The
Los Angeles Times got a little
Huffington Post-ish
in an article July 17th about Oxitec's genetically modified mosquito to control dengue outbreaks in various poor countries - and perhaps even in the Florida Keys.
We just had Snowmageddon and then heat a heat wave in parts of the US. Local, short-term weather events are suddenly proof of long-term climate change once again, according to journalists and biased bloggers who claim to care about science.
"Generation X", as marketing people call the generation after the Baby Boomers, aren't buying it, despite the fact that awareness campaigns about global warming have gone on for most of their lives.
If you believe that disparity between male and female salaries is sexism or at least gender bias, well, you may have a point. There's no doubt that, outside single women and men, there is a pay difference (lower for women) and an hours worked difference (more for men), so no matter which side you choose in the argument, you have a valid data point.
Organic food has terrific marketing. Despite being mega-corporations in a multi-billion dollar business, they have convinced their customers they are all small and unique and wholesome; kind of like Apple has managed to do with its technology products.
You know it is big business when companies sue each other over an employee and 'trade secrets'.
Is psychology a science?
Increasingly, the respect of science (and scientists) by the public has been dropping and a part of that reason is because the line of what science is has become fuzzy. If economics calls itself science, well, the public knows they don't know what they are talking about, so maybe it applies to climate science too. Is sociology science? What about parapsychology?
If the definition of science becomes relative, then so does acceptance of science, in a slippery slope world, so we can't expect people will accept FDA findings as science if political science is funded by the National Science Foundation and the public knows that isn't scientific at all.
Over the last year there has been increasing recognition that it isn't "the right" who are anti-science. The left has far more anti-science people; percentage-wise,
there are more anti-vaccine people who vote Democrat than there are Republicans who deny evolution or global warming. Ditto for anti-GMO stances, people who believe in psychics and UFOs, etc. The list of kooky positions that turn out to be held by people on the left is huge but you wouldn't know that from science media of the past decade.