A new paper in Environmental Science&Technology Letters (created a decade ago to ride the 'everything causes cancer' craze) claims that not only are 'microplastics' harmful - because in modern times we can detect anything in anything and if you can detect it, it is killing you - you can and should remove them by both boiling and filtering the water in your home.It is so bizarre - we'd have been extinct 150,000 years ago if our bodies did not have the ability to harmlessly excrete lots and lots and lots of trace chemicals - that no mainstream media outlet would promote it.

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.

Raw milk producers are dangerous, with 700X more foodborne illness risk than pasteurized milk which has had pathogens neutralized. Raw cheese has a better safety record because folk wisdom says that after 60 days the bad stuff is dead.

'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. 

In 2019, government union employees insisted they were so vital that private sector alternatives like charter schools should be denied any funding. In 2020, government union employees said they were so interchangeable anyone on a Zoom call could educate children just as well as humans in a classroom.

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. 

With some journals publishing 100,000 articles per year, you have to be truly naïve to believe they are all peer-reviewed in the sense that the public thinks peer review works. Journals don't pay for peer review, but they sure get paid, often even to publish articles.

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

Las Vegas calls itself Sin City, but there are few sins actually available. Having a cigar after a steak? Banned. Prostitution? Banned. The only big sin still legal is Gluttony, and you will pay a lot for that one, while Greed is allowed but stupid if you can do math. The house is always going to win eventually.Still, if you are going to be a glutton, you can at least do it quasi-ethically; by only eating plants. A new analysis of Vegas reveals the best places to go if you prefer to avoid a normal human diet, but if we believed that was sound science we'd endorse organic food and get some of that $3 billion per year in environmental trial lawyer money.

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.