Winter is not over yet, but I am already busy fixing the details of some conferences, schools, and lectures I will give around Europe this summer. Here I wish to summarize them, in the hope of arising the interest of some of you in the relevant events I will attend to.
Messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) is a molecule that provides blueprints for cells to make a protein that may be needed by the body. Though around for nearly 60 years before COVID-19 erupted from Wuhan, China, it didn't get a lot of attention from government-funding agencies, where the grant system most often means experiments likely to work rather than anything revolutionary,(1)
That all changed when Moderna said they could make a COVID-19 vaccine fast, they just needed the bloated federal government and its need to make companies spend 18 months getting approval for a font color on a product label to instead get out of the way. The Trump administration did just that and by the end of 2020 it was being rushed to those on the medical front lines.(2)
For convenience, let’s say it started with Photoshop. That program made it obvious not only that we couldn’t believe our eyes any more, but that photographic evidence could no longer be admissible in court. Socioeconomic implications were even wider, as new industries popped up with products purporting to tell unretouched photos from photoshopped ones. (And the trademarked noun gave rise to a verb!)
In its second year, Avian Influenza has wrecked the U.S. poultry industry and caused egg prices to rise sharply. A month into a new presidential term, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has been given
$1 billion to get the problem under control.
Hundreds of millions fewer chickens mean expensive eggs, and poor people who suffered through 44% food inflation were counting on lower prices.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
data have revealed an alarming trend: female physicians were 53% more likely to commit suicide than females in the general population. Women are still only 25% of physician suicides, men are 80% of doctors who kill themselves, and the obvious risk factor is mental health issues and a key cause for that is legal issues. The American legal system allows unlimited liability and lawyers have successfully blocked all efforts at tort reform.
You may suddenly have read a lot about the dangers of seed oils - e.g. sunflower and canola oil - and wonder why this is just being discovered.
The harms weren't recently discovered, they've still never been discovered. They're not harmful so nothing has changed except the demographic criticizing them flipped from endorsing them. They were never healthier for you either, despite claims by people touted as experts, because those claims were also based on mouse studies and food surveys. It is just the pendulum of money-driven nutrition culture that goes where political winds take them.
In September, epidemiologists out to scare people about homeopathic - "detectable" - levels of pesticides published
a paper hoping to get journalists promoting fear and doubt about agriculture.
Being the opposition to science in academia is a good place to be. They can get a publication to check off that annual box and nothing much will change. They won't get any blame.
Proposition 65 was a voter referendum that stated if a chemical was correlated to cancer, it needed to have a cancer warning label. Lawyers who were behind the public relations effort to get it passed assured consumers it would not be abused. Yet a few years later, epidemiologists inside the once-credible International Agency for Research on Cancer in France set out to gain "expert witness" contracts from lawyers and began to create more and more "correlations" - no science needed, just a possible link in mice - and now over 80,000 products carry these labels.
Not only will you find warning labels on nearly every product inside a Walmart, a warning label is on the outside, to warn you that the brick and glass has been "linked to" cancer.
The Kilometre Cubic Neutrino Telescope (KM3NeT) collaboration has reported detection of a neutrino with an estimated energy of about 220 PeV (220 million billion electron volts) by its ARCA detector.
The event, KM3-230213A, is the first evidence that neutrinos of such high energies are produced in the Universe and the most energetic neutrino ever observed.
This column deals with political opposition, resistance, and the
future of the nation. It dissects the Trump-Musk financial bromance and
the role of VP Vance. Bear with me to its end, then please comment pro,
con, or in between.
Shadow action
