Urban beards are all the rage this decade, often worn by men in Euroweenie tight suits who want to hearken back to older times, when men were manly and not afraid of science.

Not so today. If you wear a beard now, it means you want to look masculine while virtue signaling that removing certain chemicals in soap will prevent your erectile dysfunction.

In reality, such men probably needn't worry, women are swiping left because most don't want to date someone who looks ready for a Civil War re-enactment but they suspect has a bathroom filled with vegan skin care goop.


Not a Dr.

What is old hype is new again, which is to say population bombs, starvation in Africa, nuclear plant meltdowns, and atomic destruction because an aggressive American president makes a wholesome dictator in Russia nervous and nuclear bombs start going off.

These recurring doomsday narratives follow a predictable cycle:

1) Hysterical activist with a credible title engages in crisis inflation
2) It gets New York Times coverage and a whole bunch of other people talk about it
3) A few questionable academics jump on the bandwagon
4) Serious scientists debunk it, to little public acclaim
5) The original scientists back off
6) All the old critics die off
7) A new generation of activists claim it was not a myth

The U.S Government Accountability Office (G.A.O.) has had NASA on its High Risk list since 1990, due to persistent cost inflation and missed schedules of its programs.

Long before banks and General Motors set out to become "too big to fail", NASA had made it a core value.  There is no better example of how far NASA has fallen from the can-do group that gave us the Apollo program than the James Webb Space Telescope fiasco.

First proposed and funded in 1996 as the successor to Hubble, by 2002 they had told Congress that 11 years - longer than it took for the Apollo Program to put man on the moon from scratch - was not going to be enough time to send a mirror outside our atmosphere.

Though Johnson  &  Johnson and Purdue Pharma are on the hook for big judgments due to their marketing practices related to opioids, claims that they "created" an opioid epidemic are the scientific equivalent of fat shaming people if you don't like Burger King commercials.

Attorneys will claim it, they will get thousands of people to sign up as litigants, and juries will agree with the emotional arguments they hear, but that has nothing to do with science or health. In appeals cases, science data is used, which is why so many spectacularly ridiculous judgments (like baby powder or a weedkiller magically causing cancer) get overturned.

One thing that makes the science community spit its Fresca out its collective nose is the organic industry's claims to be more natural than conventional.

Mutagenesis, where seeds are literally dunked in chemical and radiation baths in hopes to get a good mutation, is placed under the organic halo (along with 50 synthetic ingredients exempted because there is "no organic alternative") but if one gene is moved from a Pacific Salmon to an Atlantic salmon so the latter grows faster, it is Frankenfish to environmental lawyers. 

Some mosquito species, such as Aedes aegypti, have been able to weave their way through evolutionary time despite having no ecological value, basically being just delivery mechanisms for things like Dengue fever, the most common vector-borne disease in the world.

We could wipe them out and the rest of the ecosystem would be just fine but environmentalists have promoted a lot of fear about science-based mitigation approaches, like a male mosquito rendered sterile, and they hate pesticides more than they love poor people, so that leaves...clothes?