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Authoritarianism in the Age of Pseudoscience
Authoritarianism in the Age of Pseudoscience
Following the court decision in the US to award in favour of Dewayne Johnson (exposure to Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer and its active ingredient, glyphosate, caused Johnson to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma), attorney Robert Kennedy Jr said at the post-trial press conference:
The corruption of science, the falsification of science, and we saw all those things happen here. This is a company (Monsanto) that used all of the plays in the playbook developed over 60 years by the tobacco industry to escape the consequences of killing one of every five of its customers… Monsanto… has used those strategies…”
Johnson’s lawyers argued over the course of the month-long trial in 2018 that Monsanto had “fought science” for years and targeted academics who spoke up about possible health risks of the herbicide product.
Long before the Johnson case, critics of Monsanto were already aware of the practices the company had engaged in for decades to undermine science. At the same time, Monsanto and its lobbyists had called anyone who questioned the company’s ‘science’ as engaging in pseudoscience and labelled them ‘anti-science’.
We need look no further than the current coronavirus issue to understand how vested interests are set to profit by spinning the crisis a certain way and how questionable science is again being used to pursue policies that are essentially ‘unscientific’ – governments, the police and the corporate media have become the arbiters of ‘truth’.
We also see anyone challenging the policies and the ‘science’ being censored on social media or not being given a platform on TV and accused of engaging in ‘misinformation’. It’s the same old playbook.
The case-fatality ratio for COVID-19 is so low as to make the lockdown response wholly disproportionate. Yet we are asked to blindly accept government narratives and the policies based on them.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
A fixed meat ration is not the path to sustainable food systems
A fixed meat ration is not the path to sustainable food systems
“We should eat less meat in order to save the planet”, has almost become a dogma. There is no doubt that industrial animal production is harmful for animals and nature. But the framing of the path to a sustainable agriculture system in terms of how many grams of potatoes, wheat and meat per day we should eat is to start in the wrong end of the stick. Instead we should focus our interest into the transition to a sustainable and regenerative food and agriculture system. Such a system would exclude or substantially reduce those foods which are wasteful regardless if those are eggs from caged hens or asparagus flown from one side of the globe to the other. With the right design animals, especially ruminants such as cattle, sheep and goats, can be companions in this transition rather than a problem.
The article Options for keeping the food system within environmental limitspublished in Nature 10 October 2018 has the following key messages according to the lead author, Marco Springmann:
- Climate change cannot be sufficiently mitigated without dietary changes towards more plant-based diets. Adopting more plant-based “flexitarian” diets globally could reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of the food system by more than half, and also reduce other environmental impacts, such as those from fertilizer application and the use of cropland and freshwater, by a tenth to a quarter.
- In addition to dietary changes, improving management practices and technologies in agriculture is required to limit pressures on agricultural land, freshwater extraction, and fertilizer use.
- Finally, halving food loss and waste is needed for keeping the food system within environmental limits.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
