Posts

Bittersweet Access Denied

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The website from yesterday is gone.  Access denied.  Despite the fact that this was our central scientific organization making a major blunder, the internet was strangely silent, and it made me uneasy.   This situation is nothing but bad optics, but the criticism had to be levied, because it was the truth. Damn the torpedoes.  But it was enough time for at least a subset of the anti-technology movement to grab it and run with it.  I'm holding my breath and hoping for a clarifying statement that acknowledges the findings of the awardees, but frames them within the limitations of the experiments performed. I'm also waiting for the claims that this was the secret hand of Monsanto, infiltrating the AAAS corps of lackeys, and having the page pulled.  We indeed live in strange times. I'm glad that scientists in places like Sri Lanka examine public health issues, formulate hypotheses and test them as they can. We just need to keep it real. If we ar

What Am I Missing?

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I humbly ask this question.  What am I missing?  Tonight I read the press release for the AAAS about the 2019 Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award, going to two Sri Lankan physicians / researchers that apparently confirmed a deadly causal connection between a kidney disease (Chronic Kidney Disease of Unknown Origin; CKDu) and the herbicide glyphosate. Congrats, congrats! Wow, I must have missed this.  Certainly a concrete link would be big news, and if AAAS is awarding someone for this research it must have been a prominent publication.  But I scan the literature almost daily and never saw this.  The names of the awardees seemed strangely familiar.  Then it hit me... this was the 2014 paper where they looked at hard water consumption in Sri Lanka and then suggested a tie between CKDu, heavy metals and glyphosate.  The paper presented a hypothesis.  There were no data.  There were no experiments.  It was a decent  hypothesis that could be tested.  At the time the anti-ag

The Power of a Conversation

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I grew up in Chicago in the 1970's, and even in a massive city we had our choice of just a few major media stations.   WGN was a staple on television and radio.   I used to get up long before the sun and there was nothing on television except for the Farm Report.  Orion Samuelson and Max Armstrong were familiar figures on radio and TV.  I'd listen to or watch them daily, even though I had no connection to farming.  I was a kid, and it was something live and local.  Years later I run into Max at national conferences and I always appreciate his stories.  Today at the Independent Professional Seed Association in Indian Wells, CA, he told a great story I have to share. Max Armstrong shares an amazing story about the power of personal connections in telling the story of agriculture.  He was uber-ing from the airport to the hotel.  He and the driver carried on a conversation, and the driver mentioned that he had already driven someone to the same hotel earlier in the day

Mangling Reality and Targeting Scientists

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Welcome to 2019, and one thing that remains constant is that scientists engaging the public will continue to be targeted for harassment and attempted reputation harm.   The good news is that it is not working as well as it used to.  People are disgusted by their tactics, and only a handful of true-believers acknowledge their sites as credible.  But for those on the fence I thought it might be nice to post how a website like SourceWatch uses a Wikipedia-mimic interface to spread false and/or misleading information about public scientists.  Don't get me wrong, this is not crying victim.  I'm actually is screaming empowerment.  I spent the time to correct the record, something anyone can check.  Please look into their allegations and mine, and see who has it right.  This is published by the Center for Media and Democracy.  Sadly, such pages actually threaten democracy by providing a forum for false information that makes evidence-based decisions in policy issues more chall

Dances with Trolls

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Social media can be quite a pox, but for the most part it is a great way to share good information, have a laugh, or connect with others.  The problem is that it also can be used by folks with unsavory interests as a tool for personal tear down.  The unfortunately hostile nature of social media is what turns many away from participation in important conversations. This is especially true about conversations about vaccines, climate or genetic engineering.  So how to fight back?  I used to ignore, block or delete hostile trolls.  About two years ago I realized that I could take screenshots of their hate and actually use it to curry favor with those I sought to influence. In other words, by exposing their filth, I earned trust.  It comes from a position of power. It shows that you are not going to succumb to being a victim, especially from anonymous troublemakers and slander bots.  It also suggests that the reason you are targeted is because you have something important to communi

Another Dose of Chemophobia -- This Time Orange Juice!

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Is your orange juice full of weed killer? No. Who is making that claim, and should you be concerned? Five years ago we all were treated to data claiming that corn was not corn. More precisely, genetically engineered corn was actually a concoction of chemistry that it could not be remotely biological. According to the source, it was lacking carbon, but was packed full of glyphosate and formaldehyde (which are carbon based). It also had a substantially lower “cation exchange capacity” than its non-GMO equivalent, which is odd, because that’s a soil test, and not one done on corn. But it sure had it. Whatever it was. The data seemed weird because they were. They were fake. Manufactured. Pure bullshit. From the people that make up data or don’t publish in real journals, more chemophobia. The table was a soil test template festooned with made-up values by Moms Across America, a twisted group of food fearmongers that used the falsified data to stoke alarm among consumers.  I

Dr. Don Huber - Time to Recant

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Huber's Mystery Organism In January of 2011 Dr. Don M. Huber, formerly of Purdue University, wrote a warning letter to US Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.  He wrote of a dangerous organism, new to science, that had invaded U.S. agriculture.  It destroyed crops, killed livestock, and caused tremendous harm to human health. It was directly linked to genetically engineered crops and the herbicide Roundup. In November of 2013 I watched him speak to an audience of concerned people that audibly gasped when he showed pictures of the organism's devastating effects. People shook their heads in disgust.  At the same meeting I offered to sequence the DNA of the new organism he had isolated, only to have him say that it was already being done by collaborators in China and that it would be published shortly.  Then he said that it had no genetic material.  He was not counting on someone to be in the audience that could call him on his bullshit.  Almost eight years after his