We wrote last November that MIT, our alma mater, "has caved repeatedly to the demands of 'wokeness', treating its students unfairly, compromising the quality of its staff, and damaging the institution and academic freedom at large." As has happened across academia, total commitment to DEI—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—has become an article of faith, with an aggressive program of minority admissions part of the canon. MIT's most recent initiative involves new hiring and programs devoted to:

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Although the public is almost completely unaware, today, more than three-quarters of all food crops have been directly and dramatically altered by humans using various processes, some relatively crude, by random experimentation, taking decades and even centuries, others extremely precise. Irrationally, and unrelated to safety and health, some products are highly regulated while others are virtually unregulated.

In fact, humans have been modifying the DNA of our food for thousands of years. That's the very definition of agriculture. Early farmers (>10,000 years ago) used selective breeding to guide DNA changes (of which they were, of course, unaware) in crops to better suit our needs.

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The two-years-plus of the COVID-19 pandemic should be a wakeup call that there is something very wrong – irreparable, even – at the chronically inept World Health Organization (WHO). Two recent transgressions show that the bureaucrats there are not getting any smarter.

The first is almost inconceivable. Medicago, a Canadian company, developed a COVID-19 vaccine synthesized in the Nicotiniana plant, a relative of tobacco. In clinical testing, it showed efficacy against all variants studied prior to the emergence of Omicron of 71%, and for the Delta variant specifically of 75%.

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While Elon Musk promises a Twitter that does not suppress speech, former President Barack Obama recently asserted that we need more content moderation rather than less. Obama seems to miss the reality of what moderation really means. Intentionally or mistakenly, he's calling for greater censorship.

Genuine "moderation" means protecting people from information that might do them harm, typically misinformation or disinformation that leads them toward unwise or dangerous actions or decisions. Moderation should not "protect" people from viewpoints or dissent; that would be censorship.

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We wrote last November about MIT, our alma mater, that it "has caved repeatedly to the demands of 'wokeness,' treating its students unfairly, compromising the quality of its staff, and damaging the institution and academic freedom at large." A commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion had become an article of faith, with an aggressive program of minority admissions one of the commandments.

"Equity" is at the heart of this issue.

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