thus we see how technocracy and the scientism cult are congenitally authoritarian, anti-political, and supportive of existing power arrangements. In particular, we see the near-complete dominance of the corporate science paradigm, wherein the scientific establishment sees science as such as nothing more or less than what the corporations say science is. Publications like Scientific American are the propaganda vehicles of this paradigm.

*There is, of course, no conflict between the US and North Korea other than the one driven by US imperialism. It’s overwhelmingly the US which “rattles its saber” all over the world, and other countries can only do their best to respond, or else knuckle under. The US is the overwhelming destroyer of global security, and not just a “potential threat to global security”. Other countries can only respond or submit to the destructive chaos. And of course the reason why the US is the great destroyer of all security including its own is because the totalitarian wealth-concentrating drive of the US government, multinational corporations, and the 1% constantly requires this campaign of total destruction. End this evil and destructive campaign, and everyone could enjoy security. Continue with it, the way SciAm and its scribblers wish, and no one can be secure.

As for the Korean peninsula, the one and only solution is the same as for the Middle East and Africa: West Get Out. Most of all, US Get Out. Anything else is a destruction-seeking lie.

The New York Times has long been the premier purveyor of fake news, i.e. systematic lies, on everything from the Iraq War and “war on terror” to GMOs and pesticides to the housing bubble.

By now this corporate tabloid is so brazen that if you were to read a randomly selected paragraph from any issue you’d often have a hard time telling whether it came from a “news article” or the op-ed page.

But food is not an app. It is far more heavily regulated by governments and much more heavily freighted with cultural and emotional baggage.

Ronald Reagan couldn’t have said it better. Of course the bit about Silicon Valley’s alleged goals goes beyond editorializing to being a flat out lie. The scribbler and her editors know perfectly well that Silicon Valley has no goals but profit and power and is just as opposed to real action on climate change, animal cruelty, and food security as the NYT itself is. This is proven by the fact that a core writing standard at the NYT is for reporters to regurgitate as “fact” whatever governments and corporations say about their own goals, regardless of how unevidenced or contrary to the evidence such claims are. In this case, the “journalist” goes even further and asserts the alleged goal on her own authority. This NYT paradigm, which is followed by the entire mainstream media, is a major constituent of how this media disseminates fake news.

Similarly, for corporate media like the NYT the most hysterical, hyperventilating exaltation of capitalism and high-maintenance technology (and the most shrill defenses of these) is considered the normal baseline while even the most moderate questioning or skepticism is branded “emotional baggage.” It’s like Chomsky’s observation that when the NYT says “the people” it means big corporations and the rich, and when it says “special interests” it means the people and the environment.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention what this is all about. You’ll have to forgive me, but by now all the particular GMO scams blur together into one fuzzy streak of lies and religious wingnuttery. Each new scam is just like all the preceding ones and musters the same canned lies which were completely refuted years, often decades ago. By now only the wicked and the morbidly, terminally stupid still support GMOs and genetic engineering. In this case, GM yeast generates a synthetic version of the heme protein found in soybean roots. This protein is then incorporated into synthetic vat meat to make it “bloody” like a rare hamburger. The target consumers are the kind of wingnut who wants a bloody meat look and texture but doesn’t want to eat real meat. Allegedly, many vegans fall into this bizarre category.

(The Gates Foundation is a big investor in this strange product which is certainly nothing but a boutique item. That’s exemplary of how all the Gates claims to philanthropic motivations are nothing but lies. On the contrary, this exemplifies how the Gates Foundation is motivated by nothing but profit, power, tax dodging, and technocratic religious fundamentalism. Bill Gates is the same as any other televangelist.)

This particular scam does engage some broader trends and pathologies. Is celebrating a literal blood-lust, just offering a substitute for real blood, the right way for vegans to go, in their personal actions and social advocacy? I condemn all forms of animal cruelty, not just the specially cherry-picked ones middle class vegans usually care about. Therefore it seems to me that it’s the blood-lust itself which should be criticized rather than appeased. There’s certainly nothing natural about it; it’s not “human nature”. Indeed, the blood-lust in eating bears an uncanny resemblance to the jingoism of chicken-hawks who have never been to war and would collapse in tearful hysterics at the thought of having to go to war personally. In the same manner, CAFO eaters never want to see how CAFOs and slaughterhouses work. Meanwhile I’ve read much that’s been written by farmers who perform their own slaughter, and though most enjoy meat, I’ve never read one who revels in the blood. Only some parasitic eaters do that. So to the extent we see vegans celebrating the “blood”, we see their affinity group.

(By no means do I mean to criticize veganism as such. I have great respect for vegans with political integrity, and animal cruelty is one of the several reasons I abominate CAFOs and call for the abolition of industrial agriculture. But I despise anyone who is nothing but a myopic, anti-political, generally ignorant “lifestyle” enthusiast whose objective action not only serves systemic evil but runs counter to their own alleged cause. This is the case with anyone who claims to care about animal welfare but opposes abolitionism and acts as a corporate operative, supporting any aspect of corporate agriculture and food. Like all agronomic, ecological, and socioeconomic crises, the crisis of the ongoing animal holocaust through factory farms, environmental poisons, and habitat destruction can be met only with a strong, coherent, disciplined, relentless movement for the abolition of corporate industrial agriculture in toto and the global transformation to agroecology and food sovereignty. But just as with the crocodile-tear climate criminals and de facto climate deniers, so any self-alleged animal welfare activist who claims to find common ground with the corporate onslaught is a liar and a fraud.)

As for the Impossible Foods, they’ve been wrangling with the FDA over the lack of taxpayer-funded, regulator-guaranteed advertising for their product. I’ve written before about the FDA’s fraudulent non-regulating “regulation” of GMOs, which literally is nothing more than a voluntary exchange of letters: The corporation asserts (it doesn’t need to provide any evidence at all) that its GM product is safe, and the FDA replies, “We acknowledge that you claim the product is safe.” That’s it.

The beef here is that Impossible Foods wants the FDA to go beyond this abdication. They want the FDA to state affirmatively that their blood-pack is safe to eat. So far the FDA has refused. (The EPA actually lies more aggressively than the FDA, which in this case prefers passive abdication.) Meanwhile Impossible has “self-affirmed” that its synthetic blood-letting proteins are safe by paying flacks impersonating scientists (they’re all contractors for Monsanto, DuPont, ADM, the Gates Foundation, etc.) to assert this, again with zero testing or evidence. Literally everywhere we look, whether it be to the government regulator, the corporations, the scientific establishment, or the mainstream media, we the same absolute lack of contact with reality – no testing, no evidence, literally nothing but lies made up out of thin air.

GMOs are indeed impossible foods. Impossible to improve health and nutrition, impossible to improve food safety, impossible to improve food security, impossible for crop biodiversity, impossible for the soil, impossible for the environment, impossible for the good of farmers and communities, impossible for science and reason, impossible for any coherent human culture, impossible for animals, impossible. On the contrary, they’ve long been proven to be directly destructive of all of these values and goals.

PS. “I hacked my body for a future that never came”: This headline pretty much sums up all high-maintenance technological deployments. But this author and her self-mutilating brethren, with their “hi-tech” version of cutting, are especially mentally ill. Be aware of the level of physically violent dementia these creatures demonstrate.

I’m not saying “MY writings = abolitionism”, in the sense that I personally claim to be some great writer or anything. But the principles and deductions I write about, and the organizational, tactical, and communications standards I insist upon, comprise the necessary ideas and actions upon which any such movement has to be built.

1. For any activism to be worthwhile it has to fight for the necessary goal. The uncompromising goal: The total abolition of poison-based agriculture, in particular pesticides and GMOs (for starters). Strategy and tactics then follow from this goal. Partial steps could be acceptable, but only on the vector toward total abolition, never counter to it. Therefore the basic necessity at all times is to develop and express the firm, disciplined, cumulative abolitionist philosophy and goal.

What this group might do.

2. Research and reporting to the group: We must master all existing knowledge on poison-based agriculture and keep up with it in real time as new knowledge is found. Group members would divide the research and reporting labor. Learn it all inside and out – its health harms, its environmental devastation, its agronomic failure (the pesticide/GMO treadmill), its physical unsustainability, its malign effect on farming consolidation and farming economics, the way it distorts politics and economies, the way it has hijacked and discredited science, corporate lies, fraud, and secrecy, regulator dereliction, cover-ups and lies, everything. This research is done always toward the goal of applying all knowledge to the abolition fight.

If the expertise and means are at hand, we shall create knowledge ourselves. Original study and reporting.

We do the research necessary for all of this according to a division of labor. All the facts to date have been compiled by various sources. Our job is to take all this raw material and deploy it according to the abolitionist idea. We’ll then want to keep abreast of all the new information. We do this according to assigned jobs. Each member commits to research and writing on a specific aspect, all according to the abolitionist analysis. E.g. one person can be in charge of reporting on superweeds/bugs; another on GM contamination; health harms; political and regulatory developments; scientific fraud, etc.

3. We need our own writers. The existing system is not abolitionist, and writers within it are still part of the corporate/consumerist system and still are committed to reform and “co-existence” with Monsanto. They comprise a loyal opposition, “constructive criticism”. Therefore we need original writing on all the main topics. The writing is the abolitionist analysis and call to action.

In everything, we need to move from passive reception of information to active combination, deployment, and propagation of it. Most of all we the people need our own organizations, our own writers.

4. We must propagate our own abolitionist writing. Propagation is a group responsibility. We’ll help one another propagate this writing across the broader media, through submitting pieces for publication and/or linking them everywhere. For starters, mostly websites: Those with anti-GMO/pesticide focus, those with focus on organic and local food, amenable political sites, religious, etc. We have to get our writings published as far and wide as possible, all under a clearly recognizable abolition banner. We need relentless, disciplined publicity for our “brand”, online and where applicable through fliers etc.

The pioneer organization must organize all the facts and truths into a comprehensive, politically potent, relentlessly propagated campaign. Members need to commit to specific research and writing tasks, and the organization needs unified action to propagate its writings, first in the “alternative” media, eventually toward the mainstream, and counterattack the enemy in the mainstream media. This should focus especially on the targeted demolition of fraudulent scientists and journalists.

5. We’ll organize ourselves as an online wolfpack. This will be planned, synchronized group commentary at mainstream media comment threads and at other important sites. We must stop letting the organized liars face only disorganized, often less-knowledgeable ad hoc opposition. We’ll counterattack them with the fully erudite, philosophically coherent, organized, disciplined truth. We must reply in a strong, organized way to corporate media pro-poison propaganda and hatchet jobs on campaigners, scientists, and scientific bodies like the IARC.

The wolfpack will have a coherent line of counterattack against each type of lie so we’ll all be on message with the best evidence in the most tactically effective communication styles. The group will be ready with the best links, preferably to our own abolitionist publications, to resources refuting the particular lies as well as resources explaining why and how the mainstream media is inherently untrustworthy and always lies, and why and how government regulators are inherently untrustworthy and always lie.

In the same way, we’ll always present the affirmatives of agroecology and food sovereignty. Even the most cogent criticism of an entrenched, still intact status quo is bound to be ineffective unless it’s coupled with an attractive, compelling alternative affirmative vision.

So we’ll have planned wolfpack actions against media pieces which exalt poisonism and/or attack critics, especially where the comment threads are dominated by pro-poison activists.

Propagandists are of great importance to the enemy. Therefore we can also have planned actions where we counterattack a specific propagandist, a false scientist or journalist. These are the fraudulent cadres who must be discredited. We must condemn false scientists and false journalists for all their lies and all their crimes. We’ll research and demolish them.

We can discuss possible actions, vote if necessary, then commit to the coordinated action, each member with a particular responsibility. One person can focus on the target’s specific lies, another on the money they’ve been paid by the cartel, another on demolishing the fraudulent “environmental” or other groups which amplify the propaganda, etc.

We agree ahead of time who has responsibility for which aspect, though we all speak the same line. During an action we focus on particular points and stay on point.

6. As we recruit pioneers within our localities and extend the organizations into real space, we can start public discussion groups with monthly meetings, hold public meetings, give lectures and presentations, always from the abolitionist perspective.

7. In all these publicity endeavors the three goals are: To educate the public about poisonism; to force into the public consciousness the idea of the need for abolition and how easily doable it is, getting people to be aware of this idea and to remember it, whether or not they initially agree with it; and then to convince people to agree with, support, and fight for the abolition goal. See Part Two.

8. We can participate in pressure campaigns on municipalities, manufacturers, and retailers, and launch such campaigns ourselves. Friends of the Earth and other campaign groups have shown what can be done through their campaigns to get retailers to pledge not to sell GM salmon or not to use GM potatoes and apples, or to stop using neonics on their products. Recently such cities as Barcelona and Edinburgh have responded to campaigns with pledges to phase out glyphosate use. Same for some retailers in France and Germany. Germany banned the surfactant POEA from glyphosate formulations sold within the country. (It’s still included in Roundup everywhere else.) If they can be driven to ban POEA, they can be driven to ban glyphosate as such.

Abolitionists support these campaign goals in themselves, and a dedicated abolition group would also always use every such campaign as an occasion to publicize the need for total abolition.

9. In all these endeavors, the group seeks as much as possible to speak directly to the people. When the group speaks to establishment media it does so in a way calculated to be channeled as clearly to the general public as possible. While we welcome the adherence or sympathy of any kind of professional or establishment type, we do so only on an abolitionist basis, never in terms of modifying ourselves to be more “respectable” or “acceptable” to any element of the establishment. This doesn’t mean chaos, on the contrary it means an organized, disciplined adherence to ecological philosophy and science, the abolitionist philosophy, and the abolitionist goal.

***

So there’s a brief sketch of the kind of small, grassroots action group which could launch itself with minimal resources except for the time, energy, and commitment of its members. If it did its job well then growth and greater resources would follow, but it must never drift from its grassroots nature rooted in ecology, democracy, positive freedom, and abolitionism.

This template could be applied to other kinds of abolitionist campaigns.

For many reading this, this wouldn’t require them to leave their computer screens nor to take extra time from where they’re already reading about GMOs and pesticides anyway. It would only require a change of focus, to a more organized, focused, active, disciplined, cumulative mode. This will be an evolutionary step forward for the movement. If you’re spending several hours a day as it is, spend those hours this way.

I’ve thought of starting my own FB group which would require the active participation of members, each member committing to taking on a particular responsibility for research, writing, propagation, and/or online action.

But we need a website for this. It can’t be organized primarily through social media. No organization has ever gotten started on social media. Social media is a death zone for any kind of organizational work. On the contrary, social media can be only a supplement to a coherent organization based in a more stable, substantive format. So we need to get a website going as home base for publication and for real, substantive discussion (which never happens on social media). It’ll link to all relevant resources and include on every page prominent links to our most basic manifestos: Why Abolitionism is Necessary; the Great Agroecological Transformation; as well as refutations of the most virulent big lies of poisonism, especially GMOs Cannot “Feed the World”, GMOs = Famine and Pandemics, GMOs Have Nothing to Do With Science; GMOs are Anti-Science, etc.

So there’s some ideas on how to get started. All the great movements of history had similar small beginnings, and all began by propagating a new idea.

In Part One we sketched the need for an abolitionist movement built from the soil up, from completely outside the existing political system, toward goals and a way of life contrary to those of this psychotic, homicidal and suicidal system. What are the basic operations and goals of this movement?

It’s not possible to “stop” the corporate system as long as the fossil fuel, environmental, and organizational basis of its power remains intact. The purposes of starting right now to build a pioneer movement for the abolition of poison-based agriculture and for the spiritual and cultural affirmatives of the new Earth are more evolutionary and cumulative, with an eye toward the long run. But this still requires hard work in the here and now.

1. The movement must propagate the new and necessary ideas. Humanity needs a dedicated abolitionist organization whose first goal is to sow in the public consciousness ideas of the need and practicability of abolishing poison-based agriculture and building the complete economy based on agroecology and food sovereignty. Toward this goal we must speak to those who already feel these things to varying extents, to further radicalize each from whatever level they’re currently at, toward the full abolitionist consciousness. [Definition of abolitionist consciousness: Implicit acceptance and avowal of the need for total abolition; total commitment to this goal no matter how long it takes and no matter what’s necessary to attain it. Therefore complete flexibility and lack of bias with regard to strategy and tactics.]

Almost no one knows yet about the need to do this and the fact that it can be done right now. Most people have no idea that there exist far better alternatives to industrial agriculture, globalization, the finance sector, etc., that all these things are destructive rather than constructive, and that there’s no physical basis for the future of this system. There’s no substitute for fossil fuels; the soil and ecology as a whole cannot sustain the exploitative and destructive status quo. So we must propagate the ideas into the general public consciousness. At first this isn’t primarily to “persuade” anyone, though to whatever extent that happens it’s a fringe benefit. Rather, the primary goal is to make people aware that the alternative ideas exist, so that when history brings a radical change in the situation and large numbers of people suddenly become ready for a radical political change, they’ll know where to go.

Agroecology is a fully demonstrated science and set of principles ready for full global deployment, as soon as humanity evolves the will to do it. Therefore the first task is to make these ideas fully public. From there food sovereignty and poison abolitionism can start building a true social and cultural movement toward active political goals.

So the first task is to make these ideas part of the public consciousness, even if at first most people don’t take them up.

2. The movement must build the new within the old. Especially agroecological practice and the community food economic sector, but also whatever else is possible in other sectors. We must defend this rising economic and agronomic movement against the government’s increasingly aggressive attempts to suppress it. This is an economic necessity for the flourishing of truly organic farming and food processing and distribution restored to their rational regional basis. (Almost all food production and distribution is done naturally and rationally on a regional or local basis.) This is a physical necessity since it’s necessary to preserve as much of the agricultural and wild germplasm as possible for the future basis of agriculture. In the same way it’s necessary to preserve as much of the still-living arable soil as possible and to start rebuilding the soil wherever possible, starting right now. It’s also the ongoing empirical and scientific process of building our agroecological knowledge and expertise. All this is already happening. It needs greatly to expand and to become fully conscious of itself as a world-changing movement.

3. The movement must prepare for the time, which will come unpredictably but can start accelerating at any time, where the basis of corporate global power begins to erode in earnest. We must be ready to act in any way possible as this proceeds. Even now I think there’s several potentially powerful wedge campaigns we could run which could help to break up existing political alignments, in particular the overall fear and loathing of poisonism.

4. This movement comprising the pioneering abolitionist organizations must build itself as the skeleton of a future mass movement, which will cohere when the masses to whom we previously propagated the new and necessary ideas suddenly become ready to take up these ideas and commit to them. That’s when the abolitionist and ecological movement (by “ecology” meaning not just the physical environment but economy, politics, spirit, culture) will have its first great chance to transform the Earth. That’s also when it’ll be humanity’s one and only option, other than the mass starvation and pandemics locked in to the status quo path.

There’s the overall strategy. In Part Three we’ll sketch a plan for the day-to-day actions of pioneer abolitionists.

For all its current power Monsanto has a bleak future. In a sector scrambling to consolidate because its real opportunities for the future are increasingly constrained, Monsanto is especially vulnerable. The company is dependent upon Roundup for about 70% of its revenues. Roundup accounts for half its sales, while GMOs dependent upon it make up much of the rest. That’s why Syngenta had little interest even in Monsanto’s GMO business. In 2015 the entire world learned for keeps what campaigners, Monsanto, and regulators have long known, that glyphosate causes cancer. With the WHO’s announcement the clock is now ticking, counting down the rest of glyphosate’s legal life. The people will now slowly but surely force the complete ban of glyphosate-based poisons. The bell is tolling for Roundup, Monsanto knows it, everyone knows it. They must find new products or die. They’re hyping everything in sight, from slapping new ad slogans on old, pointless, narrow-market products to touting the idea of RNA interference GMOs. But if these ever came to market they’d still be the same kind of shoddy insecticidal GMOs which in Bt form are already a failure with a gradually diminishing market.

The structural reason driving the current consolidation is that GMOs are a shoddy product and don’t have much of a market or a future in themselves. On the contrary, there’s a growing consensus inside and outside the sector, including on Wall Street, that the pesticides remain primary, with the GMOs being secondary to these and dependent upon them. Their fundamentals are bad. In other words the finance sector now agrees with what GMO critics have said from the start, that GMOs in the real world are nothing but pesticide plants, poison plants. Although Wall Street is poor at acknowledging its own pyramid schemes, it knows how to call them out in other sectors. GMOs are a scam.

By now all the GMO cartel has is the hype and hoaxes of the pro-GM activists and the corporate media. Monsanto in particular is desperate to tout its new GMO campaign, and with media fanfare is licensing two CRISPR “gene editing” processes. Monsanto’s Roundup business is seen as having a highly questionable future, and in all the merger talk the only thing which has really interested anyone is the company’s potential to develop GM traits other than those based on glyphosate. Here we see Monsanto desperate to reassure skeptical Bayer shareholders. Indeed, the hype over “new GMOs” may continue fooling the business world for awhile, but hype is all it is. As a practical way for the GMO project to get on track and start delivering on its promises, the retread GMOs are a vain ploy and a malign lie.

Here’s all anyone needs to know about CRISPR etc., the whole false notion of a retread “second generation” of GMOs based on “gene editing”, RNA interference, and similar tricks: These retreads are the same failed technology, the same failed GMOs, the same failed mode, the same failed agricultural paradigm based on poison, guaranteed to have the same result as all prior pesticides and GMOs. Pests will quickly overcome it, it will function only on the same ever-accelerating pesticide treadmill which already spins endlessly, it will poison people, animals, and the environment, and it will contaminate non-GM crops and wild plants. It’s not possible to be mistaken about any of this. Indeed, these are proven to be intentional primary effects of every technology deployed as part of poison-based agriculture. As its name says, this is the project of maximizing the production and use of poisons in order to maximize the poisoning of people and the Earth. All of this is being done for its own sake, as well as for the sake of profit and power. All of it is disguised with the lie that any of it has anything to do with producing food.

By now all we have are conscious, willful liars on the one hand, vast amounts of gratuitous, self-willed ignorance on the other, with a few scattered truth-tellers who recognize the clear facts.

The health dangers of the retread GMOs are the same as for the old GMOs. Scrambled genomes, insertional and tissue culture mutations, and the effects of these: A gene producing too much or too little of a protein with toxic or other ill effects, producing the wrong protein with toxic effect, producing a misfolded protein with toxic effect (Mad Cow disease is caused by a misfolded protein), toxically excessive or foreign metabolites, gene or cell damage leading to cancer or any number of other health destructions, “silencing” the genes of humans who come into contact (topical, inhaled, ingested) with the RNAi pesticide, and any number of other predictably unpredictable chaotic effects. The retread GMOs are the same as the old GMOs.

In the same way the health dangers are the same as for any other pesticide. The engineers and propagandists have no more idea how genotoxic, hormone disrupting, neurotoxic, organically toxic, and carcinogenic the RNAi pesticides will be than they originally had for the other classes of pesticides, all of which proved to be lethal to humans in all these ways. To put that another way, they know perfectly well that the RNAi pesticides will almost certainly have the same effects that all other pesticides have. The new pesticides are the same as the old pesticides, and will fail against pests and poison people in the same way the old ones always do.

It’s not possible to be mistaken about any of this. These are all known facts.

Of course the “new” retread GMOs are designed to aggravate the socioeconomic and political evils of corporate agriculture and commodity-based production the same way all previous GMOs were designed. Just like all prior GMOs, the goal of the retread GMOs is to starve the world in order to feed a handful of gluttons.

1. On the most basic factual level, the engineers and their supporters have no idea what they’re doing. Jonathan Latham writes,

[The industry and media’s] exposition is belied by the evidence. If CRISPR were already precise, accurate and specific there would, for example, be no publications in prominent scientific journals titled “Improving CRISPR-Cas nuclease specificity using truncated guide RNAs“. And these would not begin by describing how ordinary CRISPR “can induce mutations at sites that differ by as many as five nucleotides from the intended target”, i.e. CRISPR may act at unknown sites in the genome where it is not wanted (Fu et al., 2014).

…[I]t is technically not possible to make a single (and only a single) genetic change to a genome using CRISPR and be sure one has done so (Fichtner et al., 2014). As Fichtner noted “in mammalian systems Cas9 causes a high degree of off-target effects”…There is, furthermore, no guarantee that more precise versions of CRISPR are even biologically possible. Technically therefore, precision is a myth: no form of genome editing can do what is currently being claimed.

[A] defined, discrete or simple pathway from gene to trait probably never exists. Most gene function is mediated murkily through highly complex biochemical and other networks that depend on many conditional factors, such as the presence of other genes and their variants, on the environment, on the age of the organism, on chance, and so forth. Geneticists and molecular biologists, however, since the time of Gregor Mendel, have striven to find or create artificial experimental systems in which environmental or any other sources of variation are minimised so as not to distract from the more “important” business of genetic discovery.

But by discarding organisms or traits that do not follow their expectations, geneticists and molecular biologists have built themselves a circular argument in favour of a naive deterministic account of gene function. Their paradigm habitually downplays the enormous complexities by which information passes (in both directions) between organisms and their genomes. It has created an immense and mostly unexamined bias in the default public understanding of genes and DNA.

Where this isn’t willful lying, it’s the common mode of being seduced by a crackpot version of “scientific method”. They reify these ivory tower experimental conditions of limited usefulness into the lie that these are real conditions which give real knowledge.

The primary lie making up the marketing campaign for the retread GMOs is that they’ve been made with extra-special “precision”. The propaganda theme that the retread GMOs have been engineered with precision is the exact same lie as the theme that the old GMOs were the result of precision engineering. In reality all genetic engineering is an extremely sloppy, wasteful, scattershot empirical process relying on brute force and massive reiteration to produce an adequate result once in awhile. Genetic engineering and its results is best represented by the proverbial stopped clock which is correct twice a day. So it’s been for all GMOs to date, and so it is for the “new” GMOs.

In itself, precision is only as intelligent or moronic as allowed by the extent of one’s knowledge. Latham gives a good analogy: “Suppose, as a non-Chinese speaker, I were to precisely remove from a Chinese text one character, one line, or one page. I would have one hundred percent precision, but zero control over the change in meaning. Precision, therefore, is only as useful as the understanding that underlies it.” In reality, even legitimate science knows little about the details of genomes and next to nothing about the chaotic genome effects of genetic engineering. When we add to this ignorance of the details and repercussions the engineers’ junk science of biological determinism and their complete ignorance of the state of genetic and biological science, we see how even if they did have a precision technique they’d still have absolutely no idea what they were doing. They’d be firing with good marksmanship into a soundless, pitch black void. But to say again, they have no precision technique either. They’re really hurling handfuls of gravel into that void.

The “precision” lie is a core article of the religious faith of scientism, going back centuries to the de jure Christian roots of the engineering ideology. Although engineers and scientists have never had such precision control of anything, they’ve always prayed to themselves and lied to the world that they did possess such precision knowledge and control. Here again, the hype about CRISPR is just the latest incarnation of the most hackneyed lies. Here too it’s not possible to be mistaken. Anyone familiar with the history of science and engineering, especially the history of pesticides and GMOs, knows the lie by heart.

Technologies based on the reductive, poisonist junk science like genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, synthetic “life”, robotics, nanotech, geoengineering and others share the fantasy of the engineer exercising total control through the precision use of control technologies and engineering techniques. Science has seldom been more than a servant of this cult religion of control. More often than not the process by which these technologies are developed has little to no “precision” involved, but is a very messy process based on profligate, wasteful deployment of brute force empiricism toward whatever approximate result is “close enough” in practice as long as it can be transformed through the fantasy into an idea of precision. In the same way, as a rule these technologies don’t work in the real world. The real world performance of GMOs ranges from temporarily adequate as long as supported by the most lavish, expensive panoply of inputs – bank credit, machinery, fertilizer, irrigation, pesticides – to a complete disaster from the start. Nowhere on Earth have GMOs ever consistently performed as well as the much healthier, much less expensive true crops. But as long as cheap oil, industrial inputs, and corporate welfare can provide enough brute force to keep GMOs in the field at all, this is enough for the scientism cultists and their fanboys to fetishize GMOs into a transcendent religious ideal.

When we consider the origin and circumstances of the STEM cadre this cultism isn’t surprising. STEM disciplines attract the most hierarchically-oriented, authoritarian, reductive, order-obsessed types who are also the most alienated from physical (ecological) reality and at the same time possessed of the most intense religiosity. In the modern era scientism and “Progress” have presented themselves as secular civil religions, but this pseudo-secularity is just a temporary variation on the Christian millennarian roots of technology worship and science ideology. For over 900 years inventors and practitioners of engineering and science explicitly saw themselves as imitating Adam in the Garden of Eden, creating in the image of the Creator, becoming co-Creators with God, and as preparing the human condition for the Second Coming. To this day these apocalyptic religious themes remain explicit and normative among aerospace and weapons engineers. It’s also standard rhetoric among AI cultists and “transhumanists”.

The explicit Christian rhetoric is also common among genetic engineers and GMO cultists, and the transcendent tone, evangelical attitude, and warnings/hopes of the imminent apocalypse are exactly the same. It’s the same millennarian Christian religiosity, even where temporarily submerged by civil religious ideology.

Given this extremist interior, the fact that the engineers usually must function as lower-level cogs in the corporate machine, obeying the dictates of executives and marketers, the whole endeavor just a subdivision of the much more comprehensive Mammon religion, must bother them. To give just one example, Lords of the Harvest describes the initial cultural conflict at Monsanto between the high-flown fantasies and pretensions of the genetic engineering division and the agrochemical division, which the genetic engineers at first disdained as a gang of backward luddites. It was only after the GE division put up a perfect record of failure over years of very expensive confusion that they finally lowered their sights and began working on poison plants. (They failed at this too; one day soon I’ll write a piece documenting Monsanto’s near-perfect record of failure and theft.)

When we put all this together, it’s no wonder the techno-cultists exalt the fantasy of precision and control and keep telling themselves and the world lies about it. And although they continue to tell these lies about the GMOs which have been deployed so far, at the same time they implicitly admit they were always lying about these when they hype the alleged “new” kinds of GMOs, even going so far as to deny these GMOs are GMOs, which also disparages the existing types. They’re trying first to convince themselves that this time the “precision” really is precise, the “control” real control. But it’s all nothing but a retread of the same old lies, same old failures, same old bottleneck.

Most profoundly, we see in these phenomena some of the sources of the indelible culture of the lie among technocrats and scientism cultists. Humanity should have demanded of the very first scientist, “What is Truth?” The idealization of some notion of Truth, which is touted as the ultimate justification of science, originated in Christian theology and to this day remains a religious justification. Scientific “Truth” is therefore Truth as revealed by religious transcendence. As the engineers and scientists constantly say, with their technology they seek to transcend reality – the environment, biology, mortality, the irrationality and emotionality of human beings, the physical Earth. Their will to truth means the will to another world, an otherworld, an afterworld. Their will to truth must go hand in hand with the cult of technology. This means their “Truth” has always been purely instrumental. So from both directions – Truth as a theological article, and Truth as whatever idea of control technology is able to effect, right down to boosting profit margins – the culture of the lie is inherent in the technological version of Truth. As with all fundamentalist cults, the scientism cult recognizes only its transcendent ideal and its day to day empirical work, but displays absolute faithlessness toward any and all day to day measures of fact or truth. As for science itself, for the STEM cult this is nothing but an appendage of instrumental engineering. At best it can sometimes serve as a methodological guide, but is most commonly a propaganda facade. Just as the pseudo-democratic, pseudo-political ideology which has supplanted classical liberalism is called “neoliberalism”, so bona fide science has become a fraudulent “neoscience” completely engulfed within the corporate science paradigm of today’s STEM establishment. Between this mercenary hijacking and the religious basis of science as such, there’s little left of the exalted, allegedly rationalistic Enlightenment mythology. It’s the practicing engineers and scientists themselves who present the most extreme manifestation of human irrationalism and human emotionalism, as well as malignity, faithlessness, and absolute practical nihilism. But in their minds they dwell in a cloud city presided over by their own god. They see their task as to wipe out the ecological reality of the real Earth and humanity and replace it with a technology-dominated co-Creation between themselves and this god. If humanity is to survive, we must put a stop to them.

Thus Monsanto’s media advertorials for its future CRISPR projects are more than just typical corporate media hype. Underlying this is the will of the cult to arise from the muck of the bogged-down GMO/pesticide project and transcend on the wings of the gloriously retreaded “new” version of the same old anti-scientific, failure-mongering notions. In the end the CRISPR hype is still just hype, still just the same old lies. But the goal is far more than just propping up the stock price. The goal is to reinvigorate the flagging religious crusade. In the end, since Monsanto has no practical basis for future profit and power, it hopes to harness the power of religion to keep itself on top.

1. “In the 17 years I’ve spent covering Silicon Valley, I’ve never seen anything shake the place like his victory. In the span of a few months, the Valley has been transformed from a politically disengaged company town into a center of anti-Trump resistance and fear.”

They can’t really fear Trump, a regular status quo neoliberal politician continuous with the Clinton-Bush-Obama lineage, this way. There’s no objective correlative, as a literary critic would say. Made-up fears like this are always a proxy for something else.

What does Silicon Valley fear, and why is Facebook’s proximate response to pay lip service to the old corporate media establishment? On the surface it sounds like agoraphobia. As the authority of the conventional mainstream media collapses, the techno-totalitarians may be feeling some fear over the prospect of really leaving the old establishment behind and having to take the lead in their own right. Where it comes to political Leadership, the technocratic instinct is to hide behind a conventional political and media facade. That’s part of why neoliberalism has been their preferred organizational and propaganda model.

2.

During the U.S. election, propagandists — some working for money, others for potentially state-sponsored lulz — used the service to turn fake stories into viral sensations, like the one about Pope Francis’ endorsing Trump (he hadn’t). And fake news was only part of a larger conundrum. With its huge reach, Facebook has begun to act as the great disseminator of the larger cloud of misinformation and half-truths swirling about the rest of media. It sucks up lies from cable news and Twitter, then precisely targets each lie to the partisan bubble most receptive to it.

After studying how people shared 1.25 million stories during the campaign, a team of researchers at M.I.T. and Harvard implicated Facebook and Twitter in the larger failure of media in 2016. The researchers found that social media created a right-wing echo chamber: a “media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyperpartisan perspective to the world.” The findings partially echoed a long-held worry about social news: that people would use sites like Facebook to cocoon themselves into self-reinforcing bubbles of confirmatory ideas, to the detriment of civility and a shared factual basis from which to make collective, democratic decisions.

In other words, Facebook and social media are a more potent version of what the corporate media does. Crack to the NYT’s cocaine. Social media mostly transmits the same hyperpartisan perspective as the US government, the NYT, CNN: Pro-capitalist ideology, pro-corporate ideology, mainstreamed Randroid “wealth creator” ideology, Hobbesian lies about human nature and Malthusian lies about food and natural resources, the ideology that the problems of society and the environment are technical engineering problems rather than cultural and spiritual crises, and most of all the fundamentalist religion of civilization based on high-maintenance technology and extreme energy consumption.

But the conventional corporate media believes it was already performing its Goebbels Ministry role adequately, and its fear is that because Facebook and social media are so potent, they may give new and opposing ideas a way to wedge into the public consciousness. The mass hysteria among status quo cultists over “fake news” really means that the mainstream media’s fake news flock fears competition, in exactly the same way a big mainstream church will disparage a newer or more obscure, at any rate smaller, religion as a “cult”.

Therefore the Leaders among mainstream corporate media are attempting to impose their gatekeeper role upon Facebook, and according to Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony Facebook wants to become part of a propaganda continuity with the NYT model rather than any kind of break with it.

3.

Scholars and critics have been warning of the solipsistic irresistibility of algorithmic news at least since 2001, when the constitutional-law professor Cass R. Sunstein warned, in his book “Republic.com,” of the urgent risks posed to democracy “by any situation in which thousands or perhaps millions or even tens of millions of people are mainly listening to louder echoes of their own voices.”

I’m sure Sunstein makes a point of reading the latest criticism of capitalism each day in order to ensure that his position remains correct.

But the rest of those in the media who propagated their consensus that there was no housing bubble and that housing prices literally would rise forever are now arguing among themselves about what constitutes “fake news”. These same commentators said Wall Street had to be bailed out, and today say there’s no stock bubble and no fracking bubble and that there never really was a housing bubble. In 1929 they all said there was no stock bubble. They all say climate change can be solved by emitting more greenhouse gases and destroying more carbon sinks. They say all currently deployed industrial poisons are safe for people and the environment. They say that the US government’s military presence in the Middle East is a normative law of nature and that Arab and Muslim resistance to this presence has some arcane, perverse basis. They say that the hundreds of times the US has interfered in foreign elections and overthrown elected governments is all normative and above discussion, while the thinnest rumor about Russia influencing a US election is a world-historical crime. They all said Iraq had WMDs and therefore had to be invaded. They still call the general US war around the world a “war on terror” and advertise this as necessary and indeed as a permanent law of nature. Most of them agree there is no US empire, and they all agree this empire is self-evidently good and at any rate a law of nature. They say globalization works for humanity and at any rate is a law of nature. They all agree that health care should be controlled by the profit motive and they all deny that the rest of the industrialized world does things differently and better. They all continue to insist with the strongest emphasis that young people should go into debt to get higher education and they continue to promise good, secure jobs to those who go into debt to obtain these degrees. They all deny that these are all political choices, they say that all these things are laws of nature, and most of all that there is no alternative to any of them.

There’s just a small sampling of Truth according to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, and Snopes, just to name some of the leading establishment media outlets who comment about Facebook and the news in this NYT piece. They call all this “good information”. Bad information is anything which questions or contradicts this corporate and militarist party line.

Therefore, much of this is the mainstream media’s angst over its imploding authority and its looking for racketeering-style ways to get it back. Here we have the sclerotic Mafia trying to intimidate the rising Colombian and Russian gangsters into some sort of deal.

4. And Zuckerberg says he agrees, in a new “manifesto”:

[Facebook’s] next focus will be developing the social infrastructure for community – for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for the inclusion of all….

There are questions about whether we can make a global community that works for everyone…Giving everyone a voice has historically been a very positive force for public discourse because it increases the diversity of ideas shared. But the past year has also shown it may fragment our shared sense of reality.

This is nothing more or less than the standard authoritarian Volksgemeinschaft boilerplate which goes back thousands of years. Feel free to read it as par for the mainstream course and/or as portending incipient fascism. Either is correct. It all means reinforcing the corporate mainstream monoculture and suppressing diversity, alternatives, dissent.

The piece goes on to describe Facebook’s commitment to “news literacy” according to the corporate party line and Zuckerberg’s avowal that “a common understanding needs to exist.” To paraphrase Chicago’s mayor Chuck Daley, what Zuckerberg really means is that a common misunderstanding needs to exist. That’s the business of the mainstream media, including social media like Facebook.

5. All this is in the service of the same status quo insanity and evil.

“We’re getting to a point where the biggest opportunities I think in the world … problems like preventing pandemics from spreading or ending terrorism, all these things, they require a level of coordination and connection that I don’t think can only be solved by the current systems that we have,” Zuckerberg told me. What’s needed, he argues, is some global superstructure to advance humanity.

All this, it generally goes without saying in the mainstream media, must be done under corporate control and toward corporate profit goals, from which every other good allegedly will trickle down.

In truth, trickle-down, together with the infinity of fossil fuels and the infinite capacity of the environment to assimilate our assaults upon it, comprise the three core lies of modern civilization. Modern media is dedicated to propagating these three lies and suppressing all news of the reality which contradicts them.

More importantly, everyone knows that systemic risk is maximized by such “global coordination and connection”, and that the inevitable conclusion of globalized corporate civilization is general famine and chaos as industrial agriculture, and everything else which is 100% dependent upon finite fossil fuels, enters its predestined collapse. We also know that neither regional ecosystems nor the global ecology shall stably sustain much more of the destruction this mode of civilization inflicts upon them as its systematic policy. We know that the inevitable kinesis of all this destructive potential shall return the chaos and destruction a hundred-fold upon the head of the civilization which launched the campaign of waste and destruction.

There’s no doubt about the deliberate character of the campaign of destruction or the fact that waste and destruction as such are the intentional goals. For we also know that the only way to lower risks and vulnerability and to preserve stability is to decentralize power and control, build resiliency, build redundancy, build diversity, all in harmony with the natural decentralization, resiliency, redundancy, and diversity of ecology and evolution.

Thus Zuckerberg regurgitates the foundation lie of the extreme destruction model of “civilization”.

The NYT concludes with an approving nod: “This is not an especially controversial idea; Zuckerberg is arguing for a kind of digital-era version of the global institution-building that the Western world engaged in after World War II.”

All we need to change there to make it true is: What the Western world engaged in as its continuation of World War II.

And this globalization war has worked so well for humanity, as the “news” of the likes of the New York Times repeats every single day.

As for abolitionists and any other kind of true dissident, anyone who cares about the future of humanity and the Earth and hears the mission call to propagate the necessary ideas, we see how Big Propaganda, old and new, is trying to come together to suppress us. Part of our mission is to see to it that we exploit every tool social media affords us and seize every opportunity it opens up, but without being co-opted by it or succumbing to the many pathologies inherent to it.

We must do this in a disciplined, coordinated, cumulative, relentless way, according to a coherent strategic and tactical doctrine and always keeping the clear concrete abolition goal directly before our eyes.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.