Science 2.0

Most people who try a diet don't succeed in keeping weight off long-term and that is trumpeted as a huge failure of dieting by people who, wait for it, are often selling a competing diet.

The health truth is that even if you fail, you improved your health. Claims that people whose weight go up and down are dying earlier are just the same bad epidemiology that has journalists lamenting that International Agency for Research on Cancer activists claim pickle juice and aloe vera cause cancer.(1)

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You're not  a Frank-people because you eat Doritos, despite what people writing lifestyle/diet books and New York Times journalists who gush over them want you to believe.

Such claims are pure food populism by rich white people for rich white people. It's not science, it's instead not even right enough to be wrong.

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To bolster declining electric car sales, President Biden told EPA to create a new emissions standard. The agency put epidemiologists to work and declared that X (fill in any number you like, it's epidemiology, that's what they did) life-years have been lost without electric cars and trucks, and created a new emissions-standard that is effectively a ban on their competitors.

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If the government promises every home a great gardener, most people recognize they won't get a great gardener at all, they will probably get someone who couldn't get a better job while the lawn service they used to use is priced out of reach.

There has always been disparity in health care, but that was aggravated when President Franklin Roosevelt instituted wage caps during World War II. Companies who wanted to compete for quality workers could no longer offer more money so they offered "benefits." Like health insurance. 

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The Tennessee Valley Authority couldn't be done today. When it was done, it transformed an area mired in poverty. With affordable electricity, they had water. With water, they could farm. With farming, food became affordable. 

In a generation, the area was transformed and soon had libraries, schools, and much better quality of life.

Environmentalists need to be needed, it is how they feed their $3 billion-per-year appetite, and so TVA could never happen today. Environmental lawyers are so obstructionist and culturally corrosive, TVA can't even replace a coal plant without a lawsuit.

A coal plant. When activists claim they care about climate change.

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After Chris Wild took over the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a UN-funded body in France that looks for statistical links between food/chemicals and cancer, they made a switch in their policies regarding participation; an epidemiologist who had ever consulted for industry could no longer vote on what to label a carcinogen.

Even though it was hypocritical - epidemiologists working for trial lawyers or environmental groups were recruited - few inside IARC objected. Nor did anyone think they might. Environmental groups have manufactured an ethical halo so well that even their lawyers look like better people than other lawyers. They are, they assure us, poorly paid evangelists for health and safety against Evil Corporations. 

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If you are a vegan and opt your child out of a nornal diet, they are going to suffer from malnutrition and you may end up in jail.

Crackpot Dr. Paul Saladino,  on the other end is just as dangerous, because he claims science doesn't exist so infants should be eating honey, raw milk and even meat.

It's nonsense without any empirical foundation but it also exposes a weakness in modern medical schools; no medical school that is sending physicians into the real world of patient care should be be graduating people who focus on alternative medicine. They do it for the same reason Cleveland Clinic will endorse Dr. Mark Hyman nonsense; it brings them money from patients who love celebrity doctors.

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For around 15 years, I have joked 'that's why they got sold for a dollar' when nonsense got published in Scientific American and my statement was both funny and factually correct.

They've been in decline for a while, their only hope for survival lay in what The Atlantic and Washington Post also got - a rich progressive (well, 'progressive' when it comes to other people paying taxes while they hide money offshore) who wants to say they own it as a vanity project. They have had that, thanks to the Holtzbrinck family of Germany, since 1986.

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Last week I was in Amsterdam, where I attended the first conference on European AI for Fundamental Physics conference (EUCAIF). Unfortunately I could not properly follow the works there, as in the midst of it I got grounded by a very nasty bronchial bug. Then over the weekend I was able to drag myself back home, and today, still struggling with the after-effects, am traveling to Rome for another relevant event.

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U.S. Marshals, acting on a request from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration seized yet another ridiculous "dietary supplement," and this one's a doozy. About 90,000 bottles of a bunch of garbage with the brand name RelaKzpro, which is sold by Dordoniz Natural Products of South Beloit, Illinois, were confiscated.

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President Biden was thrilled when Tesla announced it was creating a Tesla Supercharger network, because electric cars were not legitimate until they stopped needing government hand-outs, and few wanted electric cars until they were sure they could charge them on trips.

Which no company wanted to do because there were no government handouts.

Tesla believed it could solve the problem, and President Biden was going to add to an alarming federal deficit to give them handouts, but the problems seem insurmountable, because Tesla pulled out.

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As announced a few years ago and stated every few months in preparation, EPA has created a timeline  for a ban of non-industrial uses of methylene chloride. 

It was used in the past as a paint stripper but could also be found in things like automotive cleaners and various other consumer products. In home use, acute deaths did occur but only after shocking violations of common sense and boldly stated safety precautions.  If you used it to strip a bathtub in a closed room, well, you need to learn to read. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has long had stringent safety controls in place.

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Despite Vermont's Agricultural  Innovation Board (AIB), created to inform regulatory recommendations using science, flatly stating there was no basis for a ban on a class of safe pesticides called neonicotinoids, and agreement by Vermont’s Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets, the Vermont Senate just passed House Bill H706, which will ban such insecticides despite decades of safe use.

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In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the science community was right to openly wonder about the Wuhan labs next to the wet market where the disease took the world by storm. A Chinese government researcher had been arrested and found guilty of selling lab animals and everyone with any experience knew that a biosafety rating in America and in China were much different levels even if a the communist government slapped any number they wanted on there.

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Evolutionary psychology, the discipline that claimed we're being manipulated by flowers and evolved to like the appearance of black men, also made the bold assertion that the income of your parents during pregnancy made you...gay?

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California Democrats know to strike when the anti-science iron is hot, so hot on the heels of banning red dye No. 3, using nothing but the same suspect epidemiology that turned the state into a laughing stock with Prop 65 'may cause cancer' warnings on 65,000 products, they are going after red dye 40.

Think of all the lives being saved by all those bans. There must have been corpses lining the streets!

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With a porous southern border, street fentanyl continues to enter the United States and be purchased by recreational drug users, all while the U.S. government continues to treat suffering cancer patients like criminals when it comes to legitimate pain medication access. It isn't much better in Canada, according to a new study.

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A year ago, corporate media promoted the provocative claim that dinosaurs like Tyrannorsaurus rex had so many neurons they had to be substantially more intelligent than assumed, since these high neuron counts could directly inform on intelligence, metabolism and life history.

They even added that T. rex was monkey-like in some of its habits and may even have used cultural transmission of knowledge as tools. Corporate media sells ads so they love such 'scientists are baffled by' narratives and a scenario where dinosaurs could be ruling on other planets. Other scientists were instead baffled that it got by peer-review.

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A New Yorker writer extols bucking modern food militancy in a story about a world where infants could try lemons and schnitzel.

Basically, before the 1990s, when pregnant women were shamed into believing if they had a glass of wine their child would have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (but only US babies - European pregnant women are fine without Puritan mullahs) and that they needed to stay home and breast feed for two years and then only feed their infant USDA Organic, Non-GMO, Shaman-Blessed bland purees of 'nutritious' vegetables.

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From April 30 to May 3 more than 300 researchers in fundamental physics will gather in Amsterdam for the first edition of the EUCAIF conference, an initiative supported by the APPEC, NuPecc and ECFA consortia, which is meant to structure future European research activities in fundamental physics with Artificial Intelligence technologies.

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