Cool Links

When you read that NPR has 87 Democrats in editorial positions and 0 Republicans, are you really surprised?

No, but when much of corporate media, and nearly as much of academia as NPR, is similarly skewed to the left, NPR looks fair and balanced. Yet 14 years ago I warned that they skewed so heavily to rich, white, progressives they risked losing public trust.
California is under fire for claiming to care about emissions while being responsible for the overwhelming majority of a chemical that activists link to climate change.

The state at least feigns concern about pollution. It mandates and subsidizes solar power and electric cars, forcing the poor to pay the nation's highest gasoline and utility costs as a result, and tells them they should feel ethical doing it. They throw up ridiculous maps showing PM2.5, small micron particulate matter so tiny you need an electron microscope to see it, to keep people in a panic about pollution when the state actually has some of the best air quality in the world.(1)
There was a time when Paul Thacker was part of a progressive commune that all endorsed and supported each other in their 'science is a corporate conspiracy' bubble. They had infested what passed for the Journalism department at NYU, progressive websites such as Grist, and even journals like otherwise reputable PLOS. His work shilling for Natural Resources Defense Council opposing agriculture for their lawyers was applauded.
Environmental lawyers are teeing up to sue decaffeinated coffee companies. They just need the Biden administration to ban it, but they can't using science. They want him to use OSHA. 
Again. 

As when the president used OSHA to circumvent Congress and mandate COVID-19 vaccines (he did not do that for government employees) and as he did with other agencies like EPA to advance his desire to ban products. 




They want the ban now in case he doesn't win the election in November. 
After seeing the results of a randomized, controlled, double-blind, multinational, multi-center trial where 390 subjects got either Zevtera (192) or daptomycin plus optional aztreonam [the comparator] (198), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Zevtera (ceftobiprole medocaril sodium for injection) for adults with Staphylococcus aureus bloodstream infections (bacteremia, adults with acute bacterial skin and skin structure infections, and pediatric patients three months and older with community-acquired bacterial pneumonia.

For bacteremia, 69.8 percent who received Zevtera achieved overall success compared to the current treatment at 68.7 percent.
The science community is cheering while European politicians are seething, because Ghana’s National Biosafety Authority has approved 14 new genetic engineering products; eight corn and six soybean varietals.

Europe wields a heavy hammer in Africa. They subsidize to make sure they can compete with local farmers and then dictate to Africans that if they use any process that European NGOs want banned, the products can't be exported to Europe.
Anti-science activists and the environmental lawyers who fund them were giddy that a paper found Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in 45 percent of water they tested.

Oh no, let's run Big Science out of business. It's for the children!
College students who took out $200,000 in loans to get degrees in 18th century French poetry are hoping to get their stupidity waived before the 2024 election, but until then it's smart to look at jobs that are in growing fields.

Northeastern elites want to hire other northeastern elites and the magazine Newspeak took a survey of growing businesses and found that the top field hired by wealthy people in 2024 will be Rat Whisperer.

If you bought that New York City penthouse apartment from Jon Stewart for $17.5 Million when it had a market value of $1.8M an asset value of $800,000, you are not the victim of a victimless crime - if you are a Republican, anyway, it is just the free market when he does it - you just didn't know how to deal with rats.
President Biden and his economists don't really believe in the free market, they instead believe that government 'primes the pump' of the economy, so if they subsidize and mandate something, like ethanol in gasoline or electric cars or solar panels, a miracle of capitalism will occur and the industry will take off. If they create inflation by giving $5 trillion in money to government union employees and political allies, they will curb it by raising interest rates. 

If bankruptcies double and people have to work two jobs to afford off-brand toilet paper, they reframe that as a booming employment market.
In a 2019 Wall Street Journal article, I brought a "genetically rescued organism" some popular attention. It was the American Chestnut, which had been devastated by a blight that conventional techniques and chemicals could not stop.
In 1969, a fellow who felt that the eugenicist founders of Sierra Club were not militant enough in their war on brown and black people under the guise of 'population control' set out to create his own organization. He latched on to the most popular progressive positions of the day - nuclear power etc. - but declared the group to be in opposition to all science.
America was founded by people escaping European norms, like government control of religion and economies. Such culturally inherited individualism has served us well but government is now claiming that loneliness may be a problem. 

Not a problem like California manufactures with its claims about 'toxic stress' but because people are a lot more mobile. Fewer work in trades so they may not stay close to home, they go where lifestyles and jobs are, at least until they decide they want to buy a house.
If my son watches Lord of the Rings, and decides to take up a pipe, he can't do it until he is 21, even though a pipe is, by any scientific measure, absolutely harmless. Government says he is too immature until then to decide for himself.

What about taking Supprelin LA, with some real positives - it blocks puberty for young people who do not feel like their sex at birth - and unknown negatives? England is taking the precautionary principle about it and National Health Service has banned puberty blockers for cases of gender dysphoria or gender incongruence in minors. They're instead going to somehow conduct trials. 
If you have acne, and are worried about benzene because corporate media is touting that an "independent" lab - which happened to be paid by a group representing lawyers who want to sue - found elevated levels of it, you can relax.

In 2018, an International Agency for Research on Cancer did discuss benzene, but the levels were 10,000X safe levels. And they do not ever show what causes cancer, all they do is target chemicals and look at rows and columns of data from surveys and other papers, and try to claim correlation.


Folk medicine, traditional medicine, alternative medicine, complementary medicine, wellness - it is all the same thing rebranded to be sold anew but one thing remains consistent; none of it is actual medicine.

Acupuncture is a placebo, massages are not evidence-based treatments, your Blue Apron "organic" food subscription is not preventing any illness, and so the Biden administration has rightly decreed that you can't use a Health Savings Account - untaxed funds meant to be used for medical care - and buy alternatives to medicine. Not even if you you get a doctor to give you a note saying it is real. The irony is that because his constituents overwhelmingly distrust science, his administration launched an unscientific  “Food is Medicine” initiative last year.
A lawyer who claims his client, a government union employee, got cancer from using the common weedkiller Roundup, is whining that his side didn't get to include "key evidence" from "the World Health Organisation" that it caused cancer.
Food fads in the 'food is medicine' space try to use science jargon - nutriceuticals (literal food as medicine), polyphenols, prebiotics, all so they can  promote fad diets around something new - like fermented foods recently.
A new paper in Environmental Science&Technology Letters (created a decade ago to ride the 'everything causes cancer' craze) claims that not only are 'microplastics' harmful - because in modern times we can detect anything in anything and if you can detect it, it is killing you - you can and should remove them by both boiling and filtering the water in your home.

It is so bizarre - we'd have been extinct 150,000 years ago if our bodies did not have the ability to harmlessly excrete lots and lots and lots of trace chemicals - that no mainstream media outlet would promote it.
So-called "organic food" is a gigantic industry, $135 billion in revenue per year, augmented by a corporate panel created by the Clinton administration that exempts them from real U.S. Department of Agriculture oversight. They can exempt any synthetic ingredients they want and still sell an organic sticker (and do - dozens and dozens of them) and have insider corporations that "certify" organic status, but only make any money if they sell the stickers.
Raw milk producers are dangerous, with 700X more foodborne illness risk than pasteurized milk which has had pathogens neutralized. Raw cheese has a better safety record because folk wisdom says that after 60 days the bad stuff is dead.