1. Washington Times used our work debunking claims about phthalates in macaroni and cheese to show how New York Senator Chuck Schumer is going to chase any environmental fad - especially if it makes science and technology look bad. It appeals to his base. The "analysis" was hand-picked by a group co-founded by a guy who thinks food is "spiritual".
That checked off all the boxes for New York Times editors so they dutifully doted on it without any skepticism, which is another reason Schumer called for Congressional action; they share the same base and that base is opposed to science. Unless science claims we're doomed, like global warming. Then they are fine with it.
Healthline was more evidence-based than the New York Times, asking our Dr. Josh Bloom for the science alternative to the group created by food activist organizations like Center for Food Safety specifically to raise money and sue by creating this issue.
2. Dr. Jamie Wells was in Orlando, Florida to judge the Miss America Outstanding Teen Competition. Unlike a beauty pageant, this is a competition for teen women who are checking off all the right boxes we want in leaders of tomorrow. Health overwhelmingly dominated the career goals of the contestants. Why not physics? Though some try to contend it's sexism that fewer women than men go into physics, surveys instead find that young women want to help people more. Science is important, of course, but we can't criticize women who instead say they want to treat patients.
If you want the inside scoop on the week's events, you can read about it here.
3. Dr. Julianna LeMieux is getting ready to teach a course to students who want to be science literate at The City College of New York (CUNY), called Science Forward. Here she was at the office of the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, & Technology, where we talked about the Little Black Book of Junk Science and delivered them to the members.
4. We showed up in odd places as well. Organic Consumers Association continues to panic about its industry funding because we continue to expose their war on poor brown people in developing countries - and that goes against their carefully crafted marketing image. So they sent one of their top paid mommy bloggers into something called FAIR to claim that Kate Kelland, a veteran Reuters reporter based in London, is secretly being controlled by us - she even refers to Kelland's employer as "the lobbying tool Reuters." They may actually believe it. After all, OCA controls Paul Thacker and Carey Gillam, and so likely also did when those two were journalists..
They do this a lot. A few months ago, they got an environmental lawyer in a minor court brief to claim we were preventing $1 billion in organic spin efforts from being more successful. And then they sent their publicist everywhere repeating the manufactured claims by a legal document that they got put into the legal document. It appeared in places like Russia Today, the propaganda arm of the Kremlin, which the US Director of National Intelligence showed has been using environmental groups to hinder American science for Russia's benefit. And yet OCA keeps doing it despite the blowback they have received for siding with fifth columnists. Sources say there have been numerous Foreign Agent Registration Act violation complaints filed against OCA and its puppet sites but during the previous administration enforcement had been pretty lax and there are still a lot of empty jobs in the current one. So it may be a while before participants are truly exposed.
5. Guard your credibility is good advice, and The Business Farmer has it. Chipotle made a big show of claiming to be non-GMO, but they lied about it. The GMOs were only removed from soybean oil used in their burritos, they were still in the meat, the cheese and the soda. If there is a thing such as Science Karma, Chipotle got bit by it. A real issue - making people vomit due to their products - has haunted them since. In the "Food Evolution" movie, a Chipotle marketing executive was even caught on a "hot" mic cackling with a paid organic food promoter, economist Chuck Benbrook, about funding efforts to put warning labels on GMOs in Vermont. So they didn't guard their credibility very well and it hasn't gotten better for them since. You have less chance of being attacked by a shark - or being killed by a cow - than getting out of a Chipotle without heaving, as Dr. Alex Berezow showed.
