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Five Reasons You're Right Not To Trust Corporate Science Media - The Bloomberg Example

Bloomberg Businessweek has written another anti-Monsanto article, nothing special about that, but this time they did something new; they consciously sought to interfere in an environmental lawsuit against Monsanto in California and to promote fear and doubt about the science community and regulators who overwhelmingly accept the science consensus on genetically-modified foods - colloquially called GMOs, because Monsanto received a patent on that one kind of genetic engineering.

It's not the first time members of this team of Peter Waldman, Lydia Mulvany, Tiffany Stecker, and Joel Rosenblatt have...

Happy Endings, While Dining Out & in Our Heads

"Well, we believe first of all that, that human beings are probably the animal on earth best designed for mistake making compared to any other animal there is. … When you do make a mistake, we do have a philosophy, which we call the five As, which is first be aware you made it. If you're not aware, you're nowhere….Number two, acknowledge it. Number three, apologize for it. Number four, act on it. And number five, apply additional generosity. And we have found time and time again, this happens all day long, because again, restaurants just like everything else in life are just a series of mistakes."

Danny Meyer

The researchers...

TIME Has A Science Article Based On A Yogic Flying Instructor: Here Are More Ideas They Can Use

The anti-science army in the war on common pesticides like glyphosate (and adjacently GMOs, those groups don't know enough science to know they are different) is having a Gettysburg moment.(1) They are out of options so they are making a desperate charge but they are in an open field a long way off and opposing them on the other side is every legitimate science and regulatory body.

Yet supporting their war on evidence-based decision-making are journals like JAMA, which now seem to do editorial review of "Letters" rather than peer review, and journalists at partisan publications like the New York Times. Rather than names like Early and Heth and...

Retraction Watch Begins For Gary Ruskin Conspiracy Claims In Critical Public Health

Gary Ruskin, the chief junkyard dog of US Right To Know, an industry front group created by Organic Consumers Association to harass and intimidate scientists, has managed to pay-to-publish a Short Article which allows him to claim he has been in a peer-reviewed journal.

That has to be placed in context. In an open-access digital world, where thousands of predatory journals now exist which allow anyone to buy the right to claim they have been peer-reviewed, being peer-reviewed doesn't mean what it used to mean. If I gather five astrologers to review some article on astrology and put it in an online astrology...

After Crackdown on a Pain Clinic, a Tragic Double-Suicide

"In my mind, what the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] is essentially doing is telling a diabetic who's been on insulin for 20 years that they no longer need insulin and they should be cured. They just don't understand what chronic pain is."

That's what Gretchen Elliott's brother told Vice at his sister's funeral last month. Gretchen and her husband Danny committed suicide because they could no longer endure a pain that doctors were terrified of treating. It was the most recent of the many dreadful outcomes that follow when cops practice medicine.

Danny had chronic, searing pain from an electrocution accident years earlier. For treatment, he and Gretchen, his caretaker,...

'Consumed' the Movie: An Unofficial Recap

Consumed is an anti-GMO movie that was just released on Netflix under Conspiracy Theory Movies. I recapped it here so that you don't have to watch it. You're welcome.

Scene 1: Danny Glover’s Organic Farm

The movie opens as Danny Glover walks around in a dark barn, feeding goats and a dog out of silver pails. Danny Glover is authentic with his pails. He also wears suspenders and carries a lantern because he is an authentic organic farmer who doesn’t…believe in flashlights? Headlights! Scary music. Someone has come to intimidate or run over Danny Glover but we don’t know yet because this is a thriller.

I still can’t believe anyone made a thriller about how we breed plants. They should have used mutagenesis because radiation has a lot more...

COVID Vaccines Put Anti-Science Activists to Shame

This article was originally published at Leaps Mag. It is reprinted with permission.

It turns out that, despite the destruction and heartbreak caused by the COVID pandemic, there is a silver lining: Scientists from academia, government, and industry worked together and, using the tools of biotechnology, created multiple vaccines that surely will put an end to the worst of the pandemic sometime in 2021. In short, they proved that science works, particularly that which comes from industry. Though politicians and the public love to hate Big Ag and Big Pharma, everybody comes begging for help when the going gets tough.

The change in public attitude is tangible. A ...

Editors at Journal 'Science' Call Me a Corporate Shill

Every decent science writer has, at some point in his or her career, been called a "corporate shill." It's a rite of passage.

If a science writer defends GMOs as safe and effective, he's called a Monsanto shill. If he says that vaccines are also safe and effective, he's a shill for Big Pharma. Defending America's conventional farmers results in being labeled a shill for Big Ag or Big Dairy. Stating the objective truth that our food supply is relatively safe results in being called a shill for Big Food. There's no way around it. If a science writer defends good science, he's called a shill.

The cretins making such accusations are the usual suspects: Anti-vaxxers, anti-GMO(rons),...

Grass Fed Cows And Better Milk: Is Industry Funding A Bad Thing When It's An Organic Corporation?

A new paper which claims that cows fed "organic" grass provide nutritionally superior milk is sure to set off cheers among the organic customer base who have long wanted to believe that buying organic was not just a process choice, but a health one. There is just one problem. The research was funded by industry, the Organic Valley brand, the very thing organic consumers say is wrong with Industrial Farming. Multiple co-authors disclosed their financial conflicts of interest due to being affiliated with the company, and one co-author, Dr. Chuck Benbrook, is an agricultural economist who was unceremoniously kicked out of the school where he was a glorified adjunct once his organic industry funding...

We're On History Channel, NYU Journalism Goes Anti-Vaccine, and More Media Outreach Last Week

1. None of you are naive, so it won't surprise you to learn that in Manhattan, there is a definitive political skew, which bleeds over into what science they accept. And in academia there is a skew so overt it can only be discrimination. And in journalism there is a political skew so overt it's both of the aforementioned.

So it won't surprised you to learn that Dan Fagin (email dan.fagin@nyu.edu), Charles Seife (email charles.seife@nyu.edu), and other "professors" in the NYU Journalism group, are defending the vaccine and agriculture deniers at Organic Consumers Association and their puppet sites. It also won't surprise you to learn that the...