I have no idea what is happening here but I am linking to it because...I don't know why.Weird Al Yankovic as Isaac Newton takes on someone dressed as Bill Nye in an epic rap battle about science.An easy win, right? Bill Nye couldn't even figure out how to take down Ken Ham, after all. Well, in true WWE wrestling style, Neil Tyson comes in at the end and tags up for Nye. Then it's on, baby.Who wins? You decide.

It's ironic that a subset of people inclined to believe that ordinary farmers and the companies that supply them are built on an elaborate corporate conspiracy willingly suspend all logic and sense when it comes to organic food.But there you have it. However, not only is Whole Foods competing using aggressive marketing, a new article shows that they are outright lying to people; about pesticides, about nutrition, about taste. When they aren't lying, they are being deceptive. Their whole premise, it is argued, is scaring people into buying their 'alternative', overpriced food.

The Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund is a group that is basically right on a big issue - the freedom of family farms and consumers - and then takes that libertarian philosophy and does something really wrong with it: they think there is some natural right to foist off raw milk on a public which, let's face it, is not agrarian any more. Raw milk will make a lot of people sick, especially if it is embraced by the anti-science/nutritionist/fad diet segment.But they have a funny graphic which is correct, namely that relying on mainstream journalism, with its swinging pendulum of Miracle Vegetables And Cancer Causing Products, is a big mistake.To wit, TIME magazine:

In an Internet world where everyone is told they have to shamelessly promote and Buzzfeed and Upworthy "What I Saw Next Made Me Cry" titles are the norm, it is weird to see something like this, the self-chosen bio for the man who basically invented the World Wide Web. And that makes it even more awesome:And I thought my job title slightly understated my actual role... pic.twitter.com/GyLbBWbxqR— Matthew Salter (@MSalt69) June 11, 2014Yes, indeed. That is being humble

http://cheeseunderground.blogspot.com/2014/06/game-changer-fda-rules-no-...

You may not know this, but there are Democrats who don't accept climate change. Quite a lot of them. Even elites in Congress.You wouldn't know it from reading most science blogs, of course. They are firmly trapped in 2004 - and missed the 1990s, when Democrats were the anti-science party, killing the SSC and America's green energy program - and think that global warming and evolution are the only two science denial things happening in the country. Since it is election season, the first wave of 'Republicans are anti-science' articles has already hit and there will be a lull now that primary season is over, but efforts to insist that vaccine denial is not primarily Democrats are out in force.

Almost everyone agrees that the administration is engaged in a level of domestic surveillance and punitive harassment that hasn't been seen since the Nixon administration - but no one is quitting their job s over it.And so it's easy for some of the 3,000 attendees at the Joint Mathematics Meeting — a big event for their community - to engage in some moral posturing and state that mathematicians should refuse to work for the NSA. The NSA just happens to be the biggest employer of mathematicians in the country. 

Writing in Pacific Standard, Science 2.0 fave Dr. Michael White notes something that isn't obvious to the public - if you ask most biologists to identify race, they can't do it.If you ask anthropologists, sure. Race is an entirely social construct. There have been numerous efforts to make race scientific, based on differences in appearance and such. Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid, etc. were actually not flawed science rationale hundreds of years ago but this concept of race is still perpetuated.As he notes, biology can tell us all kinds of things about people; genes can match people to within 30 miles of their native village. But objectively, which is to biologically, races don't exist. Unless a redhead is a different race than a blonde.

American adults lead the world in science literacy, America leads the world in science output, America leads the world in Nobel prizes.Yet once a year a survey comes out about evolution and people who hate Religion and/or Republicans use the results as a club in their culture war.Ask the average atheist who 'accepts' evolution about adaptive radiation and most will sputter something meaningless. They know very little science, they simply have faith in what someone else wrote. How is that superior to religion. On the other side, a lot of quite scientifically literate people go to church.

Undercover journalist James O’Keefe has released a new video, this one a sting operation to expose Hollywood environmentalists.The front for this one is an undercover journalist from Project Veritas posing as "Muhammad,” a member of a Middle Eastern oil family, who is willing to pay $9 million to American filmmakers to fund an anti-fracking movie.O’Keefe entraps actor Ed Begley Jr., actress Mariel Hemingway, and director Josh Tickell (Sundance Film Festival Winner and director of environmental message movies Fuel, The Big Fix, and PUMP), who agree to the film while promising to hide the source of the funds.