Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Arkansas Proves Itself Worthy of Notice

...  by showing that they, too, can set new and previously unimaginable benchmarks in human stupidity and downright evil.  So we all expect this sort of thing out of states in the deep South like Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, etc.  Arkansas technically falls under the same wing when you think about it, but because the stupid burns so deep in those other areas, and also quite recently, that Arkansas kind of just never really gets noticed.  After seeing the Texas Republican Party proclaim proudly that they are against thinking, I made it clear that they deserve a mighty eradication from existence.  But now, I feel it is only fair to include Arkansas Republicans in the picture, too.

Congratulations, Jon Hubbard, Charlie Fuqua, and Loy Mauch.  You, too, much like the entire Texas Republican Party, Michele Bachmann, Todd Akin, Rick Santorum, Paul Broun, et al. all deserve to be launched directly into the sun where every last molecule of your physical substance will be vaporized and all of existence will be better off.

Saturday, October 6, 2012

GMO Foods and Prop 37 Malarkey

There is a lot of hullabaloo going on throughout California right now regarding Proposition 37.  This is a measure that will require foods that are made using genetically modified (GMO) crops to be labeled as such.  So I have some mixed feelings about this whole thing.  There are a lot of strong arguments that can be made for or against this measure, but the problem is that no one seems to be making them.  There is very little out there which does not constitute a weak or even sometimes entirely false argument for either side of the equation here.  I can only say that there is a great deal about this whole thing which is just wrapped up in stupidity.

Ultimately, though, the big effect that Prop 37 would have if passed would be a shift away from mass-market products towards the organically-grown products (at least within California where the law applies).  This is why pretty much every supporter of Prop 37 is an exclusively organic food producer and/or an activist group of some sort.  Plenty of companies like Kraft engage in both conventional and organic practices and do not support 37.  However, while you know my position on organic food already (i.e. that it's basically a big fat sham), it doesn't change the fact that people are gullible enough to fall for it.  More importantly, GMO is something that is so poorly understood that it is going to be the subject of fear, which means that people are going to shy away from that fearsome stuff just because they don't know any better.  And this is why I'm not 100% in favor.  People are just going to see it as "Frankenfood" and react in irrational fear.

Transparency on the part of the producers is the only strong argument, but 37 is not that.