Running a pro-science nonprofit is a poor business model. Especially compared to lawyer groups like Environmental Working Group or rich deniers like Greenpeace.

'Your food is safe' is a terrible call to action but 'evil chemical corporations are killing you' gets the money rolling in - even though the former is true and the latter is a paranoid conspiracy theory with no basis in fact.

Social authoritarians like to make people more reliant on government and then control what people do with the government assistance they are now reliant upon. It keeps those in control in positions of power. The most recent example is with government funding for food coming attached to strings telling people what they can buy with the money.

The Usual Suspects of the anti-science movement, Center for Biological Diversity(1), Environmental Working Group(2) and more, are back in court to try and force California to accept that money is magic and rich homeowners with solar panels should be paid for electricity they send to the grid - at full retail price.
It sounds ridiculous. Imagine if a customer buys a vegetable your farm grows says they should have the right to force you to buy vegetables they grow in their garden at full retail price from them. Not the price you get, the full retail cost.

You'd laugh. You have tractors and employees and materials. Liabilities. Even more ridiculous, you helped give them the money for the land they used to grow the vegetables.

The electric car industry is held back by reliance on conventional energy. Despite spending trillions of dollars on mandates and subsidies, solar and wind alternatives have made little difference in the share of energy filled by natural gas and oil. 

Some of that is economics. A subsidy prevents innovation because it props up the status quo, and environmentalists and the politicians they support remain opposed to nuclear power, but some is plain physics. Lithium-ion batteries are stuck in the 1990s because there are real challenges to be overcome in the next generation.

The bond between humans and dogs is one of the oldest stories in anthropology. It may also be a cautionary tale for other animals, though the organic, holistic, free-range, ayurvedic, shade-tree grown dog food is probably pretty good.



A new study of bones recovered from Gough’s Cave and Pınarbaşı says we may have been dressing pets up in funny outfits even farther back. Evidence shows they were actually accompanying us on walks over 14,000 years ago, even before agriculture created the spark of civilization.

“I have lost D’Artagnan, in whom I had every confidence,” wrote King Louis XIV to his Queen Consort, Maria Theresa of Spain, after he received news that his right-hand man, Charles de Batz de Castelmore, the Earl of Artagnan, was killed during the siege of Maastricht in the summer of 1673.

D’Artagnan would become famous thanks to an 1844 serialized novel by Alexandre Dumas, in which he was instead a young Gascon peasant who becomes a friend to Athos, Porthos, and Aramis in the King's Musketeers and saves King Louis VIII from various intrigues. It was such a hit that it made Un pour tous, tous pour un (one for all, all for one) part of the worldwide lexicon and it's been turned into dozens of films, including its greatest, Richard Lester's 1974 version.