The Republican War On Science

[Baruch]

Well, yes ... progressives have to have everything just as perfect as they are themselves ... sheesh!  We must put all people back where they were 10,000 years ago, and all the other species as well, otherwise we are ecological barbarians.

Fact is ... about 6 billion people will die soon ... because the planet can't support the people currently alive.  There isn't enough water, farm land etc given pollution and global warming.  The crisis will probably start in China and India, as it usually does.

Justice League need to get their super-suits on, fly around the room for practice, and then go smash the Legion of Doom.  Without their wisdom we are Doomed.  Why am I reminded of Team America?

[mauricio]

relevant video



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[Hydra009]

If you want to feed the world ... go ahead, just leave me out of your NWO.

I think you're missing the meaning of the W part of that acronym.

[Baruch]

The tree of liberty is fed by the blood of tyrants.  Seems like the tree needs more fertilizer.  If it takes a global Jihad to kill of the NWO .. I vote in their favor.

[josephpalazzo]

People have been manipulating the DNA of  species since they learned how to irrigate, which is the origin of civilization. Deny DNA manipulation, and you deny civilization.

[stromboli]

Well, yes ... progressives have to have everything just as perfect as they are themselves ... sheesh!  We must put all people back where they were 10,000 years ago, and all the other species as well, otherwise we are ecological barbarians.

Fact is ... about 6 billion people will die soon ... because the planet can't support the people currently alive.  There isn't enough water, farm land etc given pollution and global warming.  The crisis will probably start in China and India, as it usually does.

Justice League need to get their super-suits on, fly around the room for practice, and then go smash the Legion of Doom.  Without their wisdom we are Doomed.  Why am I reminded of Team America?

We have enough food to feed everyone

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-holt-gimenez/world-hunger_b_1463429.html

A new a study from McGill University and the University of Minnesota published in the journal Nature compared organic and conventional yields from 66 studies and over 300 trials. Researchers found that on average, conventional systems out-yielded organic farms by 25 percent -- mostly for grains, and depending on conditions.

Embracing the current conventional wisdom, the authors argue for a combination of conventional and organic farming to meet "the twin challenge of feeding a growing population, with rising demand for meat and high-calorie diets, while simultaneously minimizing its global environmental impacts."

Unfortunately, neither the study nor the conventional wisdom addresses the real cause of hunger.

Hunger is caused by poverty and inequality, not scarcity. For the past two decades, the rate of global food production has increased faster than the rate of global population growth. The world already produces more than 1 ½ times enough food to feed everyone on the planet. That's enough to feed 10 billion people, the population peak we expect by 2050. But the people making less than $2 a day -- most of whom are resource-poor farmers cultivating unviably small plots of land -- can't afford to buy this food.

And the crime rate is down
http://www.wanttoknow.info/g/violent_crime_rates_reduction

Did you know that according to official FBI and U.S. Department of Justice reports, the rates of violent crime in the U.S. are now at their lowest level in 40 years? Did you know that violent crime rates of 2010 were 1/3 the rates of 1994? Other countries are experiencing a similar decline. And deaths of law enforcement officers are at their lowest in 50 years according to this Boston Globe article. What inspiring news!!! Yet notice how little media attention this is drawing.

The issues are distribution and political upheaval and inequality of financial distribution from top to bottom.

I read Ehrlich's "Population bomb" back in the 70's, but his predictions have not panned out- why? GMO crops. Golden wheat and golden rice like I spoke of earlier. We have much higher yield per acre than ever.

Presently and down the road there is/will be a breakdown in the systems. There will be starvation because of more political upheaval, more inequality of resources and economic inequality. But the lack of food and/or high crime are not the problems.

Predictions I've read indicate the world population will stabilize around 10 billion. If you had a secular state worldwide that used birth control, family planning, and distribution of resources fairly we could do just fine.

The underlying problem? Religion and the backward, non progressive mentality it fosters. If we worldwide addressed the issue of global warming and the social inequalities that existed, We'd do just fine.

That be some progressive shit right there.

[Baruch]

People have been manipulating the DNA of  species since they learned how to irrigate, which is the origin of civilization. Deny DNA manipulation, and you deny civilization.

Monsanto had a time machine, to back to Sumeria?  Really?  I think I would trust Enkidu trying to cross an ass with a sheep sooner than I would trust Monsanto.  Also the degree of manipulation now is total ... Enkidu wasn't gene splicing at a fine level.  And yes, I do deny civilization ... since the city is a work of Nimrod ... you nimrod ;-)

Stromboli ... unfortunately to make everyone First World, you need the existing First World to kill off the Second and Third Worlds ... and that in progress.  Middle Class uber alles.

[josephpalazzo]

Monsanto had a time machine, to back to Sumeria?  Really?  I think I would trust Enkidu trying to cross an ass with a sheep sooner than I would trust Monsanto.  Also the degree of manipulation now is total ... Enkidu wasn't gene splicing at a fine level.  And yes, I do deny civilization ... since the city is a work of Nimrod ... you nimrod ;-)

[Baruch]

I don't allow idiots to work on my car.  Why should I allow megalomaniacs who don't know what they are doing, to splice my genes?

[stromboli]

The thread is about the Republican war on science. It isn't specifically about GMOs which, if anything, the Republicans likely don't have a problem with. and regardless of feelings on GMOs- I am not a fan- there are real reasons for it. We have less starvation in the world now than previous, due in a large part because of increased crop yield. And like JP said, mankind has been manipulating flora and fauna for millenia.

LITERALLY EVERYTHING YOU EAT HAS BEEN MODIFIED FROM THE ORIGINAL STOCK. The banana is named Cavendish, not semi edible plantain. The pig you get pork from is a bigger variety than his ancestors. I used to haul turkeys back as a teenager. I've seen turkeys in the wild. Not the same bird. Beef are bigger and produce more meat, dairy cows produce more milk.

so you can talk GMOs all day long but the fact is ALL  our food has been modified through selective breeding and advances in fertilization and methods of harvesting, you name it. If we, as some people suggest, went back to unmodified crops and meat, you would have a far different scenario. So-called heritage breeds produce less harvest and are more expensive to raise.

I guarantee you anything you eat- from lettuce to eggs to some good ol' pork chops- has the hand of man on it. That is the reality of our world.

[Baruch]

Yes, but the hand of man .. is unethical, if not immoral.  And that is also a problem.  For example, we have people at work who have had to drop wheat, because dwarf wheat has been used to substitute for older strains, and dwarf wheat is part of their dietary problem with gluten.  Of course different people respond differently to different foods, some are allergic to peanuts.  But let us say, if growing monster peanuts allow us to feed 8 billion people, it is OK to force everyone to eat it (because of wholesaling etc) ... including people who are allergic to peanuts?  Yes, I have freedom, if I don't want to eat stuff, I can stop eating.  But the freedom isn't worth much in a food supply that compared to even 20 years ago, is entirely dominated by political-economics ... not nutrition.  If the government would force all food suppliers to only supply foods that are nutritious (this means you, Count Chocula) .. well then, no argument.  But these same people don't want me to garden with legacy seeds to feed myself ... because totalitarianism aka civilization, can't stand even a single spear hunting native of the Amazon, to escape their clutches.  That is why we are down in Ecuador destroying the forest for oil, and if necessary, murdering the natives (once again) for gold.

So the point isn't that some genius, can reverse engineer the genome of corn (which is in fact bad for you, and barely fit for car fuel) that started in the Stone Age ... and produce something that doesn't kill us instead.  The tobacco company scientists can be trusted, right?

[Hakurei Reimu]

Baruch, GMOs are not going to be less nutritious than their traditional counterparts. There is no compelling reason for a company to engineer a crop to make it less nutritious. Indeed, a large chunk of the GMO manipulation does the opposite.

There's never going to be a time where the peanut (or any other crop) supplies all of our food for three reasons:

(1) No one food crop is complete in its nutrition. Humans need literally hundreds of nutrients, both macro and micro, in order to stay healthy. It doesn't matter how rich you are, if you don't get your full nutrition, you eventually die. It would take a large amount of genetic manipulation to create this mythical one-size-fits-all crop you imagine â€" it's just way cheaper to improve a variety of crops in incremental steps and then mix and match for nutrition, than to massively engineer and grow one supercrop.
(2) No one food crop will grow everywhere. Sure, you can get some crops to grow in places very ill-suited to them, but it will always be more expensive and of lesser yield than simply using a crop that is just well-adapted to the environment already â€" that is to say, the crops that people are already farming there. Again, it's a much greater return on investment to simply tweak up a native crop than to engineer one supercrop.
(3) Growing one crop for all of your food is unstable. Monoclones are supremely vulnerable to infestations that tend to devastate our crops in short order. We already see this in monoclone crops around the world (there have been a long series of banana crops for just this reason), such that sustaining a single, worldwide supercrop is going to be a nightmare. Now, you could engineer the supercrop to be resistant to the new bug... or you can switch to a new crop that the new bug is ill-adapted to.

In all cases, it's better and more profitable to genetically modify a whole range of crops than to modify one crop into a supercrop. We will not all be eating only peanuts, only chard, or only any one crop. A universal crop would be too expensive to create and too generalized to beat out specialist crops in their niche for any company to even bother. The crops we have through breeding are already damn good at what they do, such that GMOs will be those organisms that are fine-tuned for their purpose.

There will always be options, because I doubt that the higher ups would want to live on only peanut butter, either.

As to corn, it's perfectly wholesome. The flap about corn syrup everywhere has less to do with the fact that it's corn and more to the fact that it's syrup. Syrup in large quantities isn't good for you, doesn't matter if its corn or maple.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

For those who wish more information on this war, I suggest you look into the "Golden Fleece Awards", Senator Proxmire's personal vendetta against things he couldn't understand.

[stromboli]

Gluten? You do realize that the only people who "suffer" from gluten are people with Celic disease, right? It is monstly a sales pitch, like bottled water, Almond milk and other sales pitches.  Wheat has had gluten for millenia, and there have not been any massive "people keeling over dead" from gluten.

You can't return to the stone age or hunter gather stage. There are 7.8 billion people to be fed, and crop yield has to be boosted per acre to yield it. We are bigger, stronger, longer lived and overall healthier since our ancestors first started farming. And we have been modifying our food for centuries.

[Baruch]

Lot of employees from dystopian Monsanto folks posting here ;-)

OK, so we have mutton that has human genes spliced into it ... are you OK with eating that hybrid or wearing its wool?  There was no way bestiality-preference Sumerians (I am talking to you, Enkidu) were going to make that hybrid happen, but it is already happening in GB.  And the sentient English speaking steer that offs itself to make your dinner (Restaurant At The End Of The Universe) will happen this century, not a million years from now.  And what about the human rights of these part animal-human hybrids?  When Vietnamese workers get too expensive we can employ hybrid zoo animals to make iPhones?  Calling Island Of Dr Moreau.

If you are good with patenting human genes or whole humans ... if you are good with unregulated human-animal hybrids ... then don't speak of ethics or nutrition.  We should just go complete Planet Of The Apes and enslave regular humans, and raise them for food too.  Problem is, with a criminogenic government, don't expect any regulation of bioethics to be actually enforced ... the money (and fake money at that) is the only imperative.