It's never easy to joke about people in face masks inciting violence to prevent violence they claim will happen due to other people, so I won't make fun of the Antifa group that says they oppose racism while engaging in a whole lot of "isms" of their own, like fascism, when I make fun of Extinction Rebellion for pretending to promote science when really they are the equivalent of rioters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention who claimed they were all about the Summer of Love.

Once upon a time, the vaguely suspect legal group Center for Science in the Public Interest set their sights on alcohol, claiming it caused breast cancer.

Media was a smaller community then - three television networks - and for national stories local reporters often rewrote wire pieces from a centralized pool. If you groomed a few journalists as allies you were able to place a large chunk of public thinking in your grasp, and breast cancer had a lot more sympathy than something like cirrhosis.

For cirrhosis, the public blame is on too much drinking, but on breast cancer, which likely affects almost every American at some point, it was easy to blame the chemical. And that is what trial lawyers like CSPI want to do.

Every other month American journalists gleefully proclaim that communist China is spending more money (at least according to China) and producing more papers and that America is finished.

In 2010, to celebrate 50 years of Exobiology and Astrobiology research at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) they commissioned a graphic history of the people and events that have shaped the science of nascent Exobiology and Astrobiology research.

Of course, how we came to be is not a new field, for as long as mankind was able to take a break from grinding out life we've wondered how it all came to be.

George Luber, who ran the climate and health program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before only being allowed in the office accompanied by an armed guard since May, is touted as a climate scientist by Reuters, but he is an epidemiologist. He got his degree in anthropology, a social science.

Baby Boomers, the generation that gave us rampant alcoholism, divorce, over-medicated American culture, and denial of science to protect the environment, are now being targeted by marketing groups with claims you don't need medicine, you can cure disease with...food.

I'm not being mean to baby boomers, they also were the first generation to have a polio vaccine and they ended Smallpox. They paid the taxes that funded an optimistic War On Cancer and the successful moon landings and Medicare. I was just noting that if you are in the spin business, you can frame broad demographics, especially tens of millions of people, any way you want.

And that is being done with a report saying baby boomers thinks food - specifically organic food -is medicine.

In today's politicization of science news, California, which just got scolded by EPA for trying to put cancer warning labels on a weedkiller (of all things) pivoted to ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos.

Last year, the scientifically wacky 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California - the most overturned appeals court by the Supreme Court of the United States - tried to order EPA to ban chlorpyrifos even though they hadn't seen any data showing it causes any defects in people. 

If you don't trust Centers for Disease Control claims on vaping, opioids, or pre-diabetes, you are not wrong. In the last decade they became increasingly unreliable for anything where they don't just gather data from states, like vaccine rates and how many people vomit after buying unpasteurized milk

On numerous other issues, they seem to pick a position and then torture data until they confess. And that is a concern about all their findings. In the case of gun violence there is a concern about their numbers they replaced one hospital in a small (60) sample with one that had more than 100 times greater non-fatal gun injuries its predecessor ever had. The new hospital added over 22,000 gun injuries to the 2015 national estimate which made gun violence look more common.

Since 1981, the beef industry had reduced emission intensity by 14 percent and reduced emissions due to land use change by 42 percent, yet in Australia, as in other developed countries, activists have done with emissions what they did with low-fat diets: Exaggerated a problem that does not exist to get money advocating for a solution that won't make any difference.

Australians seem to be willing to stand up for reason at a time when American (and British) journalists are more interested in evangelizing claims by their political allies.