During the Obama administration, he was concerned about vaccines causing autism and it showed when it came to guidance about swine flu vaccines. His administration banned multi-use vials because of his party's insistence that preservatives caused the disorder.
It's commonplace for older generations to criticize the young. In my early career, an older fellow told me he wouldn't hire anyone who didn't know how to use a slide rule. Another only a decade older than me said he only wanted to work with people who had built their own crystal radio or some equivalent.
In ancient Egypt, the heart was the key to a happy afterlife. It lived on after death, they believed, and in the Duat, the Netherworld, it revealed a truth man's words could not hide.The 42 gathered gods would measure the heart and if it weighed more than the Feather of Truth which adorned the head of Maat, their Goddess of Justice, Order, and Truth, it was consumed by the Goddess Ammit, Devourer of the Dead, who had the body of a crocodile, a lion, and a hippopotamus, and you were gone from existence forever.People had a lot of ways to get heavy hearts. Theft, anger, even eavesdropping added weight.
In politics, one way to make your belief in alternative energy seem feasible is to make its competitors expensive. President Obama did that when he began to subsidize the domestic solar energy industry at unprecedented levels.(1) He brought in Dr. Stephen Chu, who had advocated $9-a-gallon gasoline, from inside his high-paying job in academia to be in charge of energy policy for Democrats. He was right in his agenda, solar could be feasible if its conventional energy competitors were forced to be 300% more expensive.
Once upon a time, wealthy white women virtue signaled to other wealthy white women when they spent $500 on snacks at stores they're paid to promote, like "upscale" grocery chain Erewhon, where its overpriced nonsense supposedly leads to a "radiant" lifestyle.That time is still now. This one is especially fun, because two words after assuring us it "has literally sold out everywhere" she tells gullible viewers that you can buy it at the store she's being paid $5 to promote.
If you read environmental groups, we are closer to our doom than ever. Bees are nearly extinct, cell phones are causing cancer, and hydroelectric power is devastating the land.None of those are true yet they all have claims found in journals and in media. So it has been with mercury emissions, where computer models so poorly designed they'd get you fired in the private sector if you tried to recommend a working prototype using them sail through peer review.
Do you think the 2008 financial meltdown was caused by religious evil? I don't, I think it was caused by populism in Congress that made it a potential prison sentence to deny anyone a mortgage and guaranteed mortgages for unqualified people.(1)If you instead think it was evil, "Slaves of Satan" by Patrick R. Bell is a solid work. For the rest of us, well, maybe. It requires a certain amount of suspension of disbelief. The 20th century philosopher Bertrand Russell proposed if you create a closed system and introduce a contradiction anything can be proven. Dan Brown used this to fantastic effect in books like "The Da Vinci Code" and if you believe in evil as an external control, like demons, it can explain a lot.
Get-out-the-vote campaigns matter, which is why U.S. political parties encourage those in their tribe to vote by mail long before any controversies can change their mind. Voting is so predictable that about six percent of voters actually decide the election.Passion motivates, and that is shown by a new survey result which claims that undecided voters are also less likely to vote at all. Either they don't care - one party brags about their stock market gains while the other claims they'll be better for the economy - or they don't believe their vote matters. Like voters in California, unless Democrats are able to overturn the Electoral College.
Starting tonight, and lasting until Thanksgiving, Earth has a second moon.
With a 4th generation nuclear plant finally getting built in the U.S., 30 years after the federal government blocked all advanced energy research, there are so few old environmentalists still in power that alternative energy wishful thinking can make way for science. They aren't going without a fight, though. Solar and wind haven't improved in 50 years but have still gotten $4 trillion in subsidies - all to change conventional energy share by 0.1%.
When COVID-19 broke out, it was a US election year and that meant a lot of common sense gave way to politics. Democrats charged that then-President Trump was putting lives at risk by telling FDA to fast-track a vaccine, after insisting that closing airports to China was racist and xenophobic because the World Health Organisation had not declared a pandemic. Government insiders spread the word to debunk concerns about a nearby wet market in Wuhan and the safety of its two labs even though an employee had been convicted of selling lab animals in that wet market. China scrubbed its coronavirus database out of existence to outsiders.
New mothers are under a lot of pressure. They are told they have to breastfeed and if they don't, the formula they use may cause their child to have worse grades in school. And if the government shuts down formula factories for no coherent reason and imports aren't allowed because the identical product in Europe hasn't spent a billion dollars and 10 years to get FDA approval, that is a worry.
Prior to the takeover of environmentalism by Earth Day's overt communist malcontents (1) it was devoted to clean water and neighborhoods in cities, where the poorest lived.To get attention and money from other wealthy elites, it pivoted to rural rivers and streams and minorities were marginalized in the rush to control government that would control conservation and "endangered" species(2) and clean water for people of colors stopped being important.
