Folk medicine, traditional medicine, alternative medicine, complementary medicine, wellness - it is all the same thing rebranded to be sold anew but one thing remains consistent; none of it is actual medicine.

Acupuncture is a placebo, massages are not evidence-based treatments, your Blue Apron "organic" food subscription is not preventing any illness, and so the Biden administration has rightly decreed that you can't use a Health Savings Account - untaxed funds meant to be used for medical care - and buy alternatives to medicine. Not even if you you get a doctor to give you a note saying it is real. The irony is that because his constituents overwhelmingly distrust science, his administration launched an unscientific  “Food is Medicine” initiative last year.

Food fads in the 'food is medicine' space try to use science jargon - nutriceuticals (literal food as medicine), polyphenols, prebiotics, all so they can  promote fad diets around something new - like fermented foods recently.

So-called "organic food" is a gigantic industry, $135 billion in revenue per year, augmented by a corporate panel created by the Clinton administration that exempts them from real U.S. Department of Agriculture oversight. They can exempt any synthetic ingredients they want and still sell an organic sticker (and do - dozens and dozens of them) and have insider corporations that "certify" organic status, but only make any money if they sell the stickers.

'In a high tide, all boats rise' is a government platitude about why they continue to increase taxes and regulatory costs while creating higher inflation, but markets are not a level playing field. If you do more work and I do less and we are forced into the same result, you do less because there is no point. Half of boats sink.

Only a Keynesian economist or someone else lacking basic literacy of the human condition thinks otherwise. 

Is there room for centrist journalism in 2024? The Wall Street Journal exists, so yes, but that doesn't mean there is room for two.

Yet Jimmy Finkelstein, who owned he Hill when it was centrist, thought he could do it again, and had enough connections he could raise $50 million. Yet instead of spending that The Messenger money wisely, he threw big salaries at journalists who are economically conservative about their own funding even if the majority espouse the benefits of socialism - and weren't going to join any start-up unless the money was big. As in ProPublica money.

Ten months later the worst kept secret in media is officially out - $50 million gone. 

In July of 1937, Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan never arrived at Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean, on their trip around the world.

In September, the Deep Sea Vision team, funded privately by Tony Romeo, began scanning 5,200 square miles in search of Earhart and Noonan's Lockheed 10-E Electra aircraft - and they think they have location it.

Their proof are sonar images of a plane-shaped object 16,000 feet down, under miles from Howland Island, where Earhart and Noonan were supposed to refuel.


Image: Deep Sea Vision

Pseudoscience often rebrands itself under new names but never really goes away. Some people not only believe in acupuncture, they even believe in acupuncture for their coffee grinds. Other things have even less evidence, like chakras, astrology, and their more modern weird love child, the Enneagram.

Like The Flu Fighter Martini, just because Enneagram numbers are in The Guardian, official media outlet of the anti-science left, does not make any of it legitimate.

Before COVID-19 became a worldwide pandemic, nearly 20,000 coronavirus samples in a database (http://batvirus.whiov.ac.cn) were removed by the Chinese government. Prior to that, I had noted a suspicious passing of a Chinese whistleblower, Li Wenliang, who had been arrested by the government and suddenly died. Many other doctors were arrested for 'promoting' dissent.

The US Department of Agriculture believes that foreign countries may own up to 40,000,000 acres of farm land.

No one really knows despite the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act of 1978 requiring it.