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.
Despite Vermont's Agricultural Innovation Board (AIB), created to inform regulatory recommendations using science, flatly stating there was no basis for a ban on a class of safe pesticides called neonicotinoids, and agreement by Vermont’s Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets, the Vermont Senate just passed House Bill H706, which will ban such insecticides despite decades of safe use.
Evolutionary psychology, the discipline that claimed we're being manipulated by flowers and evolved to like the appearance of black men, also made the bold assertion that the income of your parents during pregnancy made you...gay?
If even a wealthy like Germany has to lie about emissions to placate government-funded environmentalists and burn wood and buy gas from Russia, it seems unfair to criticize a poor country like Congo, but the culture war on oil can't think about any of that.If you don't want to look like a rich, white progressive telling poor black people that the climate is more important than their children, the way to do it is to write...anonymously.And an ironically-named humanities journal like Critical Historical Studies will still publish it, uncritically.
China has quietly overtaken France to become the world's second-largest producer of nuclear energy.
As Lenin's Birthday Earth Day approaches, all of media are pillaged by public relations flaks being paid by 'green' companies who are using capitalism to promote their financial form of environmental socialism.One thing they have in common; they claim whatever they are selling is more ethical than what everyone else is selling, and using their sticker will also make you part of the 1%. Literally. A claim promoted by an organization that sells certification stickers, 1% For The Planet, is that companies 'certified' by them or similar groups have a 70% chance of better growth than companies who don't.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a lawyer who leveraged a name that was essentially beatified by Democrats into a lucrative career trying to promote corporate conspiracies about cell phones (cancer!), GMOs (cancer!) and vaccines(everything else!) and he had some success.Thanks to his efforts raising money for Obama his name was floated as head of EPA at the end of 2008, but even a president-elect who was on the fence about vaccines causing autism and had advisors who believed in UFOs and that girls can't do math told Obama that RFK Jr. was too kooky.(1)
People are living better lives for longer than ever but an EXPLORATORY study using a computer simulation says there is reason for concern; people are getting cancer younger than ever.The authors analyzed results of blood samples from 148,724 people ages 37 to 54 in the UK Biobank and focused on metrics 'linked' to aging, like albumin and glucose. Those nine values were put into the 'mPhenoAge algorithm to estimate biological age and that age was compared to actual age.
Urban/local/small ag is a feel-good fallacy. There is nothing wrong with wishful thinking and aspirations, we all have harmless beliefs that get into our brains. Some home ag is clearly ridiculous - a $150 machine to grow $0.25 worth of herbs is a gimmick for the rich - but mostly it's good, slow exercise or at least good to not be on a tablet watching TikTok videos so China can harvest your personal data.
Wealthy countries with natural 'breadbaskets' - places where it is easy to grow food - have so much abundance they can put special labels like 'organic' on tens of thousands of products and charge more and people will spend $100 billion on them.Other countries need science, yet it is often the case that regions like Europe dictate what science poorer nations can use. Disagree, and you cannot sell in Europe. Then they mobilize relief efforts for the countries they keep poor. When poor people are geopolitical pawns for rich ones, can hunger ever be eliminated?
Misinformation scholarship is not new, it just got more attention due to Brexit and Trump - and that's due to the left finally focusing on an issue when it's happening on the other side.Prior to 2021 there was little concern among the left about the anti-vax movement - because it was dominated by their tribe. Academic progressive waved away overwhelming CDC data showing a clear apolitical demarcation by trotting out surveys showing the denial was not that small.Yet if you asked who's more likely to deny evolution, the right or left, the left reflexively declared it was Republicans. Except the different between the left and right on evolution was only 9 points - far smaller than the denial of vaccine by the left.
Large Language Models, colloquially called Artificial Intelligence by companies selling rebranded autocomplete tools to other companies and the public, can automate a lot of entry-level projects but when it comes to anything more complex the flaws are quickly seen.When Black people using social media exhibit possible depression in their prose, a paper claims LLM/AI tools don't detect it as easily as they do other skin colors.
Risk factors like salt and sugar intake and high blood pressure for heart attacks and disease need constant rethink if they are going to be more than folk wisdom.Low-salt and sugar-free have too many vested interests to get critical thinking on how valid population-level statistics are for individuals, and 'high' blood pressure rarely gets questions about how reliable the correlation was that picked 130/85 mmHg (millimeters of mercury) as high blood pressure for everyone. Thosa blood pressure numbers are the clunkily-named systolic on top over the diastolic below. The top is the pressure in arteries as the heart beats while the bottom is the pressure at rest.(1)
