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.
YDr. Norm Borlaug, Nobel Laureate and "Father of the Green Revolution" was obviously a big believer in advancing an evidence-based, pro-science approach to food, He saw the need for debunking the myths that a generation of environmental groups began creating in the 1960s: Those groups believed that science was doing more harm than good, and we simply had to resign ourselves to famine and starvation and Draconian measures might need to be taken to control the population.
U.S. Right To Know is a small marketing group devoted primarily to endorsing the organic food process and undermining conventional agriculture. Nearly 100 percent of their funding comes from organic food companies, and they seem to believe that for organic food to be cost-effective, regular farming has to become more expensive. (1) Like Sourcewatch, Mother Jones and a few others, they are what the science community calls Deniers For Hire, the junkyard dogs of politically partisan anti-science groups. They hate farmers, and they hate affordable energy, but they hate scientists and doctors most of all. (2)
After a successful Women's March to protest statements made by President Donald Trump about women in 2005, and other issues, a group of science advocates got the idea for a similar "Science March" to protest the President's restriction on use of social media by the Environmental Protection Agency. And ostensibly to support science.
Though environmental activists are aghast that Republicans now control the White House, the Senate and the House for the first time since the 1920s, at least a few have come to some self-awareness that non-stop lobbying against jobs and poor people, and for higher regulations and cost, are to blame for why their candidate lost.What they don't realize is that there is actually a great deal of opportunity for environmentalists during the Trump years. In most ways, he is a lot more like Democrats than he is like Republicans, they just need to stop being against everyone and everything except higher taxes and more federal rules.It may be time to mix it up, when the writing is on the wall that being "anti-" is not working for anything except their bank statements.
When the oddly-named Baby Boom generation (the "boom" happened in 1946, after soldiers returned from World War II, it wasn't an entire generation) were young, it was the age of "Reefer Madness", with kids involved in manslaughter, suicide, and a whole bunch else thanks to marijuana.
Michael Pollan, food activist and journalist, is the proverbial man trapped in the past in his latest piece for the New York Times, criticizing the Obama administration for not catering to his bizarre beliefs about how food production actually works, and along the way taking the opportunity to smear...me.
Nestle, the world's largest food company, has decided to embrace optimizing our microbiome, which consists of trillions of bacteria living in the digestive system and which has been linked to depression, multiple sclerosis, autism - you name it, and someone is claiming their product will fix it.
Republican candidate Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Senator Hillary Clinton arguing about the colors to wear this evening -and the winner takes the White House.
Clinton: All I have to do is divine from what I know of you. Is blue the color of the sort of man who would risk his own presidency, or his enemy's? Now, a clever man would not risk his own presidency, because he would know that only a great fool would risk what he was given. I'm not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the suit in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool; you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the suit in front of me.
Trump: You've made your decision then?
Clinton: Not remotely. Because the color blue originated in Egypt, as everyone knows.
In 2012's "Science Left Behind" I noted something that was perfectly obvious to anyone who was not in a progressive ideological bunker - that while both the American left and right were each anti-science about some things, only the right wing got any science media attention about it. And that was despite the fact that the left's anti-science beliefs are far more dangerous.
Thanks to public shaming of wealthy progressive elites on the coast, and even pressuring the Governor of California to accept science the way he long claimed he does and ban the arbitrary exemptions that led to some schools with only 25 percent of kids - the ones with Republican parents - vaccinated, America's anti-vaccine movement is in decline.That leaves France, where over 40 percent of its citizens believe vaccines are unsafe, as the world leader of the anti-science movement in general, and vaccines in particular, show results published in EBioMedicine.
Are bees in peril or not? It's difficult to know, because the moment science declares one thing not an issue (example: neonicotinoid targeted pesticides), environmental groups move the goalposts and declare something else is the problem. When honey bees were shown to be unaffected, groups proposed that wild bees were the big concern, and if amateur record-keeping and a Bayesian estimate agrees, they declare the science settled. If a world-class entomologist does a good, controlled study of bees, it is ignored.
Though Britain has consistently been part of formal European trading, it was with some hesitation that they entered the European Union (EU) in 1993, and they famously balked at adopting the Euro currency in 1999.During that time, fears about giving a lot more than they get have been realized. Some claims have been that science in the UK would be impacted by Britain's exit from the EU - "Brexit" for short. So is that fact or hype?
