Next week is the oddly named National Health Education Week. Like calling a law that will dump poison into rivers the National Clean Rivers Act, the Health Education name is odd because the year it was created, 1995, by the Clinton administration's appointees in the National Institutes of Health, was the year after he exempted supplements and alternatives to medicine from FDA oversight. The $35 billion industry populated by grifters who get away with lying as long as they put “This statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease" in small print and don't adulterate their placebos with real medicine.

We now know that during the last election, a worldwide pandemic was also manipulated culturally for political gain. Just like in 2008, Democrats were early adopters with new tactics, viral internet campaigns, reneging on a promise to obey McCain-Feingold campaign finance rules so they could outspend Republicans 2:1, etc. 

When you get in that expensive electric car, you are exposing your age, gender, social security number, religious beliefs, marital status, your race, if you are a citizen, even if you have a disability. Tesla says they don't sell your information to outside companies but they were also busted for sharing videos of customers internally, including kids, including nudity, so it's not secure.

I am not just picking on electric cars, though they are a nationally-subsidized grift so they should at least be stealing from us less after the sale. Virtually any car made since 2006 uses its sensors, microphones, cameras, bluetooth, and vehicle telematics to spy on you and harvest everything it is allowed.

And it is allowed a lot. Because you said they could. 

When it comes to denying science, California leads America, and sometimes the world. In early 2020, for example, when the President of the US said to cut travel from China due to SARS-CoV-2, Governor Newsom said he was xenophobic and racist and that since the World Health Organisation denied it was a pandemic, he was opposed to science also.

Prior to that it was a state where we had to hammer the legislature for 10 straight years to eliminate arbitrary exemptions from vaccines, because California schools on the coast had more unvaccinated kids than the rest of the US combined. Prior to that, they tried to ban modern agriculture, along with Happy Meals and Golf.

Polish Grandmaster Jan-Krzysztof Duda won the 2023 Armageddon Championship Series in convincing fashion but the intriguing science story is his biology while doing so.

Armageddon Chess is often used as a tie-breaker, and in it, black plays second but is the winner if the game is a draw - and has a shorter clock. The Armageddon Championship Series compresses time and uses a double-elimination format once the regional finalists are obtained.

Epidemiologists correlate eating more fish to better health and while skepticism is warranted - we're talking about what people claim on food surveys and taking it as scientific truth - there is no question its economic impact is real.

Yet food activists then piled out to an environmental strain problem by claiming that farmed salmon is somehow worse. It resonated without any skepticism because many weealthy elites want to go to restaurants and know blue collar workers risked their lives for expensive fish. 

In July of 1937, Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan, on their way around the world, missed a planned stop at Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean.

You may not even have known Noonan was on the flight, it's always been a better narrative to suggest she was solo, but one thing is well-documented. No one knows what happened to them.


Uncredited 

A few months ago, the Supreme Court continued to play Whack-A-Mole with the Biden administrationon's efforts to give control over US family farms to the EPA - under the guise of a Waters of the United States Act they expanded without a vote, and then the Clean Water Act, and then using an interpretation of the Endangered Species Act.

Eventually they may be forced to fall back on the CDC and say control over puddles in rural areas is needed due to Covid-19 Variant Seti Alpha V, or whatever we'll get before the election in November of 2024. 

We use an atomic orbital in our logo, even though it is scientifically wrong.

Scientists spend a lot of time nit-picking minutiae(1)  but sometimes you have to go with imagery the broad public understands, not try to satisfy that guy at a conference Q&A session who doesn't have a question but just wants to talk about himself.

An atomic orbital doesn't ruin trust in science, the way garbage like the manufactured 'balance of nature' or claiming sugar-free soda causes cancer or denial of agricultural breakthroughs do. What about thinking of small structures as primarily empty space?