Do what you need to do. I enjoy posting here, but right now cannot afford to donate. In fact, my wife is talking about going back to ’employment’ (she works plenty now) which would mean my grandson goes to the PICs. I do NOT want that.

Whatever is wrong with GM is a scientific, technological problem—not a political one—it can be solved only by technology, by value discovery thru the price mechanism, and thru the spontaneous order of the free market.

In Defense of “Frankenfood”

Government intervention in the markets in new products once again creates a grotesque alliance of regulators and big business in alliance against the interest of both potential customers and potential competitors–stifling innovation in return for business cartelization. With big agribusiness, environmentalists, and government bodies all potentially on the same page, the GM food revolution could be stymied. And any such regulatory barriers are roadblocks to a well-fed planet.

They call GM foods “Frankenfoods,” these enviro enemies of a fertile and well-fed globe. The stereotypical enemies of Frankenstein– the out-of-control mob storming over the land with torches and pitchforks–are not exactly a symbol of reason and logic. In that sense, the enviros’ loaded rhetorical attack term is valuable. But it says more about them than it does about the beneficial products of human ingenuity they want to destroy.

Ecology/Environmental Social Religion

Ecology as a social principle condemns cities, culture, industry, technology, the intellect, and advocates men’s return to “nature,” to the state of grunting subanimals digging the soil with their bare hands.

An Asian peasant who labors through all of his waking hours, with tools created in Biblical times—a South American aborigine who is devoured by piranha in a jungle stream—an African who is bitten by the tsetse fly—an Arab whose teeth are green with decay in his mouth—these do live with their “natural environment,” but are scarcely able to appreciate its beauty.

Try to tell a Chinese mother, whose child is dying of cholera: “Should one do everything one can? Of course not, that is nature’s way.”

Try to tell a Venezuelan housewife, who trudges miles on foot in sweltering weather in order to spend hours standing in line at a state store dispensing food rations, that America is defiled by shopping centers, expressways and family cars.

In Western Europe, in the preindustrial Middle Ages, man’s life expectancy was 30 years. In the nineteenth century, Europe’s population grew by 300 percent—which is the best proof of the fact that for the first time in human history, industry gave the great masses of people a chance to survive.

If it were true that a heavy concentration of industry is destructive to human life, one would find life expectancy declining in the more advanced countries. But it has been rising steadily. Here are the figures on life expectancy in the United States (from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company):

1900
47.3 years
1920
53 years
1940
60 years
1970
71 years
2013
79 years

Anyone over 30 years of age today, should give a resounding Thank you! to the nearest, grimiest, sootiest, smokestacks he can find.

The dinosaur and its fellow-creatures vanished from this earth long before there were any industrialists or any men. But this did not end life on earth. Contrary to the ecologists, nature does not stand still and does not maintain the kind of “equilibrium” that guarantees the survival of any particular species—least of all the survival of her greatest and most fragile product: man.

Amid all the propaganda of the ecologists—amidst all their appeals to nature and pleas for “harmony with nature”—there is no discussion of man’s needs and the requirements of his survival. Man is treated as if he were an unnatural phenomenon. Man cannot survive in the kind of state of nature that the ecologists envision—i.e., on the level of sea urchins or polar bears.

In order to survive, man has to discover and produce everything he needs, which means that he has to alter his background and adapt it to his needs. Nature has not equipped him for adapting himself to his background in the manner of animals. From the most primitive cultures to the most advanced civilizations, man has had to manufacture things; his well-being depends on his success at production.

The lowest human tribe cannot survive without that alleged source of pollution: fire. The ecologists are the new vultures swarming to extinguish that fire.

Without machines and technology, the task of mere survival is a terrible, mind-and-body-wrecking ordeal. In “nature,” the struggle for food, clothing and shelter consumes all of a man’s energy and spirit; it is a losing struggle—the winner is any flood, earthquake or swarm of locusts. (Consider the 500,000 bodies left in the wake of a single flood in Pakistan; they had been men who lived without technology.) To work only for bare necessities is a luxury that mankind cannot afford.

The the issue of pollution is the greatest crusade of the New Left activists, now that they’ve stop protesting the wars. Just as peace was not their goal or motive in that crusade, so clean air is not their goal or motive in this one. The goal is rent seeking, profligately distributed loot, and the destruction of the free market so that the power of central planners is preserved and increased.

The immediate goal is obvious: the destruction of the remnants of capitalism in today’s mixed economy, and the establishment of a global dictatorship. This goal is not a conspiracy, it is clearly stated all the time in speeches and books on the subject. The New Left states explicitly that the ecological crusade is a means to that end.

In addition to the accusations that “Capitalism leads you to the poorhouse” and “Capitalism leads you to war,” the New Left has added: “Capitalism defiles the beauty of your countryside,” . Collectivists are always finding problems, and always they propose the same solution. Prohibit and hamper the free market. Enlarge and set free the global dictatorship.

City smog and filthy rivers are not good for men (though they are not the kind of danger that the ecological panic-mongers proclaim them to be). This is a scientific, technological problem—not a political one—and it can be solved only by technology. Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death.

Given the alternatives, GM crops are good for the environment

Fighting pests with genes is better than fighting them with sprays. Growing genetically modified crops commercially is better for the environment and greatly reduces pollution.

It’s good to have choices though. Countries such as France and Austria, which are opposed to GM crops, will provide a means to compare results between using and not using GM crops.

So far, opposition to GM crops has been counter-productive for the environment where it is prohibited as well as harmful to the economy and the consumer. It leaves areas that don’t use them more reliant on pesticides than other parts of the world.

For instance, where GM potatoes are not planted, they require spraying with fungicides up to 15 times a season. Each spraying costs money, burns diesel, compacts soil and kills innocent fungal bystanders. Breeding blight-resistant potatoes the old fashioned way has proved difficult. By the time it is achieved, the blight is already immune to the resistance.

In areas doing it the GM way, it has proved straightforward and beneficial. Techniques developed at Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich for example, and promise stronger and longer resistance, because it is possible to introduce a cassette of several resistance genes.

These genes come from wild plants that are in the same genus as the potato, which disposes of one source of opposition — that it’s an unnatural cross. The new GM variety probably could have been developed years earlier if the ecophobics had not driven so much of that kind of ground-breaking research away from Public Labs and into secret corporate laboratories.

The phrase “genetic modification” is getting harder to define. It used to mean bringing genes in from other species, but now the question arises, what about when genes are brought in from a species in the same genus (as in the potato example)?

Or, as will increasingly be the case, when existing genes within the crop species are edited rather than replaced? And why do the complex regulations about GM not apply to plants whose genes have been deliberately but randomly modified by gamma rays, as has happened to many common “non-GM” and even organic varieties?

Organic bean sprouts killed 51 people in one E coli outbreak in Germany in 2011. GM food has neverkilled anyone so far. There’s simply no way to argue with a straight face, after billions of GM meals have been eaten all round the world, that the technology is a threat to our health and a matter of life and death.

Purple tomatoes, rich in anti-cancer agents, have been created in Norwich, but they will only be grown and sold in Canada, because in England, GM’s health benefits are denied to consumers thanks to green authoritarianism.

The need for genetic modification grows ever more urgent. The EU, in thrall to the mad precautionary principle — which argues for weighing the risks but not the benefits of innovation — is gradually outlawing many effective agro-chemicals used against weeds such as black grass, insects such as aphids and fungi such as yellow rust, all of which threaten the yields of wheat crops on a massive scale.

Wheat farmers are facing a galloping yellow-rust crisis as resistance spreads and the armoury of allowed treatments shrinks. GM rust-resistant varieties of wheat are still five years away at the earliest, because that’s how long it takes to get regulatory approval.

Elsewhere in the world, where GM crops can be grown that are resistant to pests, the butterflies, bees and birds are back in the fields in bigger numbers. When the pest resistance is inside the plant, only pests encounter it. It likewise makes no sense to ban neonicotinoid insecticides, after a year of increasing bee numbers, because the alternatives are even more damaging, and externally applied, pyrethroids.

GM is a technology that is safe for human health, better for the environment, more effective than the alternative and economically beneficial to consumers and farmers. Let the French ban instead, and then see what benefits, if any this ban brings to them.

The opposition to GM crops is chiefly motivated by dislike of corporate “control” of seeds. This is a meaningless cause, since the companies that supply GM seeds, also supply non-GM seeds. Not to mention their oligarchy over big items like tractors and small items like waterproof boots.

If there is proof that GM crops are causing problems, lets organize a campaign and deal with the issues one at a time and actually solve a problem. What’s now occurring, is heavy-handed and expensive compliance regimes are erected, which means only large corporations can afford to apply for approval for GM crops. Thus a circular argument is made to revolve around and around. Only secretive oligarchs develop and sell GM seeds. So lets increase the rules to ensure it will always be the case, that only secretive oligarchs will be able to produce and distribute GM seeds.

Most recently, the EU’s zeal to block GM crops, has includeda disgraceful campaign against the non-profit, humanitarian project in support of vitamin-A-rich “golden” rice.

This rice could prevent the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children each year from vitamin-A deficiency diseases. These world spanning governing bodies like the EU and the UN are making Goldman Sachs look like Mother Theresa by comparison.

In America, the GM market destroyers appear to be gaining ground. Two counties in Oregon have just banned GM crops, requiring all trace of them to be removed within a year. Once again, the reason turns out to be plunder. Those in the know say the big green philanthropic bodies in the USA are showing “donor fatigue” on the issue of climate change. Not one to miss out on a free lunch, Big Green has begun changing its message to push other buttons in its search for more funds. The lingering concern of people that “they are doing things to our food” is just one of those buttons.

There is probably nothing worse than making it so only a handful of companies can produce our food anymore. When there’s no longer any free market and chance of competition. What’s to stop giant crony corporations from doing whatever they want to our food?

In short, the campaign against GM is based on no new science suggesting environmental or health risks. It’s simply a cynical movement addicted to scaremongering the gullible to shake down and handcuff the market while looting new sources of new funds.

There are now 17 million farmers growing GM crops in 28 countries, on 12 per cent of the world’s arable land. Let’s hope these Green Tyrants are unable to force this gene genie back into his bottle. And enable the PTB to bring back the days of hunger games and rampant starvation to large regions of the defenseless developing world.

FUUUUUUUUHHHHHHRRREEEEEEE… Oh Never Mind

Ron Paul suspects foul play in Scottish referendum

Proof Scottish Independence Vote Rigged? Alex Jones

How to build AK-47, AK-74, AKM vid tutorial

Prince George’s County MD corporal Allen and Hero Ignowski assault innocent man for filming them

Moscow cyclist survives a close call

Not sure of General Semantics’ branch or MOS. He’s the CO of Colonel Cathcart, Major Major, and Captain Yossarian. In charge of the FORCES OF LOGIC and ARMIES OF REASON’s major offensive to finally drop Catch-22, accept the unforced error, and get on with The Game.

According to Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, which is base on GS, the core dysfunctional philosophies in a person’s evaluative emotional and behavioral belief system, are also very likely to contribute to unrealistic, arbitrary and crooked inferences and distortions in thinking.

REBT therefore first teaches that when people in an insensible and devout way overuse absolutistic, dogmatic and rigid “shoulds”, “musts”, and “oughts”, they tend to disturb and upset themselves.

Regarding cognitive-affective-behavioral processes in mental functioning and dysfunctioning:

“REBT assumes that human thinking, emotion, and action are not really separate or disparate processes, but that they all significantly overlap and are rarely experienced in a pure state.

Much of what we call emotion is nothing more nor less than a certain kind — a biased, prejudiced, or strongly evaluative kind — of thought. But emotions and behaviors significantly influence and affect thinking, just as thinking influences emotions and behaviors.

Evaluating is a fundamental characteristic of human organisms and seems to work in a kind of closed circuit with a feedback mechanism: First, perception biases response, and then response tends to bias subsequent perception. Also, prior perceptions appear to bias subsequent perceptions, and prior responses appear to bias subsequent responses. What we call feelings almost always have a pronounced evaluating or appraisal element.”

REBT proposes that many of these self-defeating cognitive, emotive and behavioral tendencies are both innately biological and indoctrinated early on and throughout life, and further grow stronger as a person continually revisits, clings and acts on them.

In both REBT and general semantics it is demonstrated the central role of irrational beliefs in self-defeating tendencies, as a significant modern influence on this thinking.

REBT focuses on changing the current evaluations and philosophical thinking-emoting and behaving in relation to themselves, others, and to the conditions under which you currently live.

Psychological dysfunction
One of the main pillars of REBT is that irrational and dysfunctional ways and patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving are contributing to human disturbance and emotional and behavioral self-defeatism and social defeatism. REBT generally teaches that when people turn flexible preferences, desires and wishes into grandiose, absolutistic and fatalistic dictates, this tends to contribute to disturbance and upsetness.

There are three core beliefs or philosophies that humans tend to disturb themselves through:

1 “I absolutely MUST, under practically all conditions and at all times, perform well (or outstandingly well) and win the approval (or complete love) of significant others. If I fail in these important—and sacred—respects, that is awful and I am a bad, incompetent, unworthy person, who will probably always fail and deserves to suffer.”

1B Holding this belief when faced with adversity tends to contribute to feelings of anxiety, panic, depression, despair, and worthlessness.

2 “Other people with whom I relate or associate, absolutely MUST, under practically all conditions and at all times, treat me nicely, considerately and fairly. Otherwise, it is terrible and they are rotten, bad, unworthy people who will always treat me badly and do not deserve a good life and should be severely punished for acting so abominably to me.”

2BHolding this belief when faced with adversity tends to contribute to feelings of anger, rage, fury, and vindictiveness.

3 “The conditions under which I live absolutely MUST, at practically all times, be favorable, safe, hassle-free, and quickly and easily enjoyable, and if they are not that way it’s awful and horrible and I can’t bear it. I can’t ever enjoy myself at all. My life is impossible and hardly worth living.”

3B Holding this belief when faced with adversity tends to contribute to frustration and discomfort, intolerance, self-pity, anger, depression, and to behaviors such as procrastination, avoidance, and inaction.

REBT commonly posits that at the core of irrational beliefs there often are explicit or implicit rigid demands and commands, and that extreme derivatives like awfulizing, frustration intolerance, people deprecation and over-generalizations are accompanied by these.

T-rex of dinosaur comics discusses General Semantics.

got damn General Semanticist

Buckminister Fuller lecture on semantics at San Quentin Prison

The Tyranny of Words
http://archiv.zeitgeistmovement-frankfurt.de/dokumente/Chase,%20Stuart%20-%20Tyranny%20Of%20Words.pdf

Illustration:
Economics wanders in a veritable jungle of abstract terms. Here is a sample of the flora:

land
labour
capital; capitalism
rent
wages; the iron law of wages
purchasing power
production; distribution
interest; the long-term interest rate
profit the profit system
money: the gold standard
credit; debt; savings; securities
inflation; deflation; reflation
value; wealth
the law of diminishing returns
the entrepreneur
the economic man
free competition; the free market
the law of supply and demand
cost; income
price levels
marginal utility
monopoly; the trusts
property
individualism; business
socialism; public ownership
the consumer; the producer
the standard of living
planning

Some of these terms are useful short cuts provided one does not objectify them. But if one employs them without being conscious of abstracting, they acquire a fictitious existence. Some have no discoverable referents. ‘Value’, for instance, is as elusive as ‘the Omnipotent’.

Some have referents very difficult to locate: ‘capitalism’, ‘individualism’, ‘inflation’, ‘credit’, ‘money’, ‘business’. Some have referents easier to locate, provided one makes the effort to find them.

To illustrate the possible confusion, a General Semanticist might prepare a list of nearly meaningless questions in economics:

1. Does capital produce wealth?
2. Is the consumer more important than the producer?
3. What is a reasonable profit?
4. Is man by nature co-operative or competitive?
5. Is fascism a kind of capitalism?
6. What is a classless society?
7. What is the American standard of living?
8. Are capital and labour partners?
9. Are we headed for inflation?
10. Is decentralization better than centralization?

Aristotlean Logicians are likely not up to the task of defining all these terms and answering all these question satisfactorily. Binary logic of course continues to occupy the primary position in rational thought. But it becomes clearer that facility with something like General Semantics is needed to deal with all the complexity and ambiguity that has arisen in our modern culture.

THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY

The world is what it is. We can make all kinds of maps and models of how the world works, and some of them can be very useful, and we can talk about them with great benefit. But the models and maps and any words we put together can never do more than approximate the actual world or the actual phenomena being examined. The actual territory is beyond verbal description.

As humans we make abstractions all the time. An “abstraction”, is any mind creation that simplifies, condenses, or symbolizes what is going on in order to better talk about it or think about it.

Watching these videos of cops inappropriately interacting with motorists helps us better understand what world we really inhabit. Even if we aren’t able to categorize this footage with the usual pre-fabricated abstractions.

Having seen these videos, now when we drive down the street, and experience events taking place. We become more acutely aware that our perceptions in themselves constitute an abstraction.

Because we’ve seen horrendous things that have no words, or have only inadequate words. We better empathize with different people who might experience the same events differently, depending on where they perceive it from and how their perceptions work.

We absorb the new sensory data by adjusting our notions of what is science and what is sanity. We now know any verbal description will never be more than a portion of what went on, passed through certain filters of perception. And in so doing we enter a new realm of freedom.

We know we will record certain sights, sounds, feelings and so forth, which will form our representations of any given event. I might then start describing what I experienced and that will abstract it further. I could say “I saw two cars, a blue Ford going west and a green Honda going east, and the blue car was going to turn left, but then the green car swerved out of its way and hit it”.

My description of a Russian dashcam video might give somebody else an idea of what went on, but really it is a very imprecise approximation of what I actually perceived, which is again an imprecise approximation of what actually went on. The next day I might create a further abstraction by simply saying that I saw “an unbelieveable accident” on the internet the other day.

If somebody took my verbal description of this accident as WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED, then all kinds of mistakes might come out of that. But if one always realizes that it is only a map, and that different maps might be drawn for the same territory, then it becomes much easier to reconcile differences.

Continuing to live and thrive in the world of science and sanity, regardless of what new sensory data we are exposed to, is a competitive advantage. Whatever one can say about something isn’t it. Whatever you can say about a computer keypad is NOT a computer keypad. The computer keypad is what it is, something fundamentally unspeakable. IF that is recognized, IF we remain scientific and sane, then language, models, and new technologies are of couse very useful in daily life.

INFINITE-VALUED LOGIC

In the old world of Greece. And even in the recent world of Fred Reed’s high school days. All that was needed was binary logic. Aristotelean logic was the most common two-valued logic. Back then, this meant that any proposition is either “right” or “wrong”.

This goes together with “elementalism” which is the placing of sharp divisions between things. For example, to talk about ’emotion’ and ‘intellect’ as being fundamentally different and separate things.

This species of Heinleinian logic is infinite-valued and non-elementalistic. The “non-elementalistic” means that there are no finite identifications of what things ARE, or sharp divisions between what different things ARE.

Infinite-valued means that any proposition is best examined in degrees of qualities or probabilities.

For example, if I want to choose between going to the movies or staying home, I can add up the different factors involved. If I go to the movies I might experience something new, and looking in the paper I might add up the probability for seeing a good movie. But also I have to go out in the traffic, which is crawling with cops on patrol and deadly careening clovers.

Going out means I have to spend some money which I have a limited amount of. If I stay home, I save time and money, and there is a probability that I can relax more, but I might also get bored. Adding up all these factors as to how probable it is that they are pleasurable, easy, economical, new, or whatever my criteria are, would add up to a decision taken based on infinity-valued logic.

Under infinite-values, no answer, model, action, or person is simply “right” or “wrong”. There are always many factors involved. Some pull in one direction, some pull in another. One would look at all those factors, look at their relationships, and add up the maximum probability for whatever one is looking for, and make one’s choice based on that.

This infinity-valued principle applies in many different areas. For example, Heinlein’s prose demonstrates the “multi-ordinality” of terms. That means that words don’t just have one right meaning. Words and symbols have different meanings to different people, and different meanings in different contexts. A word or sentence in itself doesn’t necessarily say anything finite, unless you find out what it is linked up with.

Heinlein also creates stories about infinity-valued causality. That is, we can’t just finitely say that one specific thing is causing another. Any event has many “causes” and many “effects”. We have to take it all into consideration if we wish to claim to examine the whole situation.

What Heinlein envisioned in his novels with his use of Korzybski’s General Semantics was that people could be trained in relating to the world in more fluid infinity-valued ways so that we can avoid all the human aberrations and misunderstandings that come out of taking limited maps too seriously.

Most disagreements, arguments, fights, and wars come out of the failure to recognize all factors, all views, and from relying on maps of reality that don’t correspond to what is actually going on. People argue based on their own maps and fail to realize that others use different maps. When that gets cleared up and together we look at reality, then most conflicts evaporate.

The Utopia of Heinlein exists entirely within ourselves. We can integrate the benefits of having experienced the trips to the stars he described into our life philosophy, even before we build a single permanent outpost outside the Earth’s gravity well.

SEMANTIC REACTIONS

The human mind includes mechanisms that are part of the problem. Heinlein portrayed many ‘semantic reactions’ in his stories, which is when one reacts based on the consciously or sub-consciously perceived “meaning” of an event, rather than based on the event itself.

For example, Mannie comes home from work and gives his wife flowers and she gets angry with him. She might assume that he gives her flowers because he has something to hide and it really means that he is having an affair, and she gets mad because of that. Maybe Mannie just wanted to be nice, or there was a sale on flowers.

Semantic reactions sometimes make it difficult to have rational and constructive interactions between people.

Each of us training ourselves to recognize and overcome semantic reactions in ourselves and others, could form the basis of more sane and rational interactions and activities between consenting voluntaryist people.

See Alfred Korzybski: “Science and Sanity – an introduction to non-aristotelean systems and general semantics”: International Society for General Semantics: for more on this subject.

unconstitutional CHECKPOINT in DeKalb, Illinois. This was Illinois State Police. You won’t believe this! This guy will get you riled up good and proper. The Hero was unaware he was being recorded when he rips the driver’s door open. This happened on “Thank a police officer day” by the way.

Hmm-around closing time. Maybe trying to stir some shit up?