The precautionary principle has been around in all countries and for centuries, it seems. 

The ancient temple of Perperion, south-east of the Bulgarian capital Sofia, contains a vampire burial site containing skeletons which all have an iron rod impaled through their bodies where their heart would have been - further evidence that people really did believe that vampires could rise from the dead if they were not buried properly.

Professor Nikolai Ovcharov, called Bulgaria's Indiana Jones, has also found 700-year-old corpses ‘nailed to the ground with iron staples driven into the limbs’.  There have been two vampire burials found around there in the last two years.

20 years ago President Bill Clinton and Senator John Kerry, currently Secretary of State, satisfied election pledges to voters and killed off nuclear energy in America. They insisted any nuclear power meant nuclear bombs, which was a public relations campaign of anti-science groups like Union of Concerned Scientists and Greenpeace but squarely in defiance of the evidence.

Nuclear power had already been on hiatus and America dramatically increased its use of coal. The resulting increased on CO2 emissions led to escalating concern about global warming but rather than accept their role in greenhouse gases, environmental corporations instead continued to lament affordable energy and demand more bans, taxes and regulations.

Over 40 years ago, President Richard Nixon authorized a War On Cancer, with the goal that cancer could be conquered with the right amount of money and ingenuity.

In 2008, during the economic glory days of the Bush years, Californians did a number of crazy things - spending $3 billion for human embryonic stem cell research, which no corporation thought was even close to being ready - comes to mind. And they bought into an animal 'liberation' agenda, which had been talking about the minimum size of cages and passed Proposition 2, which mandated the size of chicken cages.

Nothing says romantic nostalgia like the idea of riding a train - it's slow, it is serene. I'd do it more often but it takes 21 hours to go from my home in California to Seattle - and the last time I went the power outlets hadn't been updated since about 1975, so you could use an electric shaver but not a laptop.

That means 21 hours of doing nothing, unless you write longhand. Or you carry a manual typewriter and want to annoy the entire car. 

It's no secret by now how prescient Science Left Behind was in noting the anti-science beliefs of the left, at a time when science media insisted being anti-science was solely an inherent trait of being a Republican, were going to become a huge problem for public acceptance of science.

Proposition 65, which mandates warning labels on just about every product in every store in the state, insures that Californians have no clue what actually can be harmful or not. What doesn't 'cause cancer' if an epidemiologist can torture data long enough that it confesses?

Dr. Anne Glover, chief scientific adviser to the president of the European Commission,  was a welcome event for the science community when she got that job. Perhaps Europe would finally revisit the Science Enlightenment, and stop finding experts to endorse whatever polls say science policy should be.

It hasn't been easy. She has been targeted by both Greens and her boss for supporting the overwhelming consensus on biology. Her boss even publicly said when it comes to science, she is speaking her opinion - it's weird when a scientist only has an opinion...unless it matches political beliefs.

Pacific Research Institute Fellows Dr. Wayne Winegarden and Dr. Marc Miles have created the 50 State Index of Energy Regulation, which covers the various regulatory climates for energy consumption, production and distribution. 

It's no secret that energy is the great equalizer. We have written numerous articles showing that with clean energy - not by penalizing everything but the pet projects of politicians and the lobbyists paid to support some schemes - everything is possible. Cheap energy is the road from poverty and makes everything else possible.