A recent article in NPR applauds Anaheim for using goats to keep grasses mowed. While there is nothing really wrong with that as fire prevention, any more than it's wrong for Michael Pollan to cultivate his garden in Berkeley while preaching about organic food, it is very much the kind of gimmick only wealthy elites engage in, because it sounds "natural" - which also sounds like Michael Pollan. 

In 2019, 23-year-old Emily Goss was a like a lot of people. She believed in supplements because they are a $35 billion industry exempt from FDA oversight since 1994, when President Clinton signed the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act for his constituents, because, let's face it, they believe in alternatives to medicine and science a lot more than that other political party.

Wealthy elites used to just want to have alternatives to vaccines and conventional food and natural gas. Some took it even farther and got their kids diagnosed with autism to avoid lines to Disney World but those were outliers.

More worrisome is the new fad for rich people; HGH treatments to make their kids taller. 

As Ross Pomeroy notes for Real Clear Science, kids with growth hormone deficiency have been getting HGH since 1985 and since 2003, children with "Idiopathic Short Stature" (ISS) -no clear cause - have gotten it too.

Numerous human studies of dietary cholesterol target recommendations and cardiovascular disease have found no association, but the American Heart Association had been stuck in the past, when lots of confounders related to heart health allowed dietary cholesterol to be targeted using questionable statistical methodologies.

Though some studies associate intakes of cholesterol that exceed current average levels with elevated total or low-density lipoprotein cholesterol concentrations, it could be spurious correlation.
By having a modest diet - American Heart Association is now promoting specifics like the Mediterranean and DASH diets - the same reduction in cholesterol happens anyway. 

I am not going to alarm you by stating plainly that the New York Times is the go-to source for wealthy elites who are often out-of-touch with the real world but sometimes they are so tone-deaf that it makes the veins in your neck stick out.

Case in point is this article correlating opera attendance to better health outcomes. It was so bas I scoured the BMJ paper to see if it was part of their annual Christmas spoof pices and they got duped, the way we assumed Atlantic was duped when writing about how sexist scientists are, because "men are more likely than women to deem their own work new and profound."

Center for Food Safety, an organic industry-funded activist group, tried to stop the Impossible Burger from being "approved" by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on the grounds that it is, you know, based on science.

That it is a plant, and therefore uses no meat, and therefore is more ethical and means less emissions than ranching, according to proponents, did not matter, because the organic food industry can't grow if science does; they truly fund deniers for hire to block out things like genetic engineering.

But not all genetic engineering. They are fine with mutagenesis, plant strains created using chemical and radiation baths, they are even happy those are certified organic - only with 80 synthetic exemptions that can still carry the organic label.

NASA has spent $7 billion on a program to launch humans from the U.S. and end reliance on Russians to get to the International Space Station, but an important test for Boeing hit a snag.

The Starliner is hoping to compete with SpaceX, which already had a successful docking earlier this year.

NASA wants to outsource more of this kind of thing but the program is two years behind schedule, which along with chronics overruns and delays on programs like the James Webb Space Telescope has led to renewed concerns that NASA is no longer equipped to do big programs and should stick to smaller experiments like cute robots on Mars, while outsourcing advanced technology to contractors, the way they did in the 1960s.

This morning I took a shot on Twitter at Skybound Games, which is a presumably small company that wants to make a go of it in comics and custom collectible stuff, but are now on their third missed date for something I ordered and have also irked fans of another collectible product.

Good thing for them I am not Charles Dickens, The Man Who Invented Christmas, because if I were, people would be reading my letter 150 years from now. 

Dickens is, of course, the author of "A Christmas Carol", which not only rejuvenated his career after a few flops (and over the skepticism of his publisher, because it was a relatively minor religious holiday, and adding in ghosts was garish in their minds), it made Christmas the phenomenon it is now.

Science changes over time, that is no secret. We used to think we understood black holes, and that wasn't really true, and unless we use Dark Matter as a vague black box like aether, 100 years from now what we believe today in that regard will likely be regarded as quaint.

Even on more terrestrial topics, as our understanding gets greater the facts change. We once weren't sure what set off the dinosaur extinction, now that is known, but there are still lots of mysteries. And Darwin's evolution led to an Upright Man understanding of homo sapiens, where Neanderthals had underdeveloped brains and Cro-Magnon was us, the next step, but now science has shown that evolution is a lot more random and fickle than that, just like it should be.