"You know," I said to the lovely Mrs. Robb just after I wound down from a very vocal rant, "I just realized that a lot of my hot button issues involve children."
Finally, after a 12-year delay caused by opponents of genetically modified foods, so-called “golden rice” with vitamin A will be grown in the Philippines. Over those 12 years, about 8 million children worldwide died from vitamin A deficiency. Are anti-GM advocates not partly responsible?
Partly responsible?
Partly responsible?
No, they are not "partly responsible".
They are wholly responsible for each and every one of those 8 million dead children, because they actively blocked access to the food that would allow them to live.
Yet, despite the cost in human lives, anti-GM campaigners—from Greenpeace to Naomi Klein—have derided efforts to use golden rice to avoid vitamin A deficiency. In India, Vandana Shiva, an environmental activist and adviser to the government, called golden rice “a hoax” that is “creating hunger and malnutrition, not solving it.”
A hoax. Right. It exists, it's provable, but... it's a hoax. Plus, this hoax is causing hunger! Before it's even grown! Not that it could ever be grown, because it's a hoax! I mean, that is just how pure freaking evil this stuff is - it can kill you even when it doesn't exist!
Yeah.
My brain is currently trying to crawl
out of my ear to escape the deadly levels of
pure frelling stupid. Do I even need to point out the irony of
her last name? If I ever have the misfortune of meeting Ms. Vandana Shiva, I dearly hope that I can escape with only the loss of a few dozen IQ points. Which, as far as I could tell, would
still leave me a couple of orders of magnitude more intelligent than Ms. Vandana Shiva, who apparently has a more feeble grasp of cause and effect than a brain-damaged dachshund.
But wait! There's more!
Most ironic is the self-fulfilling critique that many activists now use. Greenpeace calls golden rice a “failure,” because it “has been in development for almost 20 years and has still not made any impact on the prevalence of vitamin A deficiency.” But, as Ingo Potrykus, the scientist who developed golden rice, has made clear, that failure is due almost entirely to relentless opposition to GM foods—often by rich, well-meaning Westerners far removed from the risks of actual vitamin A deficiency.
So. It's not having any effect because... they have been opposed by anti-GMO organizations at every turn. Organizations who have no problem spending money on keeping golden rice out of the hands of the people who desperately need it to save their children. Organizations that would rather spend that money on lawsuits and bribery and propaganda than, you know, following their own advice and help supply vitamin A supplements to dying children.
Is that unclear? Maybe this will help.
ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISTS
HAVE KILLED MORE THAN
8 MILLION CHILDREN.
I very strongly suspect, though, that those 8 million children don't really count in the eyes of most environmentalists.
After all, they were foolish enough to be born to third-world parents who happened to have the wrong skin tone. It's not like they were real, important people like a community organizer or a animal rights protestor or an OWS facilitator. Besides, even if they did die, at least they died pure and untainted from those horrible, nasty GMO foods. Why, I am sure that if those blind, emaciated, dying children knew just how much those environmental activists had done to for them, they would burst into tears of joy!
Yeah.
