Lori McClintock, wife of California Congressman Tom McClintock, believed in herbal remedies and has died from dehydration caused by gastroenteritis and whose inflammation was caused by “adverse effects of white mulberry leaf ingestion,” according to the Sacramento County coroner's report. 

Such deaths are considered accidental but if you wouldn't drink and drive on the windy roads of the Pacific Coast Highway, you shouldn't believe in folk medicine, traditional medicine, alternative medicine, complementary medicine, integrative medicine, or whatever else naturopaths and supplement charlatans are calling their dangerous money-making schemes these days.

There is a reason for 25 years the anti-vaccine movement was dominated by progressives - they believe in the naturalistic fallacy and that science is a corporate conspiracy. Progressive darling (because female, academic, conspiracy theorist) Dr. Marion Nestle claimed it again just a week ago, which sounds so anti-science and politically partisan it feels like 2005.

It took Republicans being opposed to the COVID-19 vaccine for Democrats to finally accept them for the first time since Reagan was president.

In an increasingly polarized political climate, media has taken clear sides. No one in Manhattan confuses the skew of the New York Times with the New York Post.

A U.S. Food and Drug Administration Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for Paxlovid (nirmatrelvir and ritonavir) now allows pharmacists to prescribe it.

The reason is because it needs to be administered within 5 days and in modern health care, you are lucky to get an appointment within 2 months - unless you have the same health insurance politicians give themselves. So FDA wants to make it possible for pharmacists to provide it and bypass the morass politicians created in health care.

On the heels of the Supreme Court making a somewhat bizarre ruling that undid another bizarre ruling - Roe V Wade in 1973 found that abortion could not be illegal under the 14th Amendment, the 2022 ruling found that the 14th was irrelevant to abortion - there are concerns about new abortion limits and bans being put into place by states.

When Germany made political hay out of abandoning nuclear power, they had a secret safety valve - Russian gas. Natural gas is wildly profitable because the solar and wind they adopted instead of nuclear needs full-time on-demand backup. And it costs them nothing politically.

Former President Obama threw $72 billion at solar power companies because he believed if government threw enough money at technology, he could accomplish what scientists and engineers had not for the previous 50 years.

It is difficult to imagine the motivation of Russia in attacking Ukraine yet again. Thanks to European reliance in Russian natural gas and food, they probably felt untouchable.

If so, it was a reasonable gamble. After the last fight in Ukraine, Germany and Europe so desperately wanted to avoid conflict with Russia they ignored their own environmental laws and promised to fast-track a pipeline that went from Russia to Germany, bypassing Ukraine entirely. They were already buying a large percentage of their food from the east because, with a wave of the pen, a large amount of Russian food became "certified" organic - and Europe does no surprise spot testing to see if food really only uses ancient pesticides and genetic engineering techniques.

When people from more normal states ask me about living in California, I tell them all the good things and the weird things people hear are true.

When it comes to science, though, it's all weird. We charge more for cars that help nothing in emissions, we have 100,000 cancer warning labels on everything from coffee to corkboards, and we have to get exemptions from EPA to have unlimited natural gas pollution because we mandate and subsidize solar that doesn't work. We can't allow rich people in Malibu to have brownouts but want to have poor people pay for their solar.