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The Feel Good Fallacy Of Sugary Drink Taxes On Reducing Obesity

Social authoritarians like to make people more reliant on government and then control what people...

Environmental Groups Back In Court To Help Fellow Rich White People

The Usual Suspects of the anti-science movement, Center for Biological Diversity(1), Environmental...

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Dogs Have Been 'Man's Best Friend' For 14,000 Years

The bond between humans and dogs is one of the oldest stories in anthropology. It may also be a...

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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 »

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Last year, when CNN journalist Chris Cuomo was recovering from COVID-19, he endorsed all sorts of homeopathy and alternatives to medicine. It's no surprise, he is married to an influencer who just happens to sell those placebos to other wealthy, white elites. He's not alone. A surprising number of celebrities have spouses that promote nonsense.(1)
Epidemiology pushes out a lot of dumb papers. Not as many as social psychology per capita but in volume a whole lot more. It's easy to see why the public believes horse de-wormer cures COVID-19, it was in an epidemiology paper, and that methodology was just as valid as a paper this week 'linking' olive oil to longer life. 
Prior to 2021, if you found an anti-vaxxer, it was also going to be someone who bought organic food and thought cell phones cause cancer. While some kooky Republicans have taken over for some of the wacky left-wing people that deny vaccines, organic food and 5G conspiracy theories are thankfully still only one party and thus don't get much media attention from their political tribe in corporate journalism.
If you believe solar power is ready for mass usage, you are likely an activist, in the industry, or one of the customers who really believes they are selling electricity back to the utility at the same price they are paying when they need it and it isn't being paid for by people in the apartments that we get told are better for the environment than single-family homes.

Without mandates and subsidies, plus fees tacked onto every non-solar-using customer, the industry would go back to the niche it was prior to 2010. Since 2010, the share of conventional energy needed has not moved while the world spent trillions underwriting alternatives.(1)
The Supreme Court dealt another blow to federal overreach by the Biden administration but then rightly upheld vaccine mandates if an organization is federally funded.

Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, nearly all hospitals are federally funded. So a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services rule requiring vaccinations for health care workers at companies that receive Medicare or Medicaid funding, which is nearly all of them, is legal, while the overzealous attempt to use the Occupational Safety and Health Administration requiring companies with 100 or more employees to force them to get vaccines was rightly found unconstitutional.
We all know there is no Beepocalypse by now, right? Seeing it referenced in sit-coms from the 2010s  is as anachronistic as watching "Soylent Green" from the 1970s and seeing them lament that they didn't listen to scientists and make the hole in the ozone layer larger. Sure, Washington Post readers probably still believe bees are dying, just like their contributors think "Soylent Green" got a lot right, but it's as unscientific as acupuncture.