A reader sent me an email asking about chewing gum and if it was really made of plastic and my first thought was 'Why ask me? Do what scientists do and go to Google, skip the first 10 entries, which will all be gamed by SEO experts at anti-science groups like Ecowatch, and then you will find the answer' but I was hooked when I saw the article linked was in The Economist.

Subway Brand Ambassador and soccer star Megan Rapinoe kneeled during the national anthem at the Tokyo Olympics and Twitter did what Twitter was designed to do and went into spasms, despite that being about as edgy and controversial as endorsing clean water in 2021. Subway still had reason to worry. How will it affect sandwiches?  That is what they need to know, because selling sandwiches to 2 Democrats and 2 Republicans is better than selling sandwiches to 2 Democrats, no matter how you spin the math.

We have shown diseases can be eliminated, like polio and smallpox, but can you eliminate something like COVID-19?

Coronavirus was only recognized as distinct from the common cold in the 1960s so it's impossible to know what impact it had throughout history and was just called flu or something else. COVID-19 was the third coronavirus pandemic of this century and we didn't worry about eradicating SARS and MERS, it was just important than the pandemic would stop.

Yet COVID-19 and the media attention it brought has thrown out the virology rulebook; some epidemiologists are overruling scientists and declaring everyone needs to wear masks until it is eradicated, but is that even possible?

The international Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in France was once one of the most respected epidemiology groups in the world. Today, their reputation is in a shambles.

They'd like to fix that, and to humanize their group they have created one of those 'get to know us' things. It's a fine publicity stunt but it does not mask the real problem; they do not want to inform public health, they no longer find carcinogens - they manufacture them.

If you were born prior to 1980, you likely had a parent say that you needed to eat your dinner because people were starving in Africa.

And it was true. The Malthusian boom and bust lamented by Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, and other doomsday prophets in the 1970s had gripped journalists and therefore popular culture.(1)

Yet beginning in 1980 scientists began to run the table on breakthroughs that have headed off starvation. Now no progressive seriously discusses mandatory sterilization or abortion and a Planetary Regime to enforce them the way Ehrlich and Holdren did in "Ecoscience"; the worry instead is that everyone is getting too fat thanks to science making it possible to grow food so affordably.

I have a pocket watch from the late 1800s. Why or how anyone carried this thing comfortably is a mystery. It is bulky and heavy. I can't have been alone because within just a few decades there was a wave of optimization that can best be compared to cell phones; even low-cost watches became small, light, and they kept great time. A pocket watch from the 1930s or '40s can often be found on my person, never the big heavy thing.

I don't like dainty coffee cups or a salad fork and I like a heavy blanket. Though recent trends had been toward smaller and lighter, I am not alone in preferring heft. People have started to love weighty stuff again.