I got an email from a PR agent for a vitamin company criticizing other vitamin companies for doing a questionnaire for visitors to their website and then recommending up to 8 vitamins based on their health goals and current self-reported state in this material plane. Others got it down to 2 pills a day. Still too many, they said!The two doctors behind this company did the exact same thing, except the big news was they got it down to 1 pill. In other words, they paid someone to promote the big breakthrough that they created a multivitamin. Multivitamins have existed since 1943. Even during World War II, with sugar and meat rationed, someone found a way to be a grifter and call it science.

The pandemic changed a lot of political landscaping when it comes to science. The anti-vaccine movement was once squarely centered inside the left but now lots of right-wing people have done their best to make Republicans look just as stupid. Prior to 2021, environmental activists were not only comfortable with anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists under their umbrella, they embraced them, because they were overwhelmingly their wealthy donors. Now even Brooklyn hipsters and their shoulder cats say they are on Team Science again but the kookier members of the progressive movement remain opposed to nearly all applied science. They are even turning on vegetarians.

Erika Girardi, a "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" star, has been sued in a new $2.1 million complaint claiming she "aided and abetted" Tom in his law firm Girardi&Keese's alleged financial wrongdoings. They are being sued by the people who represented because he would get settlements and he kept the money, it is claimed.

In the outstanding "Charlie's Angels" film of 2000, a spectacular opening sequence is just that; one of our heroines (in disguise as LL Cool J in disguise as...an African prince? It's never said who "Mr. Jones" is supposed to be, other than awesome) pops the emergency exit door on the very large airplane with her elbow to carry a terrorist wearing a bomb vest into the open air and save everyone.Drew Barrymore, the heroine in that scene, is about 5'4" and maybe 120 lbs. soaking wet. She couldn't have done that. At 6'2" and 100 lbs. heavier, neither could I. It's great cinema but terrible physics.

If you were an environmental activist or a politician looking to use any world event to gain cultural traction against nuclear science after slowly losing ground due to concerns about climate change, Fukushima was manna from heaven. The prospect of a nuclear meltdown is just what you hoped for to get the most viable clean energy source banned.

It's easy not to be sympathetic to heroin junkies. They are self-victimizing lifestyle addicts and the Obama administration CDC's efforts to blame Big Pharma for a recreational opioid addiction look ridiculous when the same Big Pharma is now saving the world from COVID-19.But people addicted to heroin are not the same as those who eat too much cheese. There are limits to how we should let politicians diminish the plight of addicts. 

In 2010, during the California governor race, the Jerry Brown campaign called his Republican opponent Meg Whitman a "whore." Democrats not only had no issue with that, the National Organization for Women even rushed to endorse him to prevent criticism of him, with the rationalization that she 'was kind of a whore.'A lot has changed since then. Democrats are no longer calling it The Monica Lewinsky Scandal or vilifying her to protect President Clinton, and George Soros can no longer get away with blaming fellow Democrat and current Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand for Al Franken being forced to resign for his behavior.

San Francisco once tried to ban Happy Meals and golf. Their residents and political leaders overwhelmingly believed vaccines were causing autism.All of those were backed by science, they said. They loved science. Science was on their side.Reality was quite different. Instead of accepting science, they were picking a lone study or fringe finding and embracing it. No differently than how people who believe in astrology or that a vaccine does not create "natural" immunity only read things that support their confirmation bias.

With the James Webb Space Telescope reaching its final orbit in space, people are starting to express their belief, and even disbelief, that everything has worked so far. No one will be more surprised than NASA. When this project began as a successor to Hubble, the joint confidence level was only 50%. They got funding from Congress in 1996 claiming they could do it but to impartial experts it was a coin flip.

Neil Young has never been a favorite of mine so I won't miss not playing him on Spotify. Throughout his career he has simply shown an ability to easily pivot from things like breezy bigotry ("Southern Man") to anti-science posturing ("The Monsanto Years") and I always assumed it was for one of two reasons; he is misinformed and therefore easily exploited as one of the "useful" idiots that smart groups exploit, or he is just greedy and makes music he knows can sell.Either way, he has hundreds of millions of dollars in his bank account and I do not. The free market has spoken.