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.
Environmental Working Group, the Extinction Rebellion of affordable produce, is always in a war on strawberries - unless they only contain pesticides their organic industry corporate donors use or sell.For the scientifically literate, those with at least the intellect of 17th century peasants who understood 'the dose makes the poison', strawberries are healthy and safe. as is the rest of the EWG Dirty Dozen list that just happens to never include organic food sprayed with toxic chemicals the day it's shipped to Whole Foods.This year, strawberries will be even better than usual. There are two reasons: rain and a cooler spring. Those mean larger fruit, and also extended shelf life, which means less waste. That is a win on every level.
A new case study sounds the alarm that per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are detectable in Greenland and the Faroe Islands. The authors say the levels are alarmingly high.What does that mean? No studies have shown health issues related to PFAS yet and if they were a health concern, it would be known after 100 years. Yet cancer is not up, no environmental or lifestyle health issues are up except obesity, and that is due to an abundance of affordable food even for the world's poor. PFAS are so ubiquitous they are detectable in the Ittoqqortoormiit villagers of East Greenland, which means if they are harmful people should be dropping left and right, yet the only casualties so far are mice who get 10,000 times the exposure humans will get in their lives.
A new paper laments fine particulate matter in Asia. which is like worrying about third-hand smoke when actual smoking is still killing people there.
Most of the world relies on a 113-year-old chemical reaction used every day. It is the Haber (or Haber-Bosch) process and while its contribution to energy usage and emissions is negligible compared to its benefits, the private sector is always looking for ways to keep things affordable. That means trying to come up with a fundamentally better way to fix nitrogen than the one invented before The Great War.
After spending thousands of years converging on the perfect beers, this century culture went crazy and overdid hops, tinkered with grains, and generally made niche beers at high cost. Yet there is no question craft beers are big business, a growing segment when balanced lagers are in decline.
If you believed Monsanto controlled 500,000 biologists who accepted GMOs and weedkillers worldwide while Whole Foods, with more revenue, was standing alone selling organic food that made you healthier, you are a conspiracy theorist. You're not alone, even if the demographics changed. A few years ago, conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his claims that cell phones cause cancer and vaccines cause autism were embraced by the crazy fringe of the Democratic Party, like Organic Consumers Association and their puppet attack groups such as US Right To Know and SourceWatch. Now he is embraced by the crazy fringe of the Republican party, who think the COVID-19 vaccine is a Big Pharma effort to control our brains.
A crippling flaw in much epidemiology is that it takes survey results as truthful and then seeks to correlate that to some benefit or harm. It's why epidemiologists said butter was bad and trans fats were good, until butter was good and trans fats were bad. If you were gullible enough to buy quinoa, teff, or any other superfood, some influencer you believed had an epidemiology paper on their side.
In the 1990s, utility regulations promised to do for electricity what it had done for airline travel and telephone calls - reduce costs by 90 percent for consumers. California instead did what government had done to cable television costs; used over-regulation so that only the largest companies could survive the political phalanx they created.In the early 2000s, a California Governor was recalled because he refused to use an executive order to mitigate the energy crisis government over-regulation had created. PG&E, the largest government-chosen utility, was banned from owing its power lines, and they could not change rates without government permission. They could not buy on the spot market, when demand was high, without government permission.
While modern weedkillers are great about using fewer chemicals and therefore less runoff into streams, the organic manufacturing process uses older, less effective compounds and that means on a calorie-per-calorie basis, the harm to the environment may be substantial. Water contaminated with copper sulfate, the most popular organic weedkiller, is harmful to crops, animals, and people.
One way to keep a healthy genetic population is a diverse enough group that there can be a random exchange of material. If that is a big factor, then geographically isolated giraffes on preserves may be at future risk.
It is well established that although acupuncture, chiropractic care, massage therapy, yoga, and meditation/mindfulness market themselves as Asian traditional techniques that will help buyers avoid the same Big Pharma industry that gives us cancer treatments and vaccines, the overwhelming users in America are not Asians at all, they are wealthy white female progressives.
In the 1990s, culture seemed to truly get that cigarettes and the damage they cause are the leading preventable lifestyle killer. Tobacco companies got penalized to the tune of tens of billions of dollars for their part in suppressing data showing the harms of smoking but instead of celebrating the win and using that money to promote smoking cessation and harm reduction, much of it went to trial lawyer yacht payments and the "expert witnesses" they support. Some went to anti-smoking groups, who were now reliant on Big Tobacco money and, you guessed it, then had to get allied epidemiologists to start promoting a new lawsuit, this time for second-hand and even third-hand smoke as causes of cancer.(1)
