Among the foremost threats to individual freedom in America is the abusive and oftentimes lawless behavior…
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More Legal Shenanigans from the Biden Administration’s Department of Education

Among the foremost threats to individual freedom in America is the abusive and oftentimes lawless behavior of federal administrative agencies, whose vast armies of overpaid bureaucrats remain unaccountable for their excesses.

Among the most familiar examples of that bureaucratic abuse is the Department of Education (DOE).  Recall, for instance, the United States Supreme Court’s humiliating rebuke last year of the Biden DOE’s effort to shift hundreds of billions of dollars of student debt from the people who actually owed them onto the backs of American taxpayers.

Even now, despite that rebuke, the Biden DOE launched an alternative scheme last month in an end-around effort to achieve that same result.

Well, the Biden DOE is now attempting to shift tens of millions of dollars of…[more]

March 18, 2024 • 03:11 PM

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Democrats, The Party of Superstition Print
By Troy Senik
Thursday, April 03 2014
GMOs have the potential to save lives and salvage livelihoods.

If you had a functioning television during the presidency of George W. Bush, you got used to the relentless Democratic attack: Republicans were anti-science, either cynically rejecting scientific insights in order to better serve their corporate masters or just simply being too thick to put down their Bibles and bask in the light of sweet reason.

That was never an especially compelling case. The centerpiece of the argument was conservative skepticism about global warming, a trend where the left has been stretching its credibility to a breaking point in recent years. In 2000, for example, David Viner, senior scientist at Britain’s famous University of East Anglia climatic research unit, said that within a few years “winter snowfall will become a very rare and exciting event” — we know how that turned out (for a thorough rundown of the climate issue, see this week’s column — Activist Demands Imprisonment for “Climate-Change Liars” — by my colleague Timothy H. Lee).

In other instances —using embryonic stem cells for research, for example — the left seemed to miss that the operative questions were theological or moral in nature, not scientific.

If the critics of the Bush years possessed any consistency, they’d be up in arms today over the Democratic Party’s promiscuous scientific illiteracy.

Consider the example of genetically modified foods. Congressional Democrats — following the lead of liberals in state governments throughout the country — are currently leaning on the Food and Drug Administration to adopt mandatory labeling for food products with genetic modifications. What many on the left — and indeed, much of the wider public — doesn’t seem to understand is that modern genetic modification efforts aren’t especially novel; they’re just more efficient.

Human beings have bred plant and animal species in order to cultivate specific traits from the earliest days of civilization. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of human progress has been the ability to alter natural resources to better fit the needs of humanity.

All genetic modification does is cut out the middleman, allowing advancements to be made in huge leaps in the laboratory rather than through the painstaking incrementalism that results from generations of selective breeding. Yet the self-styled party of science has reacted to this development with the sort of reflexive fear one might expect from some isolated tribe in a remote jungle.

As Pamela Ronald, a plant biologist at the University of California-Davis noted back in 2011, “There is broad scientific consensus that genetically engineered crops currently on the market are safe to eat. After 14 years of cultivation and a cumulative total of 2 billion acres planted, no adverse health or environmental effects have resulted from commercialization of genetically engineered crops." Nothing has happened in the interim to alter that judgment.

Indeed, the operative question may be whether GMOs are overregulated. Despite a flawless record of safety, the regulatory hurdles to getting GMO food to market are enormous.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Gregory Conko recently underscored this point in the Washington Examiner, writing that, “It takes an average of five to 10 years to develop and test a crop for consumer and environmental safety. This is followed by an additional two to four years of review by the Food and Drug Administration, Department of Agriculture, and Environmental Protection Agency. And because most American farmers will not plant genetically modified crops they cannot export to global markets in Europe, Asia, and South America, the wait is even longer in order to secure approval overseas.”

The average regulatory cost of getting a genetically modified plant to market? By Conko’s estimates, it runs over $35 million.

These concerns are not abstract. GMOs have the potential to save lives and salvage livelihoods.

Consider the example of Norman Borlaug, the agronomist who won a Nobel Prize for his work altering wheat so that it could better resist diseases, better adapt to growing conditions and generate higher yields. That work is widely credited with saving upwards of a billion lives around the world.

While Borlaug’s initial work was done through conventional breeding, subsequent advances have utilized genetic modification techniques. Borlaug himself (who died in 2009) warned of the potentially devastating effect that criticism of that work could have, noting, “If the naysayers do manage to stop agricultural biotechnology, they might actually precipitate the famines and the crisis of global biodiversity they have been predicting for nearly 40 years.”

For a contemporary example, look to Central California, currently dogged by persistent drought conditions. As the Hoover Institution’s Henry Miller has noted, the lengthy approval process for genetically modified crops has left the region unnecessarily reeling from the lack of rainfall.

Genetically modified wheat in Egypt, for example, has been demonstrated to be viable with as little as 1/8 the irrigation needed for its conventional counterpart. Because of regulatory delays, however, many such crops — which would be a godsend to California farmers —aren’t available to those suffering through the drought.

GMOs are only the tip of an enormous iceberg. Liberals continue to peddle similarly apocalyptic predictions about fracking, despite the fact that even Ken Salazar and Sally Jewel — the two individuals who have served as Secretary of the Interior in the Obama Administration — have admitted that it poses no environmental danger. Liberals continue to wage war against e-cigarettes despite overwhelming evidence that they offer a healthier alternative to conventional tobacco.

Heck, a 2009 Pew Forum survey even found that liberals are about double as likely to believe in astrology as conservatives.

None of this is to suggest that all liberals are knuckle-dragging flat earthers or that all conservatives are scientific sophisticates — neither of which is remotely close to true. It is to suggest, however, that liberalism came by its scientific pretensions on the cheap — and that its failure to live up to that exalted reputation can have devastating costs in both human and financial terms.

Notable Quote   
 
"It's a rematch.President Biden and former President Trump each hit a key marker last week, clinching enough delegates to become the presumptive nominee of their respective party.The outcome of the general election will come down to a handful of states, as usual.The map maintained by The Hill and Decision Desk HQ lists seven contests as toss-ups."Read the entire article here.…[more]
 
 
— Niall Stanage, The Hill
 
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