Science 2.0

The death of a California woman has been attributed to an Asian supplement, Cao Bôi Trĩ Cây Thầu Dầu, a 'castor oil hemorrhoid extract' that is actually about 4% lead, a “highly dangerous amount.”

read more

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a lawyer who leveraged a name that was essentially beatified by Democrats into a lucrative career trying to promote corporate conspiracies about cell phones (cancer!), GMOs (cancer!) and vaccines(everything else!) and he had some success.

Thanks to his efforts raising money for Obama his name was floated as head of EPA at the end of 2008, but even a president-elect who was on the fence about vaccines causing autism and had advisors who believed in UFOs and that girls can't do math told Obama that RFK Jr. was too kooky.(1)

read more

We occasionally publish content from The Conversation though it is no surprise that the company goes hard to the left. A friend received a job offer and then had it pulled because staffers were concerned that some of his science tweets sounded *gasp* conservative.

At least NPR would discriminate against those outside their tribe in the hiring stage, The Conversation looked worse by being hypocrites pretending that science and health were their touchstones, and not science topics their political demographic endorses.

read more

There was a time when Consumers Union, the company behind Consumer Reports, which claims to impartially test products, was a trusted brand.(1) That was before key employees were caught colluding with grifters like Dr. Oz to pick winners and losers in the marketplace.

'GMOs are unproven' just happened to be the anti-science belief that got a Consumer Reports employee hired by Dr. Oz as a 'fact checker' when the formerly esteemed surgeon was exposed (by us, but also others) as promoting unfounded claims about science and health and promoting products if companies that wrote him checks. Like hiring an astrologer to fact check an astrologer, hiring someone who believes in woo and hates science as much as you do is not going to change your thinking.

read more

It has become commonplace for government officials to bypass record-keeping laws by using personal email accounts, even if they are discussing official business. Illegal, but commonplace.

read more

After a combination of natural disasters forced the shutdown of a nuclear reactor in Japan, taxpayer-funded activists in Germany seized on the hysteria to demand that their country switch to solar and wind energy. The technology was ready, they insisted, all that was needed was "political will" and the government needed to "show leadership" - and so the people believed. 

Independent science media like us reported on reality. Europe's climate agreement had declared CO2 emissions would be charged to the exporting nation so they burned imported wood, and German companies made a fortune selling natural gas-derived energy on the spot market. Which they bought from Russia, via Ukraine pipes. 

read more

Thanks to mandates by government forcing automobile manufacturers to make them, and subsidies for the wealthy to buy them, electric cars were 8% of purchases last year.

They would not be anywhere near that otherwise. Electric cars are not just a gimmick for the 1%, they are a gimmick for only the 0.6% and rental car companies, besieged by onerous maintenance and repair costs, are scuttling plans to add more. Hertz is the latest to say 'no thank you' to claims they need to get with the electric program. They have reneged on a commitment to 25% of their fleet by the end of 2024 and instead are dumping 20,000 of them to save money.

read more

The Biden EPA has been no friend to science. Like with his other agencies, if the president can't have science or Congress on his side, he will change the mandate of EPA and then direct them to do what he wants. A 1984 Supreme Court ruling made that possible.

read more

Peter Higgs passed away yesterday, at the age of 94. The scottish physicist, a winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics together with Francois Englert, hypothesized in 1964 the existence of the most mysterious elementary particle we know of, the Higgs boson, which was only discovered 48 years later by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. 

read more

When you read that NPR has 87 Democrats in editorial positions and 0 Republicans, are you really surprised?

No, but when much of corporate media, and nearly as much of academia as NPR, is similarly skewed to the left, NPR looks fair and balanced. Yet 14 years ago I warned that they skewed so heavily to rich, white, progressives they risked losing public trust.

read more

California is under fire for claiming to care about emissions while being responsible for the overwhelming majority of a chemical that activists link to climate change.

The state at least feigns concern about pollution. It mandates and subsidizes solar power and electric cars, forcing the poor to pay the nation's highest gasoline and utility costs as a result, and tells them they should feel ethical doing it. They throw up ridiculous maps showing PM2.5, small micron particulate matter so tiny you need an electron microscope to see it, to keep people in a panic about pollution when the state actually has some of the best air quality in the world.(1)

read more

There was a time when Paul Thacker was part of a progressive commune that all endorsed and supported each other in their 'science is a corporate conspiracy' bubble. They had infested what passed for the Journalism department at NYU, progressive websites such as Grist, and even journals like otherwise reputable PLOS. His work shilling for Natural Resources Defense Council opposing agriculture for their lawyers was applauded.

read more

People are living better lives for longer than ever but an EXPLORATORY study using a computer simulation says there is reason for concern; people are getting cancer younger than ever.

The authors analyzed results of blood samples from 148,724 people ages 37 to 54 in the UK Biobank and focused on metrics 'linked' to aging, like albumin and glucose. Those nine values were put into the PhenoAge to estimate biological age and that age was compared to chronological age.

read more

Environmental lawyers are teeing up to sue decaffeinated coffee companies. They just need the Biden administration to ban it, but they can't using science. They want him to use OSHA. 
Again. 

As when the president used OSHA to circumvent Congress and mandate COVID-19 vaccines (he did not do that for government employees) and as he did with other agencies like EPA to advance his desire to ban products. 




They want the ban now in case he doesn't win the election in November. 

read more