Category Archive: These Are The Crazy Years

Damn it, another day, yet another fucking idiot to make fun of.

Last week, a Native American botanist argued that the genetic modification of crops is a form of rape. Perhaps the next step in the #MeToo movement involves returning to the low crop yields before the Green Revolution, which saved billions of lives by making food more available through genetic modification, among other things.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist, member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at SUNY-Syracuse, called corn “one of our deepest and oldest relatives.” In an interview with Wisconsin Public Radio, she humanized corn as the “Corn Mother,” saying, “Corn is sacred because she gives us her children in return for protecting us.”

Kimmerer wasn’t talking about the sweet corn Americans love to eat today, but rather the Native corn that comes in hundreds of varieties. She contrasted this wild corn with the genetically modified corn her neighbor grows.

“There’s a word for forcible injection of unwanted genes,” Kimmerer said. “Rape.”

There’s also a word for people who try to anthropomorphize non-sentient plants:  Fucking idiots.

OK, that’s a phrase, not a word, but same difference.

We eat well today, and so does much of the rest of the world — including the shitholes that used to bury millions who suffered and died from malnutrition and plain old starvation — mainly because of one man who sparked the Green Revolution mentioned above:  Norman Borlaug.

What blows my mind is that the whole idea of genmodding crops is only a step removed from the old ways of farming for greater yields, which involved things like culling, grafting, and selective breeding — all of which changed the genetic makeup of crops over thousands of years so that we actually have the non-GM crops we have today.

Wheat was just a grass.  Corn (maize) was also just a grass.  Vegetables we take for granted today like cauliflower, broccoli, and others of the family of Cruciferous vegetables, are all descended from the humble mustard plant.

And none of them got where they are today without someone — a lot of someones — selectively breeding them for desired qualities, including the size of the “ear”, that is, the seeds.  Wheat originally had little gluten content, but modern strains have lots of it.  Borlaug himself created high-yield strains of wheat by crossbreeding existing strains and combining their qualities — he might take one strain known to produce large ears, and another strain known to be resistant to some particular disease or fungus that was plaguing the first strain, and combine them until he had a new strain that had both large ears and disease resistance.

Genmod simply takes the ancient practices and goes a little deeper.  We get things like golden rice that way, which saves millions of Third World children from vitamin A deficiencies and prevents them from going blind.  We also get wheat that is resistant to stem rust that way.

So as the article continues,

Wisconsin Public Radio noted that the sweet corn “has been altered by agribusiness,” but the article did not mention the role genetically modified corn has played in the Green Revolution, which has been credited with saving 1 billion lives and averting the doomsday prediction of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb.

[snip]

The Green Revolution combined genetic modification with new fertilizers and agro-chemicals, controlled water supply, and new mechanical cultivation. These new methods may strike an advocate for native practices as strange or even barbaric, but they saved more than a billion people across the world.

Those who wish to see corn as a sacred “Corn Mother” represent a return to the ancient animistic view of the world. Treating plants as sentient beings may sound hip and “progressive,” but Kimmerer’s rejection of genetic modification is backward, and it could be dangerous. Would she really want to reverse the Green Revolution and bring back pre-modern levels of starvation?

Well, I don’t know, but she sure sounds like she would.  There sure isn’t any going back without condemning millions of people to starvation and death.

People with this level of Luddism and idiocy are dangerous, and really need to be removed from positions of influence and authority before they do actual harm.  Sadly, they’ll probably stay right where they are for years, and continue to sell their brand of stupid to successive classes of mush-for-brains college students.  We can only hope that they’ll shake it off in later life and realize how fortunate they are to live in a modern age where most of us don’t have to worry about food shortages, famine, and starving to death.

Sheila Jackson Lee, you are an idiot, a poseur, and a disgrace to the House of Representatives — insofar as anything can disgrace it further. You have proven you know nothing:

“I don’t know what else it takes but I don’t believe we can stop at the door of the United States House. I believe there will have to be an emergence of members of the House flooding the United States Senate for Senator McConnell to understand that these initiatives today, my gun storage bill, my bill that I’ve introduced dealing with the caliber weapon, I’ve held an AR-15 in my hand, I wish I had it. It is as heavy as 10 boxes that you might be moving and the bullet that is utilized, a .50-caliber, these kinds of bullets need to be licensed and do not need to be on the street.”

• An AR-15 is “as heavy as 10 boxes you might be moving.” What? Clearly Ms. Jackson Lee has never moved house by herself before. Or she’s talking about 10 shoeboxes. Or smaller.  (Someone in the comments to that linked article suggested 10 one-pound boxes of cocaine…which would still be about three pounds heavy.)
• The bullet “is a .50-caliber”. No. It’s a 5.56mm. .223 caliber if you really want to be a stickler.  Yeah, you can buy a .50cal upper for an AR-pattern weapon.  It doesn’t shoot the .50BMG like the Ma Deuce, it shoots .50 Beowulf, which is usually used as a feral hog cartridge, or so I’m told.  By and large, citizen owners of the AR-15 don’t have that mod, anyway, and aren’t interested in using it for home defense — I hope.
• Jackson Lee first calls whatever rifle she’s talking about “the caliber weapon”. This is like Carolyn McCarthy calling the AR’s folding stock “the shoulder thing that goes up.”

These stupid statements show that she knows nothing whatsoever about the firearm she is trying to ban. Which is pretty sad, when you get right down to it. Ignorance of these things shows that she is a knee-jerk statist gun banner who doesn’t care that the vast, vast, VAST majority of AR-15 rifles in private hands in this country have never been used for any illegal purpose. I mean, read this for more illogic and “must protect phoney baloney job” rhetoric:

“We’re at a domestic crisis and it’s toxic and it’s combined with hatred and besides the toxicity of hate, we have guns, and we cannot wait any longer,” she said. “We’re good people in Texas but we’re frightened and so what I’m hearing from people is they are frightened, that they believe they cannot live in this kind of status and definition of what Texas is.”

“We cannot wait any longer.” Right. Like Glenn Reynolds said after Sandy Hook,

“When people say things like ‘don’t let this moment pass without acting on gun control,’ what they’re really saying is our arguments are so unpersuasive that they can only succeed when people aren’t thinking clearly.”

And I’d like to see her get her Dumbs through the Senate’s sergeant at arms to “flood the Senate”. If I were Mitch McConnell, I’d have the Capitol Police up there ready to arrest any of them who try.

Citizens of Texas, you need to rid yourselves of this hideously stupid boil on the ass of the body politic. And that, soon.

And Ms. Jackson Lee?  Your constituents (and many other patriotic Americans) have long had a saying (though I have it on reliable authority that the Spartans said it first):  Come and take them.

We dare you.  Because we know you don’t have the guts to do it yourself, any more than Xerxes did at Thermopylae.