Illumination 2.0

On Tuesday I gave a talk at Florida State College at Jacksonville entitled "The Future of Food: Feeding More People with Less".  The talk described the challenges to modern agriculture, the need for conservation, improved production practices (including low-input/organic ag) and new genetics from breeding.  One of the key facets was transgenic technology to complement other improvements. There was one person in attendance that was not a student, but a guy from the community that thought the topic was interesting.  As soon as I got into the GMO part of the lecture he began being disruptive.  I usually invite interaction, but his objections were relatively constant.  As usual, they were dogmatic and uninformed, tying nicely to the propaganda lines of the anti-GMO interests. For my lecture I held up glyphosate resistance as a successful implementation of transgenics in agriculture.  Here a relatively innocuous chemical displaces others that are more danger...

Birke Baehr is undoubtedly a brilliant kid.  At eleven years old he has interests in food and the environment, making him a clear outlier from his peers.  Birke was a speaker at TEDx Asheville. In my parsing of TEDx talks to identify anti-scientific claims, his was clearly a standout for good and sad reasons.  Again, as pointed out in previous posts, the outstanding reputation of TED talks was being hijacked by fringe interests to promote a non-scientific agenda, tarnishing the reputation of TED's credible brand.   This YouTube video named "Monsanto Corporation Gets Owned by 11 Year Old Boy" exploits the credulity of youth and the approval of a credulous audience.  Plus, he never says anything about Monsanto, just the usual anti-biotech rhetoric-- all stated as fact, without evidence . What is wrong with his talk?  Like a few TEDx talks I am currently discussing, they are weak on evidence and their agendas are showing.  As you listen to Birke, ple...

Over the last week there have been numerous reports of widespread avian and fish death.  Apparently large swarms of birds and huge schools of fish give up the ghost for no known reason.  Or so it is thought. The genius think tank over at Natural News has it all figured out.  In his January 4th column Mike Adams applies his usual less-than-rigorous approach to resolve this mystery.  The column speculates based on zero evidence: For all we know, these 100,000 dead fish are downstream from a field of GMO corn that mutated into something even more deadly than the GMOs we already know. This may not be so far-fetched, actually: Monsanto has a corporate office in Arkansas (in Stuttgart, Arkansas) that's not too many miles from the Arkansas River. Let me get this straight.  His hypothesis is that there was a mutation in GMO corn that was specific to the transgene, not the 40,000 other genes, and then this corn was magically transported into water and killed fish,...