Science 2.0

American health care is expensive as are drugs. Both are due to government involvement. If a company is forced to spend 10 years and a billion extra dollars in clinical trials that don't improve safety, they are just placebos so government can say they held companies "accountable", that raises costs for everyone.Other countries exploit America that way. They wait until the costs are incurred and approval is set in the US, and then tell the company they can only sell in that country for less. The company has to get its biggest profit in the country that made the success possible and Americans pay the cost so Canada can get cheaper drugs.

There are about 3X as many white women as black in the US but white women get 8X as much for donated eggs and Diane M. Tober in "Eggonomics" suggests wealthy people looking for specific traits has gotten to the point of being eugenics.

The World Health Organisation, the last major body to accept that COVID-19 was a pandemic, is out in front extending its highest emergency level over, of all things, monkeypox.We now know WHO held off on declaring COVID-19 an emergency because former President Donald Trump said it was an emergency and we should cut travel from China. Then he instructed FDA to prepare emergency use authorization standards for a vaccine they believed the private sector could create fast if government got out of the way.(1)

Astrology is one of those things that makes no sense to literate people. The position of stars a billion light-years away determined your personality, but if you are in the eastern world that personality could be completely different than if you were born 2000 miles west? See: I was a Virgo this morning, now I am a Leo! I totally feel different.

If you ever get the chance to visit Turkey, I encourage you to do so. Like Civil War battlefields in the southern US, you can trip and stumble across something old - except in the case of Turkey it could be 2,000 years old.Some sites are archaeological research and you can't just wander around like you can in Cappadocia. That is the case with the Göbekli Tepe temples in southern Turkey. It was inhabited in neolithic times and is ground zero in the culture wars over whether agriculture begat civilization or the other way around. Archaeological evidence shows they processed grain there, for example, but not that they grew it. 

Activists who just happen to take donations from competitors to normal farming - e.g. organic industry trade groups, corporations, and foreign nationals laundering money through offshore donor-advised funds - get paid to claim farming is a problem.(1)

During last evening's Republican National Convention, speakers repeatedly invoked the fentanyl crisis and blamed lax border control and unchecked illegal immigration. Democrats, on the other hand, blame Big Pharma, and argue corporate exploitation of supply chain monitoring loopholes fueled the US opioid epidemic.They are both right. Every high-profile death related to fentanyl had it purchased illegally, that is due to crime syndicates, while the other side argues that it doctors and pharmaceutical companies caused the addiction which forced them to go the illegal route.

If epidemiologists were held accountable for the high costs, drug shortages, and food and chemical misinformation they cause, nonsense like claiming a type 2 diabetes drug that is popular off-label for weight loss in rich people also prevent dementia would stop.Yet the reason so many "studies" by epidemiologists are being pushed onto the public now is because it is a fad. Fads, creating them or capitalizing on them, is big business for lawyers on one side and corporations on the other, and epidemiologists capitalize on that.

Suicide is the runaway leader in gun deaths in the United States and a new demography paper says more government control of the alcohol business might provide a solution for that, and homicides also.This was a statistical analysis, so only EXPLORATORY, but they correlate more restrictive alcohol laws with a reduction in specific states’ homicide rates. The authors at RAND used the Alcohol Policy Scale index, which measures state-year alcohol policy environments, higher is more social authoritarian, lower is more freedom, plus vital deaths data (total homicides, total suicides, firearm homicides, and firearm suicides) drawn from the National Vital Statistics System.

Each year when air conditioners are needed, California has to ask EPA for permission to violate federal emissions standards and burn enough natural gas to keep the brown-outs that nearly got Governor Gavin Newsom recalled from happening again.

There are lots of stories about the poor in America, and have been for decades. Smart demographers know that, like racism, if everyone is talking about The Poor, it's almost eliminated.One of the giant cracks in the communist dictatorship called the USSR last century was when the television program "60 Minutes" had a segment on poverty in America. It was designed to tug at the heartstrings of those with more money. The USSR ran it for their citizens but it actually backfired. Being in 'poverty' in America meant having a television and more living space than anyone not an elite in the Soviet Union had.

If you tell me an old white person in America opposes nuclear power, I can tell you how they vote. I can also tell you with alarming accuracy what they think about lots of science, like food and medicine. They think natural gas is why climate change happens.The reality is that climate change happened due to...them. Democrats gutted nuclear energy in America 30 years ago. Democrats cheered when Senator John Kerry and President Bill Clinton declared that any nuclear energy research could be a nuclear bomb. This was the capstone of a 30-year effort to undermine nuclear power in America, with politicians, their supporters, and allies in corporate media invoking the Precautionary Principle and saying any risk was too much.