Cool Links

In 2018, two black men were arrested in Philadelphia because that Starbucks store had a policy that did not allow people to use their facilities without purchasing something. Social Justice Warriors declared that racist and Starbucks changed their policy. Anyone could use the restrooms and anyone could take up seats, or smoke, or drink alcohol out of a paper bag.
In a world where food is affordable and choice is high, some people will not have impulse control. Forget conspiracy mumbo-jumbo about corporations and ultraprocessed foods and addiction, some human somewhere will have fetishized everything so such an "addiction" means nothing, what is true is that foods are more delicious than ever and some people will eat too much.


The tide of culture has shifted away from more centralized government control and the social authoritarianism it brings. While those who ideologically profited from the 'old Twitter' and have all scampered to Bluesky to only talk to each other, the rest of the world is now trying to be mainstream again.
In early 2015, a small group of scientists and doctors noted that Dr. Mehmet Oz, famed TV physician and real-life surgeon at Columbia, was promoting so much quackery that the university should remove him from their ranks.

The knives immediately came out among progressive journalists in corporate media. The doctors and scientists criticizing Oz were "corporate shills" and the nonprofits they were affiliated with were suspect and probably front groups for Big Tobacco and Monsanto and probably racist against Muslims.


If you want to know where someone is most likely to steal your package, the short answer if you want to stop reading is Washington, DC. The nation's capitol. Infer from that what you will. The cost may be up to $12 billion each year.
No one wants to diet, everyone wants a miracle pill, and that is why supplements are a $35 billion industry in America, despite being mostly placebos. Weight loss therapies, even those with side effects, are all the rage with thin culture - because they work.

Still, who wouldn't want to stay thin without a shot in the butt?
Senator Tom Coburn used to do an annual report of the most ridiculous abuses of taxpayer money and it always got attention because his Wastebook didn't care if the party behind it was Republican or Democrat, he was a towering figure in fiscal conservatism.

You work hard for your money and he wanted you to know when government squandered it. A Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska or a 'study' of how college students use cellphones, none of it should have been using taxpayer funding, but those and many others were.
The Biden administration issued a report showing alcohol's causal link to cancer. Not just statistical woo, like epidemiologists "correlating" virtual pollution ({PM2.5) to things like insomnia and lower scores in first grade, or weedkillers to anything an environmental lawyer can dream up, serious evidence.
Cigarette smoking is in steady decline because the evidence became overwhelming that cigarette smoke causes cancer. It is not dumb epidemiology, like that 'organic food is linked to better grades in children' or 'virtual pollution may be why your income isn't higher' and whatever else the International Agency for Research on Cancer or National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences is trying to scare the public about this month.

Smoking, be it cigarettes or marijuana, is very bad.(1) Yet while while the federal government rightly joined us in criticizing cigarettes, they gave alcohol a free pass. 
Most of the country laughed when an expensive Los Angeles Times 'Foodie' event gave elites who paid up to $800 per ticket norovirus. 

Norovirus is gastroentitis, a 'stomach flu', sometimes called food poisoning, except related to bad hygiene rather than spoiled products. You see it a lot on cruise ships because so many people are in such a small area and it can be hard to kill using hand sanitizer because the lack of a lipid envelope means environmental stability. It can easily be prevented, though.

Wash your hands, obviously after using the bathroom or before preparing food.
In the fall of 2020, the contentious election saw progressives claiming the COVID-19 vaccine was rushed and that the Republican president was risking lives to help his Big Pharma buddies.

They won the election and now blame Trump for everyone who died, they turned on epidemiology after a peer-reviewed paper claimed a well-known 'miracle drug' could work off-label for COVID-19 as well, and because the vaccines were rolled out when a Democrat was president, they took credit for it.
The US Defense Intelligence Agency National Center for Medical Intelligence, America's first line of defense against medical threats, expressed concern about gain of function research at the Wuhan Lab.

The Biden administration buried it. They were even prohibited from presenting the evidence in meetings, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal.
Anti-science activists are outraged that Mexican experts ruled against their government's publicity stunt claiming they would ban "GMOs" and the most popular weedkiller used by Mexican farmers.

Some of it was just populism - Mexico buys $3 billion worth of GMO corn per year from the US and the way to encourage more domestic corn sales is to ban it in the use of things people want, like tortillas.
If you want to virtue signal your eating habits to others, Los Angeles is a great place to be. Everyone touts organic, holistic, free-range, wild-caught, artisanal, non-GMO, you name it and if the price can be expensive, someone will sell it.

Los Angeles media influencers love to sell readers what they want to buy and an event at the Hollywood Palladium costing $300-800 per ticket to promote the Los Angeles Times' list of the '101 best restaurants' was sure to make big money - even if you give 80 attendees food poisoning.
A few years ago I noted that French motility was in freefall, down 30% in 30 years, and it was due in large part to the vast quantities of "organic" pesticides they consumed as the country switched to more organic food.
Looking for a last-minute Christmas gift? Doctor Wilhelm Reich, who claimed to be the discoverer of orgone energy (e.g. what other hippies in eastern nations call "chi" and in western nations call "life energy") created the Orgone Accumulator, an alternating wood/metal layered hexagon that absorbed energy from the aether - basically The Force that Boomers like George Lucas still believed in when he was making the original "Star Wars" trilogy - and directed it at people inside.
On this day in 1768, eight years before the Declaration of Independence, an anonymous article in the Boston Gazette protested the military presence in Boston as a violation of civil liberties.

In 2024, California Governor Gavin Newsom has issued another "state of emergency", this time over bird flu...in Louisiana.
Environmentalism is a $3 billion a year industry and the trial lawyers they help are orders of magnitude greater. What is the last public health win they gave us? Name a hysteria, from dying bees to BPA to DDT, and I can show you where actions were taken over the objections of scientists, not because science showed harm.
Ebba Busch, Swedish Deputy PM&Minister for Energy, says they need to go back to conventional energy, especially if they're going to continue to carry countries like Germany, that closed their nuclear plants.

Their decade-long focus on wind has caused prices to soar and reliability to decline, and even calls out Germany's Green Guru and Vice Chancellor, the philosopher Robert Habeck, PhD.


Ebba Busch, Swedish Minister for Energy, Business and Industry and Deputy Prime Minister
Nearly 50 years ago, Democrats wanted to ban recombinant DNA technology while scientists wanted to make insulin without needing a pancreas from a steer. Both sides won. Beef pancreas is no longer needed and the FDA still treats GMOs like they are a 'cure for cancer' claim in the 1970s while using high costs and bureaucracy to prevent small companies from getting into the insulin market.