Growing up in rural Missouri where American outlaw Jesse James (1847–1882) had lived, my friends and I were convinced he had buried treasure nearby. We wandered the woods in dreamy hopes of digging up a saddlebag or other treasure.

Often we’d run into an elderly man chopping firewood with a giant axe. For years, we watched this mysterious “axe man” trudge the highways in search of soda cans, his own kind of treasure. Redeeming the cans for cash, he’d retire to his run-down, roofless, unpainted shack with a bottle in a brown paper bag. After his death, his family found bundles of money stored in his ramshackle home.

Like the axe man who ignored his treasure, “green” and “civil; society” groups like the oddly named Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth (FOE), the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), the WWF and even zoos such as the Melbourne Zoo and Auckland Zoo routinely ignore the facts in their haste to condemn palm oil.

Have you ever tasted baby food? I have. It’s terribly bland. But babies have no other choice without teeth. They certainly can’t eat a nice, juicy steak!

Sadly, some news editors are content with intellectual baby food, at least when it comes to the way they treat “news” and “reports” on palm oil served up by an entire cabal of “green” and “civil society” groups like such as the oddly named Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth (FOE), the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), the WWF and even zoos such as the Melbourne Zoo and Auckland Zoo.

By not sinking their teeth into deeper truths and doing the due diligence required to unearth the real facts readers and viewers worldwide are deprived of the intellectual understanding and convictions to make right choices.

There are many people who make predictions about many things. Nostradamus would be one of them: He predicted that in 1792, Venice, Italy, would become a world power. (Venice is still waiting.) That same year, he predicted the Catholic Church would cease to exist because of the persecution in North Africa; he was wrong once again. In 1607, he predicted all astrologers would come under persecution; he missed it again.

Jeanne Dixon made 100,000 predictions, all of which were wrong except for one: In a kind of serendipitous way, she predicted the death of John F. Kennedy; but some suggested it was a lucky guess.

In the same way, an entire cabal of “green” and “civil society” groups such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth (FOE), the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), the WWF and even zoos such as the Melbourne Zoo and Auckland Zoo appear to have gotten into the prediction business, assailing the innocent commodity with wild and unsubstantiated allegations of massive deforestation on a scale that allegedly threatens the existence of the orangutan.