Category Archive: These Are The Crazy Years

Six weeks out and falling fast

Categories:

General Curmudgeonry, Perversity of Humanity, These Are The Crazy Years

Wednesday, 23 September 2020 17:13

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When your governor is too stupid to realize why his polling numbers are dropping like a stone, only six weeks out from the election:

of course he extends the useless, illegal, and unconstitutional mask mandate once again.  (Chart from Wikipedia.)

I keep hearing that outside of Indianapolis, stores are removing the directional arrows, opening closed entrances, and aren’t stopping people without masks from entering. Sooner or later, everyone in Indianapolis will be ignoring the governor, too. And looking to vote for one of his two opponents.

I will not cast a vote for this clown again. He will not be missed. And who knows, we might end up with a Libertarian governor. Rainwater is trending up faster than Myers is. I think we’ve got ourselves a real three-way contest, for once, and all because our sitting governor is a statist moron.

You would think the state GOP would have warned him off doing this.  But they’re morons, too.

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Hubris, meet Nemesis

Categories:

Democrats Own Defeat, General Curmudgeonry, Progressive Derangement, These Are The Crazy Years

Tuesday, 22 September 2020 12:36

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It’s being pointed out elsewhere, and has been ever since last Friday, but there is a plain and simple fact that the Democrats choose to ignore:

Ginsburg could have retired under Obama prior to the 2014 election, and easily been replaced by a young Progressive female jurist who could have served 30-40 years.

Her hubris was such — and so was that of the Democrats — that all she had to do was hang in till Hillary was elected in 2016, then retire, etc.  Because even after the GOP took the Senate back in 2014, history suggests they would have approved an Obama appointee without a whole lot of fuss after a Democrat won in 2016.  He might have had to appoint someone a little less progressive than he would have liked, and they would have had to wait until the smoke cleared from the election, but overall, he could have locked that seat in for a couple of generations at minimum.  (There’s precedent to approve a presidential nomination after that president goes out of office, so his nominee could potentially have been approved under a Hillary Clinton presidency, even if actual history shows McConnell felt it was important to wait and not hold hearings on Merrick Garland until after the 2016 election because a) Obama was a lame duck, and b) his party did not hold the Senate, which two items in combination have never resulted in a Supreme Court nomination by the lame duck president being approved.)

Moreover, her hubris was such that she believed she could roll the dice one more time on her cancer and beat it until after the 2020 election, while in the meantime doing the American public a disservice by remaining in office when she was unable to fulfill her duties.

Her nemesis was Donald Trump.  And even without Trump, as soon as Hillary became the nominee, there was no way in hell Mitch McConnell was going to let Obama and Hillary have their way on a Supreme Court nomination before the election.  And holding the Senate majority made that possible, and not only possible, but historically inevitable.

In addition, Trump holds a position Obama did not — he’s not a lame duck, and his party controls the Senate.  And because Harry Reid destroyed the filibuster in 2013 — something Mitch McConnell warned him would come back around and bite the Democrats in the ass — seven short years later, Trump is going to get another Supreme Court appointment whether he gets re-elected or not.  Because if you don’t think the GOP majority in the Senate is not being kept closely apprised of the debate over who will eventually be nominated, and won’t be willing to hold perfunctory hearings and rubber-stamp whoever Trump ends up nominating, you have another think coming.  Because if I were Trump (and I think he’s smarter than me when it comes to this sort of thing), I’d be on the phone to McConnell two or three times a day discussing how this is going to work.

Collusion?  You bet your ass.  But all-American collusion, the kind Barry and Hills don’t know how to do because they’re too busy chumming up to international socialists and plotting how to take America down a notch or twenty.

In the end, this really shouldn’t even be a question of politics.  The Supreme Court has become far too important, which threatens the stability of the three-cornered government the Framers created, in which three co-equal branches did their assigned thing and cooperated in order to maintain the stability and well-being of the Republic.  You could make the case that Marbury vs. Madison threw that out the window only 14 years after the Constitution was ratified, when John Marshall his own bad self decided that the Court had the power of review over what the other two branches do.  In retrospect, John Marshall probably should have been taken out and hanged from the nearest convenient lamppost along with his concurring brethren, because that supposed power appears nowhere in the Constitution and was created entirely out of whole cloth by Marshall.  And it turned the Court into a political wrecking ball, which has only gotten bigger and heavier and worse ever since, what with justices and even judges in inferior courts legislating from the bench in a manner that was never envisioned by the Framers.

If not for the tension between the Executive and the Legislature that has existed for more years than I like to think about, the Court would not be important, and wouldn’t be something that could be put in play as it has been at least since Reagan nominated Robert Bork — a massively-qualified legal mind beaten to death by Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden, and the rest of the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee.  (Although it may have been just as well — some of his statements toward the end of his life suggested to me that he might have become a squish like Anthony Kennedy.)

In the end, though, it comes down to the fact that Ginsburg lacked sufficient humility to understand that in politics, nothing is either permanent or certain, and that she should have had the grace and sense to retire at a reasonable point after her first pancreatic cancer diagnosis in 2009, and let Obama replace her with a Democrat while he had the ability and his party held the majority in the Senate to do that.

That she followed whence her hubris led her, well, sucks to be the Democrats, right now.  As Omar Khayyám memorably put it,

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”

History is history, bitches.  You can’t change it.  Not a moment of it.  And nobody can predict the future.

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Blame yourselves, commies.

Categories:

Democrats Own Defeat, HopeNChange!, Progressive Derangement, These Are The Crazy Years

Saturday, 19 September 2020 10:45

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Democrats, socialists, communists, and progressives (but I repeat myself repeatedly) are now screaming, in the wake of the RBG…er…RPG that’s been fired into their ranks, that the Senate must not consider any Supreme Court nomination before the election.  They base this off Cocaine Mitch’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s last attempt to nominate a Supreme Court justice just prior to Obama going out of office in January 2017.  But the situation is completely different.

  • First of all, the obvious:  Trump, not currently term-limited as Obama was, may (probably will, at this point, but don’t get cocky) be re-elected.  So why wait to fill the vacancy?
  • Second, we may need that vacancy filled stat, if the election is close enough — close enough for the Democrats, et al., to cheat, that is.
  • Third, the Democrats, et al., don’t have the votes to stop it.  They don’t (currently) control the Senate.  (Of course, they might be able to flip some GOP squishes, but the GOP squishes need to consider what their situation is going to be if Trump is re-elected.  Because after the election, Trump will have more flexibility (where have we heard that before?), and the squishes may find themselves out in the cold.  My attitude is the GOP stalwarts need to put some spine into the squishes…and make it clear that they’re going to be considered second-class senators without any support for anything they want for the next four years if they don’t get with the program.  If I were the GOP, I’d be laying plans to replace these assholes ASAP anyway.
  • Finally, if you think the Democrats wouldn’t take advantage of a situation like this, you’re smoking something funky and need to lay off the THC.

Quite frankly, if Trump is re-elected and doesn’t invoke the Insurrection Act immediately after, I’m going to be sorely disappointed.  But that’s another story and a post for another time.

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This fucking country has gone fucking bugnuts.

Categories:

General Curmudgeonry, Perennial Indignancy Watch, Perversity of Humanity, These Are The Crazy Years

Friday, 19 June 2020 10:16

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Exhibit A:

On Wednesday, Chicago-based Quaker Foods announced it would eliminate the Aunt Jemima brand of pancake mix and syrup in response to civil unrest and protests calling for racial equity across America sparked by the killing of George Floyd, a black man who died with his neck under the knee of a white Minnesota police officer.

Who the fuck actually becomes a racist because they eat Aunt Jemima pancakes with Aunt Jemima syrup on them?

Exhibit B:

B&G Foods, the maker of Cream of Wheat, announced Thursday that it would be reviewing the packaging of the longtime breakfast brand, the latest food company to do so after Quaker announced earlier in the week that it was retiring its Aunt Jemima logo because of its racist origins.

Again, who was prompted to become a racist because Cream of Wheat has a smiling black chef on the box?

I was going to add Exhibit C, the contretemps over Rice Crispies/Cocoa Puffs, but that got started by some idiot BLM activist who used to be a UK MP before she lost her seat over lying about a speeding ticket (see at bottom of the article), so technically not “this country”:

Onsanya was expelled from the Labour Party and lost her seat in 2019 after lying about a speeding ticket. She was jailed for the offence for three months.

Which is all you really need to know about that.

We’re down to complaints about how black people are portrayed (or not portrayed) on breakfast products.

Time to start treating these things with the derision they deserve.

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The answer is to shut up and play

Categories:

General Curmudgeonry, Perennial Indignancy Watch, Progressive Derangement, These Are The Crazy Years

Monday, 8 June 2020 12:18

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Suddenly, the NFL is in the news again, because one of its superstars couldn’t keep his mouth shut on a question he should never have agreed to answer.  And the NFL is apologizing and kowtowing and being sensitive and shit all over the place.

As usual, Roger Goodell screwed the pooch by leading the chorus of apologia.  He was insufficiently specific and was immediately set upon by certain black players for his vagaries of expression.

I have a different attitude about this.

I see the NFL as an entertainment monopoly.  It hires the best athletes it can find to play what amounts to a boy’s game with a ball (don’t snicker, all pro sports are the same) in huge arenas with tens of thousands of people watching and cheering (and booing) them on.  This is similar, to be honest, to the games played at the Colosseum in Rome, two thousand years ago.  No, really, stick with me, here.

The only real differences between our modern pro sports spectacles and, say, the games played at the Colosseum in Rome two thousand years ago, are:

  • Modern players are paid huge amounts of money to play these boy’s games
  • Modern players don’t play to the death (frankly, I sometimes think this is a mistake)
  • Modern players aren’t actually slaves, which a lot of the ancient gladiators were
  • Animals generally aren’t involved, other than as team mascots

In order to create these spectacles, in both instances, very large, very athletic, and (usually) very smart people were encouraged to sign up to play.  Back in Rome, the encouragement was often, “play or die.”  These days, it’s “sign this contract for a bunchatonamoney and effectively enslave yourself to the NFL [or whatever league covers your pro sport] and your agent.”  And what, you don’t think NFL players are smart?  You have to have smarts to play a game that’s effectively a war game in miniature, folks.  The day of the big, dumb hulk playing pro football went out the door years ago.

The only thing they’re not smart about is knowing when to keep their fat yaps shut.  Like most celebrities who have too much money and too much time on their hands, they think it’s their duty to step up and speak on the social issues and ills of the day.

Sometimes they get it right — Drew Brees was NOT wrong in his initial statement — but then they break under pressure and apologizing for making a statement that was absolutely honest and non-triggering to anyone other than people who hate this country.  And that’s what Brees ended up doing, apologizing for saying something as innocuous and admirable as “I would never agree with anyone disrespecting the flag of the United States of America or our country.”

Again, remember:  Only someone who hates this country and all that it stands for would raise hell over that statement.  Yet Brees got pummeled by not just the usual suspects in the press, but by other athletes and MEMBERS OF HIS OWN TEAM.

And Goodell, who hasn’t made a good decision since he rescinded his own policy of no tolerance for drug fuckups in the NFL, once again blew what could have been a teachable moment and probably wouldn’t have lost him a single fan (indeed, it might have gotten some back who left over the Kaepernick lunacy) by making some vague bullshit statement about the league’s attitude about how the league had failed to listen to players in the past, and that players should have the right to protest peacefully.

Which of course earned him scorn from black players for being mealy-mouthed and not specifically addressing black players’ issues.

With all due respect (and note that means I have little), what the fuck, Felix?  Black players in the NFL never had it so good.  You get paid a huge amount of money to play 16 regular-season games a year in a sport at a level most Americans couldn’t hack for sixty seconds.  You’ve got millions of fans and you’re considered hot stuff in your local NFL market.  Even if you’re a low-level player, someone out there is a big fan and figures you’re going to be great some day.

And the bottom line is, you’re playing a GAME for ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES.  And you’re doing it because someone noticed you at an earlier level, high school or college, and you thereby gained admittance to a very small and very rich fraternity.  All based on the fact that you have a very athletic body type and the smarts to make the right move at the right time.  Granted, stipulated, not going to argue about that.

What you apparently don’t have is the smarts to know when not to blow your good thing by making statements that piss off half the people in the country.  Or perhaps you do, but sometimes, like the Indian guide who is never lost, but acknowledges “sometimes the path wanders,” your brain goes off somewhere to take a break, your mouth wanders on autopilot, and you say something on camera or into a live mic that reflects what you really believe but know you dare not say publicly lest you be crucified for it.

Drew Brees found this out when he got hoist onto the cross for his patriotic statement.  And then didn’t have the balls to hang there and say, yes, this I believe, this I would die to defend.  What are the Saints going to do?  Fire him?

The same problem infests every aspect of the entertainment world (yes, sports are entertainment, get over it).  I’m not going to waste my time going through all the examples we’ve seen over the years.  Laura Ingraham even wrote a book about it, Shut Up And Sing, when the music industry blew up over the Dixie Chicks stupidity over George W. Bush.

Entertainment celebrities aren’t important enough for any of us to give a shit about their opinions on issues of the day.  They have been hoist onto a pedestal because of some special talent they have that the great unwashed generally don’t (although I’d argue I can sing better than a lot of people who make money at it, but that’s just my opinion and you’re free to ignore it).

The dirty little secret is, just being hoist onto that pedestal doesn’t give them special insight into anything but what they happen to be on that pedestal to do.

Thus, their opinions on the issues of the day should not be given any more weight than those of your barber or bartender.

And they need to be taught this lesson by seeing their popularity and their income dry up when their fans have finally had enough, and say, “I don’t give a shit what you think about George Floyd, shut up and do that thing you do.”

Which is why (to get back to Roger Goodell and his football league) I have not watched an NFL football game for four seasons and don’t plan to be watching any this fall, either.

Exit thought:  Condoleezza Rice would have made a better NFL commissioner, hands down.

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TDS is a horrible disease.

Categories:

General Curmudgeonry, These Are The Crazy Years, Trump Derangement Syndrome Watch

Wednesday, 11 March 2020 15:47

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Presented for your consideration, columnist Bret Stephens, who used to be a conservative:  New York Times columnist Bret Stephens declares coronavirus is Trump’s ‘Chernobyl’

Not even close, you NeverTrump moron.

Chernobyl was preventable, not only in hindsight, and could easily have been seen barrelling down the highway toward disaster, but the Soviet system didn’t work that way. Result: Meltdown. (Something that’s never happened in the US, not even at Three Mile Island, where so little radiation was released, it almost couldn’t be measured. And certainly not at Hanford-N, which was the closest thing we had to a Chernobyl-style reactor, and which was engineered properly with plenty of safeguards so it would not have done what Chernobyl did.)

Conversely, nobody saw Covid-19 coming. And if anyone is to blame, it’s the Red Chinese for not reacting appropriately. (I’m not giving any credence to the conspiracy theories, so don’t look for that here — but even if they were true, the Red Chinese still did not react appropriately.)

The fact is, totalitarian regimes do not handle disaster well. On the other hand, I can’t see where Trump has set a foot wrong on this to date. Yeah, he tweets a lot of BS and says a lot of things that might or might not be true, but that’s not indicative of what’s going on behind the scenes. You solve a pandemic by closing borders, stopping flights, advising people to increase social distance, and telling those who are exposed to go home and stay away from other people for a couple of weeks unless they develop symptoms, in which case you call the hospital and tell them you think you have the virus so they can be ready to handle you when you get there (like Community North handled the case that landed on their doorstep last week). These things are all being done, despite the seeming inability of the CDC to get their sh*t together until they were prodded to do so.

Other than throw a ton of (borrowed) money at the problem, I don’t see what Trump’s detractors in Congress have done to slow down what WHO is finally calling a pandemic (as if we didn’t all know that weeks ago). Mostly his Congressional detractors have simply lied through their teeth about Trump’s response to the problem. The media, for their part, have gone into full panic mode and the markets are just following the panic. (The markets will be fine. The media, not so sure of that.)

We’ve finally seen universities telling students to stay home after spring break and not come back to classes; they’ll teach classes online for a few weeks and hopefully prevent the virus from running rampant through their hallowed halls. Strangely enough, some of their students are protesting this, which only points up once again why the voting age should be raised to a minimum of 21 (I would be more comfortable with 40) and why children should, by and large, be seen and not heard. Even IU is going to do this. Talk about cats and dogs living together. IU never closes. Ask my wife.

So in many ways, the crisis is being handled well, and Dr. Benton Quest Trump (and his Race Bannon look-alike sidekick, Pence*) are due a lot of credit for that, even if the nutbags at the New York Times and the Washington Post are near to committing seppuku over the failure, once again, of their anti-Trump narrative.

And the NeverTrumpers are showing their true colors as usual, so angry and spiteful (and out of government) from TDS they need double windscreens on their microphones to keep from spitting all over them. Believe it or not, Bret Stephens used to be a fairly smart guy. Now he’s just another soi-disant “conservative” fool who’d rather burn down the country than save it. To the devil with him, and the rest of all NeverTrumpers.

_______________

* Come on.  Admit it.  If you grew up watching Jonny Quest, you want Race Bannon handling this kind of thing.

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Thoughts and prayers

Categories:

General Curmudgeonry, Perversity of Humanity, Progressive Derangement, These Are The Crazy Years

Tuesday, 4 February 2020 12:22

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I have not listened to Rush Limbaugh for literally years, ever since I got tired of the constant “inline” ad breaks and frankly what I considered to be an alarming trend in his love of his own voice resulting in fewer and fewer minutes of caller input.  And in general, three hours of political yak yak in the middle of the day during the Obama misAdministration didn’t sit well on my stomach, most days.  Bottom line, the signal to noise ratio had dropped considerably, and I had better things to do.  (Maybe this has changed but it’s too late for me to go back to find out.)

So despite the fact that I know he’s long been a connoisseur of fine cigars, it nevertheless came as a shock to hear that he had announced his diagnosis of advanced lung cancer.

Naturally, this announcement brought out the usual gleeful left-wing suspects talking about, for instance, what a great world it would be without Rush Limbaugh in it, and so forth.  But at least one person on the left took the high road, instead:

Now, I don’t care for her politics, but damn, the lady is a class act. If the rest of the Democrats had half her grace and honesty, this primary season might be bearable. They could (and will) do a lot worse than nominate Ms. Gabbard.

All the best to Rush. Cancer is apolitical and indiscriminate. We should support its sufferers ditto.

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Mr. McConnell, tear down this impeachment.

Categories:

Democrats Own Defeat, These Are The Crazy Years, Trump Derangement Syndrome Watch

Monday, 23 December 2019 17:51

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SCOTUS: No Articles of Impeachment or a Trial Are Required For The Senate to Acquit President Trump

[T]he Supreme Court has ruled – in the Nixon case [Nixon v. United States, 506 U.S. 224 (1993)] – that how the Senate goes about acquitting or convicting any impeached person is non-justiciable, in that the Senate’s power is plenary and the Supreme Court may not even review it.

This means that if the Senate acquits Trump immediately – without a trial – the Supreme Court has no authority, whatsoever, to review the Senate’s acquittal, and there isn’t a damn thing the House can do about it.

Which means that the Dems arguing that Trump hasn’t been impeached yet and the Senate must wait for the articles to be “transmitted” are a bunch of lying sacks of shite.

That SCOTUS ruling, by the way, was 9-0. Even the liberal Democrats then on the court concurred.

It’s time to end this farce, Mr. McConnell. The Senate must take action. Bring it to the floor and proceed to a vote.

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The walls are closing in on freedom.

Categories:

General Curmudgeonry, These Are The Crazy Years

Tuesday, 3 December 2019 10:37

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Seen on MeWe and Facebook:

As my friend Robert Evans says on the two platforms, “Transhustler “Jessica” Yaniv is at it again, wanting a gynecologist to examine her his girlballz.”

To which I replied, this is why it is so important to run Obama and Clinton judges out and replace them with judges who have at least half a brain. This is no different than “bake that cake” or “take that photo” or “serve that pizza.”

We are not free if we can be forced to do things that go against our beliefs or are prima facie idiotic. Someone particularly needs to take a stand against the gender warriors and tell them to man or woman up — there are only two genders and you are and will be treated as the one you were born as, period, full stop, end of subject.

And parents who try to raise and/or transform their little boys as little girls and vice versa need to be lined up against the wall and shot.

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The stupid, it burns.

Categories:

General Curmudgeonry, Progressive Derangement, These Are The Crazy Years

Friday, 20 September 2019 11:57

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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.

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