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With a new president in the White House bringing in a former Natural Resources Defense Lawyer and long-time anti-science progressive, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., there is new concern about erosion of American leadership in science and health.

If leadership is just spending money on things like theater in foreign countries or paying yourself $100,000 to rewrite data from government surveys on why some people don't trust vaccines, we are not losing much.(1)

Hopefully with Republicans agreeing about some of the more ridiculous positions of the left - seed oils and vaccines are bad - acceptance of science will blossom among the nearly 90% of career government employees in Washington, D.C. who are Democrats.(2)
Want to lose 16% of your retirement just like that? Run a computer simulation where the worst thing you fear is true.

A new paper sounds the alarm over a crash in virtual climate wealth. It isn't science, it is just a computer simulation and therefore more like dystopian 1960s fiction than science. 
U.S. policy when it comes to science can be a little confusing. Over 20 years ago, one political party demanded that drugs and devices undergo far more testing before approval. It was a common belief among the more conspiracy-minded that FDA was colluding with right-wing corporations to get products passed.
Anecdotal stories claim U.S. tourism has plummeted due to Republican tariffs and enforcing immigration the way Europe and Asia do, and it will ruin the American economy. 

If that was true, lawmakers in America's most Democratic state, Hawaii, wouldn't have added another tariff. This one aimed solely at tourists. 

SB 1396 added a whopping 11% tariff for cruise ships that dock in a Hawaiian port and increased the hotel tariff to 19% of the room rate. The Governor has already said he would sign it once his supermajority passes it. Tourists also pay a 5% extra tariff on everything just for breathing Hawaiian are.

With retaliatory tariffs against the EU and countries like China and Brazil, there has been concern about how much medical commerce originates from overseas.

It certainly does, and safety has long been an overlooked concern. Organic food has gotten a free pass, but that is just a USDA marketing gimmick so if 25% of it is fraudulent, no one is harmed, but medicines and devices can risk lives. American companies are forced to undergo 12,000 surprise inspections to insure safety but countries exporting to the US have enjoyed a double-standard. They demanded and got only 3,000 scheduled inspections.


The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress report card saw a worrying trend that has existed since President Obama gutted the successful No Child Left Behind educational program (at the request of education unions) and replaced it with the ill-advised Common Core. Reading scores for kids remain really low for as much as we spend on education. Reading, the most basic thing we do.
America has the strongest environmental protection in the world. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and government scientists showed that the Keystone XL pipeline was much better for the environment than shipping by rail. Their data were sound. With 20,000 miles of pipeline zipping across the Ogalalla acquifier, leaks were rare and only a few gallons before they were fixed.(1)

Weird progressive rants about energy, vaccines and food aside, Americans know science is often right, and the science shows that American regulations keep the environment safe by a very conservative margin.
The Organic Consumers Association, the embarrassing stepchild of the organic industry founded by the late Ronnie Cummins in 1998, has a positive-sounding name but has been nothing except negative for science and the public. Though the United States Department of Agriculture calls them an "organic agricultural products marketing and trade resource" organization they have really just been fifth columnists against vaccines, affordable food, and everything else that helps the modern world.
Epidemiologist, nutritionists, and food fad profiteers love to talk about the benefits of fish, yet they weirdly believe only wild caught fish is nutritious. This sort of scientific confusion by people who don't know any science isn't really new, they also babble on about "antioxidants" when trying to claim high fructosr levels in honey are health food while high fructose levels in corn sugar will give your child autism.
Under the Equality Act of 2010, 'woman' refers to individuals based on their biological sex at birth, according to a unanimous ruling at the UK Supreme Court.


The case has been a David vs. Goliath story. Three Scottish women up against the Scottish government, which had made policy stating that a gender recognition certificate could go anywhere that those deemed biologically female at birth could go. What got it to the Supreme Court was a 2018 law mandating gender balance on public sector boards. Women noted that gender included the trans community and that created a 'shackled man' competition.

Due to anti-vaccine hype from 1998 to 2021 which then flipped to the other major US political party, there is recurring rending of garments about science literacy. Add in a 9% difference between the left and right in acceptance of evolution and beliefs that fructose in honey is health food while fructose in corn syrup is poison, PFAS, and that GMOs cause lower grades in school, it's easy to see that US adult science literacy is only about 30%.
Prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Europeans claimed they were successfully moving away from modern agriculture and conventional energy thanks to the organic™ manufacturing process and solar power. 

What they left out was that the "organic" food they were buying was from Russia, where either Russia invented magic or they simply swapped fields to being called organic, or it was a lie.(1) The biggest hypocrisy of European culture is pretending that buying food through a European company that buys it from Russia is not giving money to Russia. They use the same trick to continue to be reliant on Russian energy
Among the 900 compounds that France's International Agency for Research on Cancer "suggests" are linked to cancer, nearly all have relied on studies in mice.

Scientists know mice are not little people but epidemiologists use animal models, very often at high doses, up to 10,000X realistic levels, to make their claims that everything causes cancer. Such abuse of animal models is why states like California, which abdicated science to IARC, has over 80,000 products with warnings about carcinogens yet no more or fewer cases of cancer.
If you insist you will only eat berries picked by hand near a stream, you are virtue signaling to other wealthy people that you have more money than than they do, while masking it in a halo of claiming to care about taste or renewability or other nature.

No one is fooled. That is why restaurants and consumers who fetish-ize wild caught fight while claiming it is more nutritious or tastes better are so cloying. Sure, there can be differences in taste, just like if you give a chicken different feed, but that is easily solvable, and has been, like in the chicken industry.

It's no secret that cats have the same α2,3-linked (SAα2,3) sialic acid receptor as birds, which means their mortality from bird flu which acts via that receptor is 50%. Or that raw pet food, raw milk, and organic chickens that refuse medicine are key transmitters of the disease outside the wild.

Why are you still buying that stuff? Why did you ever? 
Environmental lawyers, especially lawyers at Natural Resources Defense Council, exist to sue companies and to have casus belli they need to suggest corporations are killing us all. It is no surprise that NRDC has hired lots of lawyers who are anti-vaccine, anti-cell-phone, anti-food (ingredients, colors, the type of seed), anti-nuclear, etc.

If you don't know any scientists or Republicans, and NRDC employs neither, it is easy to demonize them because you never have them looking at you over lunch.(1)

NRDC knows a Republican insider now. Their former lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is part of the Trump administration and the "mainstream" positions they prize, that food science is evil, medicine is evil, technology is evil, are becoming government policy.
Imagine if I put out a claim that I had prevented teens from playing "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II" and therefore saving billions in dollars in future mental health care costs.

Well, I can, because COD:MWII has dropped a lot in usage from a few years ago. Sure, critics might claim it is an older game and new games come along and people switch to those, but if I am at FDA, none of that matters.
When a tourist visits California, the first thing they notice getting off of the airplane is a warning sign that the material they are near will give them cancer. Then another one. Then another. Soon, they become invisible but not before people do searches to see how much more cancer Californians develop than everyone else.(1)


Not only will most things in Walmart have a cancer warning, the building itself can give you cancer. Photo: Hank Campbell
After a decade of being thrown out by the courts and being slightly modified and enacted again, changes drastically expanding the definition of Waters of the United States (WOTUS) to include man-made ponds on family farms may finally be ending.