Mommy shaming and chemophobia have long found common cause when it comes to the cosmetics industry.

Though mercenary, it is understandable why companies that make labels "certifying" something safe, and activists raising money touting our doom, prey on expectant parents; they are easy targets. Being a new parent is scary. Books are basically useless and 'better safe than sorry' is a well-worn cliché.

As I write this, our local school is closed due to concern about smoke inhalation. Other parts of the nation may not realize it but two severe wildfires broke out recently, in northern and southern California. If this had happened anywhere near New York City or Washington, D.C. it would be called Smokemageddon, or a Particulate Vortex, or something else clever, but because it's California we won't get Lester Holt in a facemask and 24 hour coverage on CNN.

Dams keep the boom and bust of flooding from being too severe, they prevent water shortages, they make human existence better. But they clearly change nature.

Why is a human building a dam unnatural but a beaver building a dam natural? Only an environmentalist can figure that out, but what was a great idea 10 years ago - hydroelectric power and storing water - is now the enemy of the paid activism community, and politically sympathetic researchers have increasingly begun to curry media attention by writing papers to prove them right, as has happened again in Nature Sustainability, a journal which, like something might be called Nature UFOs, was created to make money legitimizing the beliefs of the activism community inside academia.

In late 2014 I came downstairs from my home office and said to my wife, "Herb London just left me a message."

"Is he any relation to Stacy London?" she asked in her offhand humor way. Well, yeah, she is his daughter, if you are from California, but if you are of my generation and from anywhere near the orbit of New York, you know who Herb London is. And Herb London was getting a return phone call.

A new analysis links urban planning decisions - the freeways and local schools outside cities that made the suburbs possible - from decades past as why right-wing populism exists. 

They created their correlation by looking at voting trends up to 2010 in in the Toronto area and matched them to people moving out of the city. As the desire for a yard and a house increased, politicians began to consider people who want more comfort and convenience. And now a humanities scholar contends those people are now right-wing populists, in a creepy kind of left-wing frame, but the reason progressive demands for more "sustainability" have failed.

Gregory Jaczko, Ph.D., has a degree in theoretical physics, a hatred for nuclear power, and a love for his former boss Senator Harry Reid of Nevada - which is why Reid lobbied so heavily to get him placed as Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). 

The Chair of the NRC, tasked with managing nuclear energy in America, hated nuclear energy? Yes and he still does, but despite that he got the job because, well, that's politics. President George W. Bush was a dealmaker and Senator Harry Reid wanted the Bush administration to ignore two decades of studies showing that America needed one modern nuclear waste storage facility, rather than over 100 that exist now, and the perfect place was under a mountain in Nevada, Reid's state.