Mediaboss Marketing

Debunking too often tends to be a team sport and just because its inevitable, doesnt mean its not a problem. In food and farm issues, only biotech drives more debunking than the organic vs conventional debate. When you are responding to misinformation, the other side already has defined the terms of the debate and its hard to bust out of those frames. Often that means the big picture gets lost. Ive been guilty of this and well get to an example of that, but lets start with the post that got me to finally write this one.

Steven Novella is a clinical neurologist and assistant professor at Yale University School of Medicine. Hes a high profile skeptic and does a lot of debunking on the invaluable Science Based Medicine group blog and his own blog, NeuroLogica. He recently wrote a piece with the gratuitously polarizing title, Organic Farming is Bad for the Environment that looked at a new German study that compared the land use and greenhouse gas emissions of the average organic consumer and the average not-organic consumer (people who dont buy a lot of organic certified food).

Here is Novellas accurate characterization of the papers findings:

The carbon footprint of the organic and conventional diets were the same no significant difference. However, this includes the fact that the conventional diet contains 45% more meat, and meat consumption was the main driver of the carbon footprint. Therefore, if you eliminate the meat variable, organic produce has a much higher carbon footprint than conventional produce, but this higher organic carbon footprint was offset by reduced meat consumption.

Obviously the ideal situation would be to use conventional farming practices, but also reduce overall meat consumption.

Further, the organic diet (which again includes the meat variable) uses 40% more land than the conventional diet. That is a huge difference. That is in line with other studies which show organic farming uses 20-40% more land than conventional farming. That difference is likely to grow as we make progress with GMOs, which are banned by organic farming rules.

Here is his conclusion:

The organic farming brand is counterproductive. It is ideology-based, and creates a false dichotomy which encourages variables to be mixed in a confusing way. While the results of this German study are illuminating, they also fall for the organic false dichotomy, and blur the real magnitude of the inefficiency of organic farming.

The evidence is clear that organic farming on any meaningful scale is significantly less land efficient than conventional farming. That may, in fact, be part of the motivation for organic opposition to GMOs they know they cant compete

And he goes on railing against organic production. He doesnt get anything wrong, though it would be nice if debunkings of the perceptions of organic farming as more environmentally friendly than so-called conventional farming could admit more often that mainstream farming could use some improvement as well. But, by and large, I agree with everything he has written. He has an especially nice passage dealing with two bits of fallacious reasoning that organic advocates often fall back on when faced with critiques of the environmental impacts of organic farming.

When I have raised this point in the past, defenders of organic farming have sometimes countered that such estimates are not based on optimal organic farming. If you do it right, you can equal or even beat conventional production. There is no basis for this claim, however. It is also a bit of a no true Scotsman fallacy, as if organic farmers using more land are not real organic farmers, or at least they are not doing it right. They also offer only anecdotes about how they or someone else is able to have amazing yields with organic farming.

The scientific evidence tells a different story. When actually applied in the real world at meaningful scales, organic farming is less productive than conventional farming. Even if we use the more conservative estimate of using 20% more land, we cannot afford that. There is no 20% more land to expand into.

The next non-sequitur is to argue for reducing food waste. Thats like saying we dont need green energy, we should just reduce energy waste.

Notice what was acknowledged, but essentially glossed over. If there is one big takeaway from the new German paper its that Meat Consumption is Bad for the Environment. This is clear when you note that while average organic consumption profile requires 40% more land in these calculations, greenhouse gas emissions draw about even with average conventional consumption.

The only group where the biggest partitions of greenhouse gas emissions didnt come from beef and pork was women organic consumers whose biggest GHGs came from cheese and fresh dairy.

This all comes into sharper relief when you look at the values comparing GHG emissions for different foods between organic and conventional. They arent that different. Ive highlighted the foods where there are significant differences. Organic consuming men who eat more poultry than anyone else should be dismayed to find out that the greenhouse gas emissions associated with organic poultry production are 26% higher than for conventional.

In terms of raising the land demands and greenhouse gas emission on the basis that matters per unit consumed meat consumption dwarfs organic for driving up the environmental impact of protein consumption at the population level. Organic production and consumption are such small portions of impacts because they dont account for much production or consumption in the first place. In the US, organic production accounts for about half of one percent of farmland and about 5 percent of grocery sales. In Europe, where people are willing to spend more of their budgets on food and fewer people are poor, it accounts for about 6 percent of farm land. Even though its true as the paper shows, on a unit produced basis, the land use and GHGs of organic are far higher than conventional, its such a small part of the market, the impact isnt that big a deal.

Before moving on, a side note. One detail I found really interesting in this paper was that the footprint of beef in these models is smaller than it would be if you were going to repeat this study on American consumers because a lot of German beef comes from animals culled from dairy production, so the bulk of their footprint is already embedded in the dairy numbers. That would not be an assumption you could make if you were doing these calculations on American consumers.

While I think I do a pretty good job in the FAFDL forum of pointing out the metrics where organic production comes out ahead of conventional and trying to keep the tiny footprint of organic production in perspective relative to other challenges, in my writing, the rules of debunking have often got the better of me, even where I was trying to get to a larger, more important point.

Case in point.

A few years ago, a major paper comparing organic and conventional yields was released to much Internet fanfare. The authors were touting the fact that they found organic farms which adopted the conservation agriculture techniques of polyculture and diverse rotations narrowed the organic yield gap considerably compared to conventional farms which did not employ polyculture or diverse rotations.

Here is how the lead author characterized their findings:

We found that although organic crop yields are about 19% lower than conventional yields, certain management practises appear to significantly reduce this gap. In fact, planting multiple different crops at the same time (polyculture) and planting a sequence of crops (crop rotation) on an organic farm cut the difference in yield in half. Interestingly, both these practices are based on techniques that mimic natural systems, and have been practised for thousands of years. Our study strongly suggests that we can develop highly productive organic farming methods if we mimic nature by creating ecologically diverse farms that draw strength from natural interactions between species.

However, when I read the paper, I noticed what I thought was an even more important finding. The yield gap was actually the largest when you compared conventional farms using polyculture or diverse rotations to organic farms using those systems.

That is, if instead of comparing best practices organic to average conventional, you compared best practices organic to best practices conventional the gap between the two was LARGER than when you compared average to average or even worst practices to worst practices. Adopting polyculture and diverse rotations into conventional systems seems to supercharge conventional farming in comparison to organic.

Now the reason I think this is so significant is that, as I said above, organic production in the US only accounts for 0.6% of acreage, so closing the yield gap in organic is still a fairly minor accomplishment at a systems level. HOWEVER, increasing yields while improving the ecological impacts on millions, even tens of millions of acres of conventional farming could be a big deal. A major BFD.

Thats the finding we should be shouting from the rooftops. The paper shouldnt have just quantified the yield gap between organic and conventional. It should have quantified it between conservation ag systems and non-conservation ag systems in both organic and conventional. After reading that paper, dont you want to know what conventional farmers who adopt conservation systems gain over their brothers and sisters who dont? I do. And Id like to see the same comparison within the organic sector.

I pointed all this out (mostly) in the piece I wrote on the paper. However, I ended the piece with a bit of rant on how I thought one of the big problems that the organic program presents is that it has come to be inaccurately perceived as synonymous with sustainable agriculture and eclipses the much more consequential results that conventional farmers practicing conservation ag are achieving and warps the discussion and robs our best, most conscientious conventional farmers of some of the recognition they deserve.

In fact, we just dont have a widely recognized term for sustainable farming that other than organic. There is a term, its just not widely used. Its the term, that I introduced earlier: conservation agriculture, and it centers around a set of practices to improve soil quality and output, but without the prohibitions that hamstring organic. Conservation agriculture was first applied to the use of no-till and lo-till conservation tillage and has expanded to include the use of cover crops, mulches, composts and diverse rotations. If we were to add to that integrated pest management (IPM) wed have a framework with real legs. But conservation agriculture is languishing in organics shadow, even as organic struggles to tame its tillage addiction and keep its dirty little nitrogen secret.

In fact, there is good research that shows that conservation agriculture not only increases yields, but it increases profitability as well by lowering inputs costs (read also as: lowering environmental impacts of fuel, fertilizer and pesticides) in tandem with the higher yields. Note also, that profits increase without the organic premium in price, so conservation agriculture is accessible to low income consumers in the developed world and to the poor in developing nations.

How much of a distraction is organic when it comes to how we think about sustainable agriculture and where to turn our resources?

So you can see where I was pivoting back to.

This isnt an easy problem to address. I stand behind everything I wrote in that piece (except that I cringe at the title). It was stuff that I think needed to be said and better, more widely understood. It all goes to hump that I think we need to get over and thats not going to happen without debunking misconceptions that are getting in the way. And all the positive stuff about the benefits of conservation ag are in there, they just dont get the attention they deserve. And I can tell, because I see how the essay is shared on social media. Its not shared to tout the benefits of conservation ag, its shared to put organic advocates in their place. The cringe-worthy title is partly to blame. I titled it when I was trying to see if less fastidious, more clickbaity titles would bring in more traffic (not that I could see or at least more polarizing titles didnt move the needle, so I happily retreated from that indiscretion).

But its not just on writers and communicators to do a better job. Readers, especially those sharing and debating on social media, you need to step up your game as well. As the editor of Food and Farm Discussion Lab I make sure that we run tons of stories looking at the benefits of conservation ag and other positive developments in agromodernism, and I see what gets read and what gets shared. And what gets read and shared are pieces that go to the center of the organic vs. conventional / pro-GMO vs anti-GMO culture wars. If I just wanted more traffic, I could just turn this site into a tabloid that slams organic and anti-GMO activists five days a week. I dont, because I dont think thats good enough. When we run debunking stories we work really hard to make sure they are rigorous (when we do it right they can get shared far and wide in spite of having crossed all our Ts and dotted every I). When we run the occasional red meat, it has to also provide some valuable insight. Those stories reach thousands, even tens of thousands of readers. Positive stories on sustainable agriculture reach hundreds, sometimes only dozens of readers. So why bother?

Food and Farm Discussion Lab is incorporated as a non-profit for a reason and we run off a Patreon campaign rather than advertising for a reason (make a pledge now, if you havent already!). Its important that this information is available for people who are looking for it. Among our core readership are journalists, academics, industry people, and practitioners of various stripes. Not all readers are created equal in terms to what it means to our mission in serving them. Giving a grad student who is studying horticultural and agroforestry good analytical tools for thinking about permaculture is at least, if not more important to me than giving a hundred keyboard warriors a new cudgel in the organic/GMO debates, though thats a big part of what we do as well. We do our best in the balancing act between pitched polemic that gets shared far and wide reaching lots of people, and the pieces making the case for a positive vision of what evidence and metrics based sustainable food production can be which reach far fewer.

So do me nay, do yourself a favor and put down the cudgels for a while to browse our Conservation Agriculture archive. Or expand your horizons and find something interesting to read about the health of our oceans and fishery management. Theres a whole great big world out there beyond bickering about glyphosate of which of course, our archive is unrivaled and chock full of high quality cudgels. Rest assured, theyll be there when you need them, but dont be afraid of expanding your horizons. Even if your interests are narrowly focused on the organic/GMO culture war, youll be more effective if your knowledge base extends beyond the narrow range of factoids necessary for the debunking wars. But the real value is in having a stronger sense of what we are for. Knowing what you are against is the easy part.

A version of this article at Food and Farm Discussion Lab as Lets Stop Burying the Lede in the Organic vs Conventional Debate and has been republished here with permission from the author.

Marc Brazeau is an editor and writer at Food and Farm Discussion Lab. Follow him on Twitter@eatcookwrite

More here:
Conservation agriculture: Beyond the organic vs. conventional ... - Genetic Literacy Project

Artist bio

Culture Wars wasted no time releasing their first single Money (Gimmie, Gimmie) that came blazing out of the gate with an addictive electro-rock sound and swagger according to PopMatters.

The forthcoming debut Culture Wars EP is pure adrenaline with production by longtime collaborator Robert Sewell and mixing by Manny Marroquin (Kanye West, Imagine Dragons) and Alan Moulder (The Killers, Nine Inch Nails). The debut quickly establishes Culture Wars as a band with their own distinct style, merging edgy, infectious song craft with electronic textures, punchy guitar work, and the commanding vocals of charismatic front man Alex Dugan.

The band draws upon various recording environments conjuring vibrant music thats sonically adventurous yet instantly accessible. Whether working on laptops or in the remote setting of Sonic Ranch just outside of El Paso, Culture Wars unique working methods build upon the trios creative chemistry.

A lot of our tracks have the appearance of a rock song, but underneath there's all sorts of weird experimental shit going on. We'll strike a match and record that sound, and put it through a reverb plug-in, and stick it underneath a track so it sounds like a percussion instrument. Or we'll record the sound of the rain outside on our iPhones, and we'll put some reverb and delay on that, and use it as a texture, Alex explains.

As the band worked closely with producer Sewell, and in-demand mixers Moulder and Marroquin on board, Culture Wars benefits from an uncommonly talented creative team. The three of us spent time in other bands trying to make something happen, but in this one things just seem to happen without us having to push it. It's been a big adjustment to have so many great people caring about what we're doing. Its a lot more enjoyable this way, says Alex.

Go here to read the rest:
Culture Wars on Baeble Music - Baeble Music (blog)

Sen. Bernie Sanders. (AP)

I understand that people want to keep their jobs and want to keep their friends. But I want to talk about Conservatives backing off from the culture wars.

The left is trying to create a majority victim status. When the majority of people are victims of straight, white men, what happens in society? Everyone is aligned behind victimhood and the left builds a political majority around an inaccurate grievance.

The left never compromises on these issues. Intersectionalism means you need to be behind and support the left and all their agendas.

RELATED: The madhouse that is Evergreen State College

Conservatives need to speak up and take action with the culture wars or these things are only going to progress and become more common. If you want to see more of people like Bernie Sanders continuing to make demands against Christianity, continue to hide your beliefs.

If we dont speak up, were going to see an erosion of our own rights and its not just limited to the social issues. Every time we back off on the social issues, because of intersectionality, were empowering the left on collectivism, on higher taxes, on government health care; because all their ideas are locked together.

As always, please listen to the full audio clip for complete context.

Excerpt from:
Conservatives shouldn't back off of the 'culture wars' - MyNorthwest.com

Protester wearing a caricature head of Theresa May, London, the day after the general election. Photograph: ImagesLive vi/REX/Shutterstock

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, wrote Wordsworth, but to be young was very heaven! OK, maybe thats going a little too far, especially if you didnt get a wink of sleep on Thursday night. But still. If you were aged 18-24 and you voted, then you probably felt pretty pleased with yourself on Friday morning. Younger voters, it seems, were the key to Jeremy Corbyn feeling like he has won when he has lost. Cue talk of the personality cult surrounding Labours sainted leader, of social media memes shared by tech-savvy digital natives and the revenge of young remainers angry that their future had been stolen from them while they werent looking (and in many cases, if theyre honest, not voting) in the EU referendum last summer.

But maybe something more fundamental more Marxist even is going on. Perhaps the apparent novelty of all the above risks distracting us from a rather more material explanation for what happened on Thursday and therefore for how politics will play out from now on.

Maybe we have grown so used to asserting that politics these days is all about culture rather than cash, about open v closed rather than state v market, that weve underestimated just how much the economy will continue to play a role, particularly when its largesse (or otherwise) is so unevenly distributed between classes and demographics. Weve seen the evidence for that inequality of opportunity, of earning power and of ownership some of us with our own eyes, some of us in the pages of this very newspaper. But this election, especially after seven years of austerity falling disproportionately on the young and the just about managing, may turn out to be a tipping point, something that takes us back to the future.

In the wake of the global financial crisis, much ink was spilled in trying to explain why the right rather than the left seemed to benefit electorally when careless capitalism was so clearly to blame. Certainly, one factor was the reputation of the former (more rhetorical than real, it has to be said) for balancing the books.

Keynes may have been correct to argue that the worst thing to do in the teeth of slowdown is to stop borrowing and spending. But convincing most of us that the nations economy is not the same as our households is a famously hard sell, hence the infuriatingly persuasive power of the repeated accusation that Labour had maxed out the nations credit card. But that was a long time ago, an emergency, whether imagined or real, that had to be dealt with, not an agreement on the part of voters to year after year of manifest underfunding of core public services.

Some on the right were clearly hoping that, after a while, this would become the new normal, accepted as an inevitable part of our daily lives, helping to keep taxes low and encouraging more and more of us to opt out into the private sector. But it turns out that, in Britain, at least, our sense of what the state can and should provide still runs pretty deep. As a result, just as has happened towards the end of every other period of Conservative government since the Second World War, a counter-reaction has begun to set in that anyone wanting to understand politics going forward has to understand. What is initially swallowed as good housekeeping eventually comes to seem like an ideological attempt to arrest the growth of the welfare state or even to shrink it, producing healthcare and education systems that increasingly, manifestly and tangibly fail to meet rising demand and expectations.

Previously, this pattern played out over a longer period of time: 13 years between 1951 and 1964; 18 between 1979 and 1997. But the current correction has kicked in after just seven. First, because of the speed and scale of the retrenchment attempted by the Conservatives after 2010. Second, because that retrenchment has been going on (in marked contrast to the 1950s and 1980s) while growth, particularly real wage growth, has been anaemic to non-existent. And, third, especially (but not exclusively) for younger people, housing has become less and less affordable, employment less and less secure and personal debt an ever-growing, sometimes gnawing worry.

But there is one more, essentially political, reason for the process being short-circuited this time around. Its not just because Theresa May chose to call the election three years earlier than she needed to. Its that her predecessor, David Cameron, came to power posing as a new kind of Conservative, creating expectations by no means all of which he had any genuine commitment to fulfilling. For well-heeled, well-educated voters, those expectations revolved mainly around promises of a more social-liberal, cosmopolitan stance that would consolidate, even extend, the achievements of the Blair era on gay rights, gender and ethnic equality, justice, civil liberties and Europe.

With the signal exception of the last, as well as on immigration, those promises were basically met. But then along came Theresa May and the detoxification process looked as if it were not only stalling but being thrown into reverse.

Far more important, but far more frequently forgotten, were the expectations that Camerons Conservatism was all about embracing rather than rejecting the idea of the fabled centre ground, a claim neatly symbolised by his first setpiece party conference speech as Tory leader. Tony Blair, he cried, once explained his priority in three words: education, education, education. I can do it in three letters NHS.

Allowing those words to ring more and more hollow, bleating about ringfencing and record amounts of money while peoples lived experience of increased waiting times and the rest told them something very different was going on, was something the Conservatives should never have allowed to happen. But they did, slipping back into presenting the essential choice in British politics as, to quote Maurice Saatchi, efficient but cruel Tories v caring but incompetent Labour.

That depressingly reductive war cry worked in 2015 but only just. Which was why many genuinely centrist Conservatives, even those who rather regretted Camerons self-imposed passing last year, fooled themselves into thinking that a couple of speeches, one in Birmingham and one on the steps of Downing Street, meant Theresa May (she was the future once!) was going to be canny enough to press the reset button.

Brexit might mean Brexit, they reasoned, control might be brought back but so, too, would the message that the Conservatives genuinely believed in high-quality, well-funded public services. But a mixture of ideology and complacency bolstered by the belief that Corbyn would be even easier to beat than Miliband, that banging on about Europe and immigration would win back Ukip voters, and that the Lib Dems were all but dead seems to have put paid to the emergence of a genuinely post-Thatcherite Conservative party.

This suits Labour as its currently configured. Denouncing the same old Tories is the political equivalent of painting by numbers on Britains left. It neither requires nor generates any new thinking, especially when the weakness of other progressive parties the Lib Dems, the Greens and, to a lesser extent, the SNP gives Labour a virtual monopoly on outrage.

Meanwhile, its laudable, but hardly revolutionary, desire to show that it stands for the many not the few encourages Labour to adopt something-for-everyone policies focused on fairness rather than developing the kind of productive, high-skill social market economy likely to generate the wealth and security, and to pay for the public services, which most voters understandably crave.

All this means that we are confronted with the prospect of Britains two biggest parties being incapable of securing a parliamentary majority even for the second-best solutions they stand for. This might not be so bad if the electoral system and political geography that helps produce that situation did not also mean that the parties on their flanks lack the mainstream views and/or the Westminster seats to resolve it in a manner consonant with the peaceful coexistence in Northern Ireland and the have-our-cake-and-eat-it Brexit that the majority of voters seem to want.

Politics now and in the future will revolve around interests as well as around identity, but it is badly blocked. After Corbyns victory of sorts and Mays equally equivocal defeat, talk of a new centre party has melted like snow in spring. That could be a pity: it might still turn out to be just what Britain needs to clear that blockage.

View post:
Forget culture wars, the election was about power, cash and opportunity - The Guardian

One the area's largest school districts in Clifton Park has been making national headlines in the culture wars.

In late May, a Shenendehowa student's art project themed "The Expressive Faces of the President," depicting President Donald Trump, was taken down after profanities appeared on the piece and a Fox News blogger received photographs of the exhibit. The student-artist who created the piece had left markers along with a sign inviting others to add to it, the intent being that the graffiti would augment the artwork. When principal Don Flynt showed up for a scheduled student art show he saw the graffiti and ordered the exhibit taken down, telling Spectrum News: "I was immediately offended by it and took it down, confiscated it."

But some photographs and comments found their way online. Shenendehowa public information officer Kelly DeFeciani says social media kept the story alive, and come Monday Shen was on Fox News. "National media, I think they have people out there looking for things like that, because it is a shocking picture. But what the story doesn't tell is that it was put up there as a piece of art, just the pictures, kids wrote graffiti on it, the principal saw it and took it down immediately that part of the story doesn't get told on social media."

Fox News blogger Todd Starnes, whose Facebook page claimed he was "online" and "typically replies within minutes" to messages, did not answer one from WAMC. Flynt hadn't had much luck reaching Starnes either: "I am concerned that Fox News did not speak to me, even though I reached out to the person who wrote the article."

Some Shen parents reacted angrily to the national story. "We're getting all kinds of hate mail and just nasty things said from all over the country, and they're commenting on profanity that students did with profanity we need everybody to be good role models for our students."

Also in May, two rooms at Shen were appropriated so Muslim students could pray during Ramadan to fulfill religious obligations during school hours. DeFeciani says don't call them "prayer rooms." "The reason why it's two is that we have two school buildings. We have a 9th grade building and a 10-12 building. So it's just a place that kids can go for privacy if they have religious obligations that they need to do during the school day. The fact that it's being called a prayer room is just not accurate. There's nothing in there that's religious, it's not using a classroom space, none of that. It's simply just a place for privacy, and the reason that it came about for Ramadan is because they need to pray every day at a certain time, they have to be on their knees in a certain direction. I mean there's a whole religious obligation, it's not just prayer. They can't do it in the classroom. You know they talk about the separation of church and state, but we've always had to accommodate students' right to prayer, we have kids that pray at our flagpole every morning in a prayer group."

Shenendehowa, in southern Saratoga County, is attended by nearly 10,000 students. Being that large, observers say, will result in headlines from time to time.

In December 2014, the Shenendehowa school board approved a measure 4-2 to allow students on a case-by-case basis to use the bathroom and locker room facilities that reflect the gender they identify with.

In October 2015, a student there started a petition after he claimed school officials told him he could not go to prom in drag.

And in November 2016, alleged racially inflammatory language prompted officials to send a letter to parents asking their help in creating a safe and inclusive environment for all students.

Continued here:
Culture Wars: Fox News Blogger Places Upstate NY School District ... - WAMC