Those familiar with the debate around genetically modified organisms (GMOs) may be forgiven for thinking that science alone can solve the world’s food problems. The industry asserts that GMOs are vital if the world is to increase agricultural productivity and we are going to feed a growing global population. There is also the distinct impression that the GMO issue is all about ‘science’ and little else.
It may well go down as one of the most appalling conferences in the history of the International Political Science Association. The World Congress is one of those hot air events that ventilates academic views in limited circles while shutting them off from actual discussion in the broader community. In this setting, academics with the oxymoronic title of “political scientists” can give the false impression that what they do is both of a political order and scientific. (True politics, more appropriately, is either high art or lowly muck.) Models are exchanged and poured over with pedantry
The Trump administration’s every move is marked with a strange creepiness as well as confusing messages that can only mean: They don’t get it. Their nefarious “destroy science” mentality promotes insane irreversible carbon emissions in good ole America, ultimately threatening the abilities of farmers to cope with ruinous global heat.
The pro-GMO lobby claim critics of the technology ‘deny farmers choice’. They say that farmers should have access to a range of tools and technologies. It is all about maximising choice and options. Taken at face value, who would want to deny choice?
The mechanical, robotic striving of university politburos and their jack boot managers have always been interesting when it comes to one particular topic: the role of technology and its adoption. For it is in technology that the mediocre paper clip shuffler can claim to have achieved something – on someone else’s back, naturally.
Why the industry of glib and vehement mainstream character assassinations of clinical and research psychologist Jordan Peterson? My examination of Peterson’s “Rule 1: Stand Up Straight with Your Shoulders Back” suggests that it is a seminal work anchored in a prestigious body of scientific research that should form the theoretical basis of social science in the coming years.
Western high-tech civilization can never fully enter the post-modern era without eradicating civilization of bourgeois-state-capitalism, namely, the meta-narrative of bourgeois-capitalism, that encrusted jewel, dead center, within the crown of the Enlightenment, which continues to infect and poison high-tech society with a most horrible sickness, insatiable avarice, an avarice for unlimited power and money.
When the rivers and air are polluted, when families and nations are at war, when homeless wanderers fill the highways, these are the traditional signs of a dark age.
— Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, September 26, 2000
What is explained can be denied but what is felt cannot be forgotten.
— Charles Bowden
Oh, what fun it truly was to experience the “bomb cyclone” in January in New England: the snowfall gave a sense of peace and calm, the winds were less strong than predicted, and the snow, while heavy, was not dense enough to take down trees and power lines in most areas. The following period of intense cold through February and March in the eastern half of the US, on the other hand, seems a harbinger of climate instability which will most likely worsen in upcoming years.
