Thursday, June 11, 2015

The NY Times:
The article entitled "Fears, Not Facts, Support G.M.O.-Free Food By JANE E. BRODY" perpetuates some of the worst inaccuracies of the mainstream media on GMO crops. We are told that "despite myriad assurances from scientists" the public still has fears about GMO crops. That's like asserting that scientists think Nuclear energy is safe. Some scientists do, of course, mostly those employed by the nuclear energy industry.

We are told that "Humans have been genetically modifying food and feed plants and animals for millenniums," an industry canard that claims that tinkering with plant DNA is the same as cross breeding. For whether GMOs are safe, readers are told that everything must be approved by the Food and Drug Administration. No mention of the revolving door between governmental agencies and the chemical companies.

No mention either of Roundup, that cancer causing product that GMO plants are engineered to tolerate. The result of this DNA tinkering is that most GMO foods are bathed in Roundup on their way to our table. Of course, Brody warns us, nothing is foolproof, so "as with defective cars, malfunctioning products may have to be recalled."
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/08/fears-not-facts-support-gmo-free-food/?_r=0

-->Time to recall Jane Brody, The NYT health expert who thinks that GMO products can be fixed like defective cars. And this is in the famed "Science Section" of our newspaper of record. Brody is just shilling for Monsanto (whose name never appears in the article either).

———

Common Dreams:
"Responding to ongoing brinkmanship between the United States and his country, Russian President Vladimir Putin dared reporters to publish a map of the two nations' global military footprints and then 'see the difference.'

... Obama's accusations of Russia violating the 'sovereignty of other countries' are striking in light of the United States' own military strategy, which Putin highlighted days earlier in a Saturday interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.

'U.S. military spending is higher than that of all countries in the world taken together,' Putin said. 'The aggregate military spending of NATO countries is 10 times, note—10 times higher than that of the Russian Federation.'

'I invite you to publish the world map in your newspaper and to mark all the U.S. military bases on it,' Putin continued. 'You will see the difference.' "
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/06/09/putin-says-us-imperial-footprint-unmatched-draw-map-and-see

-->Tragically for all life on earth, Obama and the Pentagon are reinstituting the Cold War with Russia and China, trying to put nuclear weaponry closer and closer to both countries. Our mainstream media just plays along with the war propaganda, effectively eliminating a national debate on the increasing risks of thermonuclear war.

———

Common Dreams:
"UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has caved in to pressure from Israel and the United States and taken the Israeli military off an official list of serious violators of children’s rights, in this year’s report on children in armed conflict.

In doing so, Ban rejected an official recommendation from his own Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict Leila Zerrougui and numerous human rights organizations and child rights defenders.

Ban’s act is particularly egregious since the report found that the number of children killed in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip in 2014, at 557, was the third highest only after Iraq and Afghanistan and ahead of Syria. ...

Ban has a long history of using his office to ensure that Israel escapes accountability except for the mildest verbal censures that are almost always 'balanced' with criticism of those who live under Israeli occupation."
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/06/09/uns-ban-ki-moon-caves-takes-israel-list-serious-child-abusers

-->Talk about the use of "balanced reporting" to cover Israel's crimes, one need only look at The NYT article on Ban Ki-moon's decision. Yes, the paper mentions the 540 Palestinian children killed by Israel, but then goes on to give equal weight to the supposed crimes of Hamas: "killing a 4-year-old Israeli boy and gravely wounding at least six Israeli children" with indiscriminate rocket fire. Our newspaper of record can be counted on to cover up Israeli war crimes, just like the Secretary General of the UN.