HuckleB
HuckleB's JournalAnd then we have the MSM, completely ignoring the science side of the equation, at times.
Here's a great example:
http://iwf.org/blog/2794833/New-York-Times-Hosts-Panel-on-Farming,-Forgets-to-Invite-Farmers
The problem is the lack of justification for labeling.
Further, the labeling movement really developed out of the organic industry's dishonest attempts to cause fear about GMOs.
What's odd to me, is how blatantly dishonest the anti-GMO crowd has been in its attempts to foment fear, and yet so few people actually stop and ask themselves, "Wow! These claims are really big claims! Maybe I should look into the reality, because things are almost never this black and white?"
A good piece on labeling:
http://fafdl.org/blog/2014/08/16/a-principled-case-against-mandatory-gmo-labels/
And then there's the costs of labeling:
http://dyson.cornell.edu/people/profiles/docs/LabelingNY.pdf
GMOS: AN INTRODUCTION (another worthy resource on the issue)
http://fafdl.org/gmobb/gmos-an-introduction/Do you really understand modern farming? Urbanite examines 10 myths of GMOs and organics
http://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2014/09/04/do-you-really-understand-modern-farming-urbanite-examines-10-myths-of-gmos-and-organics/This is a fair review of the topic, overall.
Give Food Babe An Inch... (How She Scams Companies And The Public)
http://www.thefarmersdaughterusa.com/2014/08/give-food-babe-inch.html?m=1From Poison to Passion: The Secret History of the Tomato
http://modernfarmer.com/2014/09/poison-pleasure-secret-history-tomato/"...
The Civil War was a tomato game-changer. Canneries boomed, filling contracts to feed the Union army. Tomatoes, which grew quickly and held up well during the canning process, rose to the occasion. After the war, demand for canned products grew, with more tomatoes being canned than any other vegetable. And this meant more farmers needed to grow them.
Cherry, pear, and egg-shaped tomatoes were common at the time, but larger tomatoes tended to be lumpy and ridged. Enter Alexander Livingston. Livingston, who had a serious green thumb from an early age, began a seed company in 1850. The first tomatoes he ever encountered grew wild, he wrote in Livingston and the Tomato, and his mother told him they were poison: “Even the hogs will not eat them.” But the colorful, misshapen fruits enchanted Livingston.
“There was not in the United States at the time an acre of tomatoes from which a bushel of uniformly smooth tomatoes could be gathered,” Livingston said of the tomato scene in the 1860s. Livingston introduced his initial groundbreaking hybrid tomato, the Paragon, in 1870. He called it “the first perfectly and uniformly smooth tomato ever introduced to the American Public.” Before Livingston, breeders would plant the seeds of promising-looking individual fruits. Livingston took the entire plant into account and grew out hundreds of seeds from plants he deemed had potential.
...
The twenty-odd varieties of Livingston’s tomatoes still available in seed form today are considered heirlooms. For non-gardening or farming consumers yearning to forge an emotional connection with the produce they buy, the term “heirloom” can conjure up images of pristine plants springing fully formed from a pastoral field. Despite the cuddly name, heirloom plants are the result of applied scientific method. And despite our love of the gorgeous red orbs, it’s interesting to consider why Livingston felt we needed perfectly round tomatoes in the first place. This quest endures in our own times, as the desire to produce an intersection of high yield, year-round availability, long shelf life, eye appeal, and something remotely resembling flavor — one tomato to rule them all — has accelerated into a tomato-breeding arms race.
..."
I found it interesting, anyway.
In Defense of the Pumpkin Spice Latte
A chemist defends the lack of pumpkin in fall's favorite drink
http://time.com/3264103/pumpkin-spice-latte-chemistry/
"...
Pumpkin spice flavoring, instead, has natural and artificial flavors. What are those, exactly, and why is there no pumpkin?
Kantha Shelke, a food scientist with a background in organic chemistry and spokesperson for the Institute of Food Technologists, gets questions like this all the time. “This conversation about chemicals in food requires a certain amount of responsibility, which I think some of these elitist writers and bloggers and speakers have somehow forgotten,” she says of the backlash against pumpkin spice flavoring. “I think it’s very irresponsible to be ignorant to such a level as to lead others astray and tell them to eat chemical-free food.” After all, she says, water and salt are chemicals.
So is the stuff in your PSL. There’s no pumpkin in it because it’s pumpkin spice, and not pumpkin, that’s the star. The coffee flavorings are designed to resemble cooked pumpkin spice: a blend of nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, and cloves. It’s supposed to taste like the spicy components of a homemade pumpkin pie, not actual pumpkin.
...
Despite her PR passion for chemicals, Shelke doesn’t drink flavored coffee. But that’s because she’s a bit of a flavor snob; her sense of smell is so good that she can tell which flavors are missing. When I ask Shelke for her review of the pumpkin spice latte, she admits she’s never tried one. “I cannot get past the aroma,” she admits, which to her smells far too rich. “I’m very puritanical in my approach.”
..."
I don't drink flavored coffee either, but, uh, the silly, baseless fear mongering has just got to stop!
It goes WAY back, but I grew up with Fishbone: Slow Bus Movin' (Howard Beach Party)
And, if you have a problem with the lyrics, well ...
that's your white honkey problem. (Oh, and I am a white honkey. And it is my problem.)
Lyrics:
Born in the 1940's, my parents couldn't vote
X and king was on a march for power true
Black power that is, panther's and their attitudes
Were fresh new business suits, yes, yeah, yeah
Stricken with determination to rise above the slave
The mayo men used firehoses
To spray the monkeys back in their cages
To spray the monkeys back in their cages
Round and around and around they go
The bus is goin' mighty slow
Brothers in the back seat come to the front
People gettin' hostile wanna kill someone
Well the overlords thought it would be a good idea
To mix the black with the white
But if you're a fly in the buttermilk they'll chase you all through the night
So go ahead and burn your cross and rape our women in the night
'Cause the tables are turned
When your cream coated daughter will be my wife
Round and around and around they go
The bus is goin' mighty slow
Brothers in the back seat come to the front
People gettin' hostile wanna kill someone
A little more valuable information for you:
From: http://fafdl.org/blog/2014/08/14/what-the-haters-got-wrong-about-neil-degrasse-tysons-comments-on-gmos/
"...
What we are talking about here is herbicide resistant crops, most notably Monsanto’s RoundUp Ready crops. These have been bred so that they don’t die when the herbicide RoundUp (glyphosate) is applied to the fields to kill weeds. The reason that RoundUp was chosen is that it is much more effective than other herbicides while being relatively non-toxic and easy on the environment IN COMPARISON to other herbicides. In fact, for acute toxicity, RoundUp is less toxic to mammals than table salt or caffeine. Again, this has to do with ‘mode of action’. The reason it is incredibly effective as an herbicide is also the reason it isn’t a poison to mammals.
Glyphosate works by inhibiting photosynthesis. For critters that don’t rely on photosynthesis, it is just another salt with the normal toxicity of salt (less than sodium chloride). If you are a plant that relies on photosynthesis for energy, it’s literally ‘lights out’.
So while use of glyphosate is up, use of other more problematic herbicides is down. It works so well that it allowed many farmers to adopt what is known as conservation tillage. Tillage is an important tool for controlling weeds. Prior to planting the farmer tills the soil to interrupt weeds which would cause problems during the growing season. While this may seem like a good way of avoiding using herbicides, it releases lots of carbon into the atmosphere, uses plenty of tractor fuel and cause problems with erosion and soil structure. The judicious use of a low environmental impact herbicide like glyphosate is often the environmentally friendlier strategy.
Consider this chart taken from the same study showing trace amounts of herbicides in air samples. Raise your hand if you’d like to return to the 1995 herbicide profile (keeping in mind that the category of ‘other herbicides’ that have fallen out of favor, nearly universally had a higher environmental impact).
..."
There are some very important bottom lines in this piece. Please read it. Thanks!
The history of the science knowledge of the matter is often ignored by that trope.
Not that said trope has anything to do with the six conspiracies listed in the OP.
Tobacco and the global lung cancer epidemic
http://med.stanford.edu/biostatistics/abstract/RobertProctor_paper1.pdf
Regarding the “science made mistakes” tropes? Debunked by real science
http://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/regarding-science-mistakes-tropes-debunked/
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