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.
In 2014, the world's top polluter, China, told the United States president they unequivocally would not even discuss emissions caps or targets until 2030 and American speechwriters quickly tried to spin that into a positive. China had never even agreed on a future date before, they rationalized, so that was progress.Well, not really, but it was as much as almost everyone else was going to do under the Paris Climate Agreement.
In February, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) issued a bombastic press release to announce its 2019 Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility was going to to Sarath Gunatilake and Channa Jayasumana, anti-glyphosate protesters who claim a causal connection between glyphosate and chronic kidney disease. AAAS has long been a political body, its leadership has come solely from one political party for the last 35 years. and that means it is often going to pick and choose the science it accepts based on its political skew. But a whole lot of Democratic scientists are in biotechnology, they recognize the consensus on glyphosate and GMOs is even greater than it is climate change, and the blowback to this award announcement happened rapidly.
It's November of 2019 which means that we have officially arrived at the opening of the science fiction cult classic "Blade Runner." Let's talk about what it got right.
I was at a local theater showing of "Evil Dead: The Musical" a few weeks ago and at the end was a lot of 1980s music. The crowd that evening was overwhelmingly high school theater geeks and they knew every song, from "Come On Eileen" to "Take On Me." They knew them well enough to mash up dances from other periods while they were singing.
Rutgers University wants kids to be afraid this year. Not of ghosts and goblins, but Halloween itself. So they have published 7 hyperbolic risks designed to terrify parents.Allergies! Marijuana brownies! Makeup!Getting advice from a poison control center at Halloween is as demoralizing as ordering a steak with a microbiologist: they know so much about absolute risk they have forgotten what real risk is.
Wildfires happen multiple times per year here in California, we even make light of it by joking "the mudslides will put out the wildfires" when the seasons turn. Given that pollution surges due to fires are well-documented here, it would seem obvious that if pollution was going to cause more deaths, it would be during wildfire season.
It's no secret to anyone with even modest command of history that America has long meant freedom. Every oppressed religion moved here, to the one country that did not have a national religion, separating it from the Anglican Church (imagine if the President got to approve the Bishop of Pittsburgh!) or any of the countries in the Holy Roman Empire.
Though a CBD supplement huckster was just convicted for selling synthetic marijuana and CBD oil is the culprit behind untold numbers of vaping illnesses and deaths, and a chiropractor was just lambasted by FDA for claiming his CBD supplement can fix everything from autism to Alzheimer's, if search engines are any indication, marijuana is not stopping.
Joel Moskowitz, Ph.D., of Berkeley is the kind of anti-science "truther" that even most west coast activists steer clear of, because he makes all of the social sciences look bad by association. Worse, he is a "social" psychologist, which for the last 20 years has been beset by fraud and retraction. But at Scientific American, which has become the home of activist crazies, he fits right in.
Scientists have written a paper talking about how they "rediscovered" a pesticide that had never really been forgotten but had been ignored because it was created during the Nazi regime and really expensive; DFDT, a chemical relative of DDT. German scientists called it "Fluorgesarol"(1) and "Gix." DDT is dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane and DFDT replaces the chlorine atoms with fluorine so it's difluorodiphenyltrichloroethane.(2)
When papers came out stating that cutting back on red meat didn't make any difference in your real risk of getting cancer, because a normal diet did not cause any more cancer, it came under fire by critics who had spent an alarming chunk of their careers criticizing modern diets.
Once upon a time a food company spent years in court defending itself against a government lawsuit about a marketing claim on their package that looked misleading. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission told Kraft they could not advertise that their cheese "singles" contained 5 ounces of milk because of the implication the cheese might have as much calcium as 5 ounces of milk when, in fact, they really only had as much calcium as 3.5 ounces of milk.
Sounds trvial, right? Not at a time when the
FTC and FDA defended the public from even subtle marketing deceptions.Fast forward to today, when plant juice calls itself milk and Non-GMO Project sells a non-GMO rock salt to a consumer base that does not know that in salt, there is no O for a G to M.
A new review of other papers claims that unless women stopped drinking alcohol a year prior to conception they probably gave their kids future congenital heart disease.The authors are not kidding. And binge drinking was correlated to 52 percent higher birth defects for males. The confounders are obvious, as they are for any exploratory paper: drinking was self-reported, congenital heart diseases are the most common birth defects, and the authors hand-selected studies that affirmed their hypothesis.
