Ask an environmentalist and there is not only a conspiracy to hide 'the truth' about the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, but there is a convergence of accidents designed to draw attention away from something more sinister.

Among the false claims making the rounds by activists are that animals are dying hundreds of miles away and residents have been locked out of their homes. Neither is true. Some fish may have died but the Ohio river was shown to have safe levels of butyl acrylate and no vinyl chloride. There were no toxic chemicals detected in any homes. People were told to evacuate as a precaution but all were back home by February 8th. Over 500 refused to leave their homes and were fine.

A train accident in Ohio, and the controlled release of chemicals that can be toxic at high levels, will have the Biden administration asking his appointees how they can make things safer for people. The answer is something his administration and the Obama administration when he was Vice-President opposed; pipelines.

The United States has the most stringent environmental protections in the world and a pipeline is the safest of the safe. Railcars, ships, nothing compares to the safety, and therefore nominal environmental risk that pipelines afford. Yet time and again politics has pushed science to the back.(1)

Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland and dowager Queen of France, returned to Scotland in 1561 a foreigner in the land she ruled. She married again and gave birth to a son, the future James VI, before being implicated in her husband's murder and deposed.

It only got worse after that. She escaped her imprisonment a year later and fled to England seeking help from Queen Elizabeth, but since Mary was the daughter of Henry VIII's sister, she had a claim to the throne of England also. And since Henry VIII had created a competitor to the Catholic church in order to run off with all the women he wanted (he was the head of the Anglican church and could annul anything he liked) Elizabeth was disliked by Catholics.

Tom Girardi, the lawyer whose big claim to fame was a game of chicken with Pacific Gas&Electric over a chemical detected in the water of a small town in the Mojave, was long suspected of being ethically challenged, but as long as he was sticking it to corporations it wasn't a concern for journalists.

The Biden administration has made a number of political and economic missteps - e.g. an Inflation Reduction Act that has nothing to do with inflation and won't reduce it - but its science and health gaffes get less press.

When Scott Gottlieb, MD, was in charge, FDA was on the road to becoming more nimble, but it took the COVID-19 pandemic, and watching other agencies like the CDC run in circles and demonstrate true incompetence, for FDA to really understand they are not protecting anyone by being bureaucratic roadblocks. No one is safer if a company needs 18 months and a room full of lawyers just to get permission to change the color of a font on a drug label, but that was what FDA had become.

The Biden administration has not been shy about reorganizing science and health until it does what they want, and a new move to block a mine in Alaska will probably not pass legal challenges, but is he right on the science this time?(1)

First, it is important to know politicians are rarely correct. There is no 'party of science' and no 'scientist in chief'. that is just an intellectual halo elected officials wrap their constituents in to feel good. Name a president you think is pro-science and I can tell you how they were the opposite.

Do you think hot tea causes cancer? A common weedkiller? Do you think red wine is good for you?

If so, you have been duped by scientific-sounding epidemiology that has long been finding a correlation between a product and an effect and then "suggesting" causation in press releases. And far too often is set off by anecdotes, as happened with monosodium glutamate - MSG.

If you decided you should take horse dewormer for COVID-19, that was epidemiology. If you decided flipping a mask up and down between bites of food prevented anyone from getting COVID-19, that was also epidemiology. Both are as wrong as low-fat milk, which was also epidemiology.

In engineering, an old joke goes that customers want cheap, accurate, and fast - but can only have two of those.

Business is about compromise. In food, the USDA says all farmers are farmers so they turn a blind eye to the sleazy marketing tactics of the organic segment, like paying trade groups to defame conventional food and scientists who defend agriculture while the companies themselves make advertising catering to the whitest, richest people imaginable.

Yet their customers already hate science, they think everything is a conspiracy by Monsanto, Exxon, or someone named Sackler. It does no harm to promote conspiracy theories and feel-good fallacies among True Believers. Yet it's bad if you want to appeal to normal people.

Video games are big business, far larger than movies and music - combined. Yet you never see video game developers being interrupted at lunch so fans can take a selfie. More money plus more privacy is a good industry to be in.

For the 190 million gamers in the US, it can be a little trickier. Complaints of bullying in games are common, and women complain about it more than men.