Join Dr. Keith Lockitch next Tuesday, November 18, at 7 pm EST, for a live Q&A based on his talk “The Sacred Self: Ayn Rand on Abortion, Foreign Policy and Environmentalism,” recently presented at The Undercurrent Student Conference in Washington, DC.
Mike “The Health Ranger” Adams, founder and director of the popular health news tabloid website Natural News, recently posted an article calling for the death of scientists, journalists anybody else who has written favorably about the technology of genetic engineering. Adams declared anybody working to improve foods to be the equivalent of Nazis perpetrating a holocaust on the world.
When I think of the future of genetic engineering, I imagine new and innovative varieties of food. I envision crops that practically grow themselves come rain or come shine. I hope for foods that are specifically tailored to an individual's nutritional needs, apples that don't turn brown when sliced or perhaps even a grocery store tomato that actually tastes good.
You may know it as an “eggplant,” but in Bangladesh, where it is considered a staple crop, it goes by the name “brinjal.” Last year, a biotech variety of the purple fruit, meant to resist attacks from insects, was approved for cultivation in Bangladesh.
According to a poll just released by Gallup, climate change and “the quality of the environment” ranked near the bottom of a list of 15 “national problems” Americans worry about — way below “the economy,” “unemployment,” and “the size and power of the federal government.”
Scanning the web for slogans and catchphrases that slur biotech crops rouses the usual suspects: “frankenfoods,” “our kids are not lab rats” and “GMOs are not food.” Sometimes slogans can be revealing of how anti-GMO activists really boil down an issue.
Turns out that windmills are not the only form of “green energy” that slaughters birds. As if being whacked to death by large steel blades weren’t bad enough, how about being fried by an intense solar death ray?
Claiming that they “were not able to control their emotional outburst,” a mob stormed a rice field this month in the Philippines and laid waste to the seedlings growing there. The mob tore down a fence and swarmed onto the field, uprooted the rice shoots, and then buried them under the dirt to ensure they were dead.
In the midst of President Obama’s campaign on climate change, John Kerry traveled to India last week to “prod” the people to do more to cut carbon emissions.
