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.
The political attack site PRWatch, one arm of the dark-money funded group self-named as the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), is run by a former attorney for the Clinton administration which slashed funding for real science in the 1990s (1) while promoting junk environmental claims about ethanol, so it's no surprise CMD hate pro-science groups who don't cater to the environmental scaremongering CMD gets paid to do.
The Bee Informed Partnership conducts an annual survey of commercial and backyard beekeepers so that they can try and track health and survival rates of honey bee colonies. Though honey bees are just one bee species out of about 27,000, estimates of their implied economic value are around $10 billion annually. A The latest results show that honey bee colonies declined 44 percent during the year spanning April 2015 to April 2016.That sounds alarming, and it is in contrast to studies showing that bee numbers are not in decline, but were instead at a 20-year high last year. (1)How can the claims be so different? Should we be alarmed or not?
The United States Environmental Protection Agency has already been caught releasing proposals for early commentary to environmental trial lawyers and even republished Sierra Club talking points about Keystone XL, making them officially from the Obama administration.You may not be surprised. The modern EPA is stuffed with former environmental activists, being at Union of Concerned Scientists is practically a shoe-in for a government job during the last seven years. Yet those clearly conflicted EPA officials have never recused themselves from decisions, even when being lobbied by their friends at activist organizations.
A YouGov poll found that anti-GMO beliefs are a sign of being less educated. It is something the science community has always known but organic industry trade groups such as Organic Consumers Association, U.S. Right To Know, and SourceWatch try to claim the opposite - that the customers of their clients are super-smart.
ThinkProgress has found a way to use the tragedy of the Zika outbreak to advance their political agenda. America is one of two developed countries that allow abortion on demand at any stage for any reason (Canada is the other one) and the lack of a national policy has led to varying restrictions on that within the states.
A new study finds that a vegetarian diet likely led to a mutation that may make people more likely to get heart disease and colon cancer. Using reference data from the 1000 Genomes Project, the team discovered that a mutation called rs66698963 in the FADS2 gene used for making long chain polyunsaturated fats like arachidonic acid is linked to inflammatory diseases like heart disease and colon cancer -- but only if they didn't follow a balanced diet to offset the risk.That is better scientific methodology than every single International Agency for Research on Cancer monograph produced since 2009, will IARC call a vegetarian diet a carcinogen?(1)
Organic Consumers Association, which funds Denier For Hire cabals like the anti-science group U.S. Right To Know, has baffled the science community once again by just making stuff up. When groups made claims that a larvicide named pyriproxyfen was part of a Monsanto conspiracy to promote Zika to give Monsanto a problem to solve(1), they were dismissed by even Washington Post reporters, so OCA has simply swapped out a new name and is trying again.(2) This time they chose atrazine, a pesticide made by the chemical company Syngenta that is commonly used on corn fields and golf courses.
A decade ago, the media perception was that the only "advocacy" research (science-y sounding stuff out to achieve a cultural goal) was small groups getting a little bit of money to deny things like global warming. In reality, the public knew better, and that scientization of politics had been going on ever since government started to take over science funding.
I have often argued that the pro-life movement has a disconnect about actual life when it comes to science. I don't mean about the health issues of abortion or birth control, I mean about saving babies using science. They seem to think science should only help after a baby is born, exactly the opposite of the argument they make about the beginning of life during abortion debates.
Dr. Gilles-Eric Seralini, the go-to researcher for Big Organic marketing groups and the partisan media enablers (SourceWatch, US Right To Know, Mother Jones) they fund, finally wrote something accurate in a paper - "it was not designed as a scientific experiment", even though the Deniers For Hire on his side claim it was just that.
"The X-Files" resumes tonight and if, like me, you might give it a try, here are 5 good episodes to watch in advance. I was able to sort through a lot of shows thanks to a blizzard in New York City, which kept me inside and was not accompanied by losing electricity. My non-loss is your gain.
Progressives shriek "false equivalence!" every time the numerous anti-science positions of people on their side of the aisle are mentioned, but that is a reactionary defense mechanism - a large part of their world view and identities are tied up in the belief that they are on the side of science while people on the right are not so they can be forgiven for panicking a little as the mounting evidence and examples continue to pile up.But to people in the middle, the recent fetish with attaching special labels to genetically modified food seems a lot like clever abortion 'awareness' laws couched in language to do lots of other things; namely, a way to do with subtle legislative finagling what they cannot do overtly.
