Fake Banner
Environmentalists, What Are You Asking From Dedmoroz Lenin For Earth Day This Year?

Tomorrow is Earth Day. It is also Lenin's birthday. That's not coincidence. The leader of...

How Ancel Keys Went From MAHA Hero To MAHA Villain

If a lot of the food and health claims you read and hear today seem like things left over from...

Are Baseball Pitchers Faster Today?

On September 7, 1974, pitching for the California Angels, Nolan Ryan, known for his velocity, became...

Ground-Nesting Bee Populations Don't Get Publicity But They're Everywhere

Honeybees get attention in environmental fundraising campaigns because people don't understand...

User picture.
picture for Tommaso Dorigopicture for Heidi Hendersonpicture for Fred Phillipspicture for picture for Hontas Farmerpicture for Atreyee Bhattacharya
Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

Blogroll
Science 2.0 family, it is with great pride that I announce I have been named the president of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH). 
Think the 'chocolate as miracle food' hoax was something new?
The Shackled Man hypothesis rightly notes that if two people are running a race, and one has leg irons on, the shackled person is going to perform poorly. 50 yards into the race, if we remove the leg irons, claiming that everyone now has an equal chance to win is silly. 

For that reason, affirmative action when it came to college admissions made perfect sense two generations ago. We know there was institutional racism and we knew it would take time to cure (racists had to retire or die off, and each generation would be less bigoted, but that doesn't happen right away) so giving a minority that likely did not have access to the same education, but had no less ability, a temporary boost, was both ethical and unnecessary.
This isn't the Dr. Oz show or some nutrition site selling Vitamin D supplements or whatever the big Superfood/Miracle Vegetable craze is this week, 'miracle' is a bit of a dirty word in science. But when it fits, you have to use it.

And Hepatitis C may have gotten its miracle. 

It's not well known, Hepatitis C does not have the PR of diseases like AIDS, but 3 million people have it, many of them Baby Boomers. Some got it of their own volition, using skin poppers or needles for drugs, but hygiene was a different beast 50 years ago and it was also possible to get it just by going to the dentist.
What do wealthy progressives in New York and California share in common? Both groups are happy to exploit poor people as part of their self-identification. In California, that has involved not vaccinating their children, instead letting poor kids get vaccinated to provide herd immunity for their special snowflakes, while in New York it means adopting a veil of environmental sincerity, by going after both nuclear power and natural gas, while quietly buying all the fossil fuel energy they can get to prevent brown-outs. Let poor people in Pennsylvania have health risks, say New Yorkers.
Over nine years ago, I had launched the Science 2.0 movement and over eight years ago, this site, the communications pillar of Science 2.0, was launched. It didn't take long to find evidence of a problem that I hadn't really considered. The movement was about modernizing 'science', and that meant making collaboration and communication and publication and participation realistic in the 21st century.