Illumination 2.0

Last month I submitted a proposal to present a workshop at Justice Begins with Seeds, an anti-GMO conference to be held in Seattle Washington.  The conference asked for proposals, I submitted an "Ask a Scientist" Q&A forum, and Anastasia Bodnar, Jon Entine and I were prepared to fly out and attend the conference, potentially at great expense.  The proposal was purely educational. Last week I posted that I had heard nothing from the organizers.  I sent them a note and received a timely reply from Miguel Robles, the person I originally contacted at the organization.  Miguel has always been kind and supportive. He told me that the reason we were not invited to present a workshop was not about GMO per se, but that the "conference is focusing particularly on the global social-economic-political repercussions of genetic engineering."  He then went on to the talking points, mostly about how this is all about money, destruction of small farms, etc.  He mad...

Today I'm listening to the hardcore right-wing radio station in town, the SKY WSKY 97.3 in Gainesville Florida. As I've posted before, although they want the 10 commandments in every classroom and courthouse in the USA, they spend the weekend as the vectors of bearing false witness. They run a series of fake medical radio shows that actually are infomercials for bogus health items. Today I heard the claims of TH121, on a commercial posing as a radio show called "Ask The Doctor" hosted by Charlie Robbins. If by "ask" they mean staged phone calls and if "doctor" they mean the company selling a vitamin and making claims about it, then they are 100% honest. These a-holes really make me mad. They had caller after caller phone in, without ever offering a dial up number. Each caller lost weight, and fast, without dieting and exercise! One caller claimed 9 pounds in three weeks! Then they say that there are no side effects, that is is "saf...

You may remember that I submitted a proposal to give an "ask a scientist" workshop at the Seeds of Justice get together in Seattle, Aug 1-2.  The event has all of the usual suspects that will throw the usual crazy kerosene on the imaginary biotechnology fire. My hope was to get all of the angry anti's in one place and just answer their questions honestly. Anastasia Bodnar, Jon Entine and I were excited to participate, even in a likely hostile forum. Certainly they'd be whipped into a frenzy by Smith, Shiva and the laundry list of non-scientists pontificating as experts.  What a great time to talk to them about science, how we do it, and what it says. So what was their response? Crickets. Crickets. Crickets. No response. Seeing as though we would need to plan, buy tickets, arrange lodging etc, it is not something we could do overnight.  It would be a significant expense for us to participate, but we were willing to take this on if given a forum to do som...