In July of 1937, Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan, on their way around the world, missed a planned stop at Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean.

You may not even have known Noonan was on the flight, it's always been a better narrative to suggest she was solo, but one thing is well-documented. No one knows what happened to them.


Uncredited 

A few months ago, the Supreme Court continued to play Whack-A-Mole with the Biden administrationon's efforts to give control over US family farms to the EPA - under the guise of a Waters of the United States Act they expanded without a vote, and then the Clean Water Act, and then using an interpretation of the Endangered Species Act.

Eventually they may be forced to fall back on the CDC and say control over puddles in rural areas is needed due to Covid-19 Variant Seti Alpha V, or whatever we'll get before the election in November of 2024. 

We use an atomic orbital in our logo, even though it is scientifically wrong.

Scientists spend a lot of time nit-picking minutiae(1)  but sometimes you have to go with imagery the broad public understands, not try to satisfy that guy at a conference Q&A session who doesn't have a question but just wants to talk about himself.

An atomic orbital doesn't ruin trust in science, the way garbage like the manufactured 'balance of nature' or claiming sugar-free soda causes cancer or denial of agricultural breakthroughs do. What about thinking of small structures as primarily empty space?

Are universities and medical schools racist? They must be if a Supreme Court decision based on ending discrimination against Asians means fewer doctors.

Yet that is the argument in a recent JAMA op-ed; that black people won't be able to get into medical school unless a secret sauce gives them a boost. Even more, they contend, there will be more health inequity because minorities may refuse to go to a physician who is not their skin color.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration Human Foods Program is a welcome switch from the old morass of government agencies covering food safety, chemical safety and technology, with EPA (which today is in 'everything is linked to cancer' mode), USDA ('as long as it's farmers doing the lying, we don't care what the National Organics Standards Board says about other farmers') and finally FDA, which isn't even allowed to tell rice companies they are not broccoli or a garbage whiskey company that claiming to be non-GMO doesn't make a carcinogen healthier.

In 1994, President Bill Clinton listened to his constituents who said Big Pharma was a corporate conspiracy and instructed the FDA to waive away any real control of the alternative-to-medicine industry. Unless they will kill someone, as long as the $35 billion industry writes a tiny disclaimer noting that there is no scientific basis for their claims and that therefore FDA doesn't agree with any nonsense on the label, they could be set free on a gullible public.

Dr. Mark Hyman, one of the Four Horsemen of the Alternative, was pleased that his future "patient" did all that for those who think powder made from endangered species has magical properties. It's Big Business now.

Greenpeace is a horrible organization. I used to wonder how anyone could support them, but even the KKK has 3,000 members so awful people can do awful things and rationalize why they are saving us all.

Greenpeace doesn't wear funny white hats and burn crosses, but they sure hate minorities. They hate them so much they claim brown and black people are too stupid to farm using science. Greenpeace is steadfastly opposed to all genetic engineering that could make locally grown, affordable food available to countries that are not rich - unless it is a corporate donor to Greenpeace. Like the organic food companies who use lobbyists, trade groups, and marketing reps to create an 'organic' standard that exempts anything about their products from scrutiny.

In 950 AD, the first beekeeping document was created. An Irish monk noted their hives had mysteriously died off.


Flemming G (1871) Animal plagues: Their history, nature and prevention. London: Chapman and Hall.

Bees have been recording dying off en masse ever since. Just like they died before. What was the cause before pesticides existed? The same cause as kills bees today, except lacking $3 billion in revenue and allies in corporate journalism; parasites. 

California is having a mild summer but some regions are having their hottest season in 10 years. Scientists who used to note that weather is not climate have now retired and their Gen X and Millennial replacements know that citations aren't the road to new grants, media coverage is, so a whole lot of them will try to say any incremental finding has 'implications' for climate change or social justice.

The uncomfortable truth is that we don't know a lot of about climate, and denying the impact of the sun is weird. The good news is that modeling by academics is much better than it was 20 and certainly 25 years ago, when Frankenstein hockey sticks and hiding the decline were problematic.