It's easy not to be sympathetic to heroin junkies. They are self-victimizing lifestyle addicts and the Obama administration CDC's efforts to blame Big Pharma for a recreational opioid addiction look ridiculous when the same Big Pharma is now saving the world from COVID-19.

But people addicted to heroin are not the same as those who eat too much cheese. There are limits to how we should let politicians diminish the plight of addicts. 

With the James Webb Space Telescope reaching its final orbit in space, people are starting to express their belief, and even disbelief, that everything has worked so far. 

No one will be more surprised than NASA. When this project began as a successor to Hubble, the joint confidence level was only 50%. They got funding from Congress in 1996 claiming they could do it but to impartial experts it was a coin flip.

Germany is now paralyzed when it comes to dealing with a belligerent Russia. They are reliant on the former Soviet Union country for both food and energy and can't really protest if Russia invades Ukraine again. They even asked for a new pipeline to bypass Ukraine after the last invasion so they could ignore the problem NATO would want to address.

China has become increasingly aware that food security is important. Like energy, it is not just a basic need, but a strategic one. To feed over a billion people, they are embracing science internally while exporting all of the "organic" food that they can throw stickers on.

When Germany abandoned nuclear energy and declared they were going "green", the sensible world knew what it meant. They were going to be buying a lot more gas from Russia. And Russia was going to sell it to them because they know when people in another country are reliant on you to keep their kids from freezing, their politicians will turn a blind eye to anything you do.

A new opinion piece in Nature says that President Joe Biden has mostly followed the science and he is a lot better than President Trump - but how much of that is filtered through the reality that one is in their political tribe and the other guy a Republican muddles the issue. Academics said the same thing about Obama over Bush and it was so clearly partisan (and scientifically wrong) we wrote a whole book on it.

China has no problem blaming other countries for SARS-CoV-2 - they tried to blame the US for it, claiming it was brought into China in frozen food and the hand-picked World Health Organisation panel said nothing - but their willingness to retaliate is clear. So clear that a panel of experts worried that even discussing the possibility of an accidental leak was cautioned against because it might risk "international harmony."

A Wellcome Trust email from Dr. Jeremy Farrar, current director of the Wellcome Trust and former Oxford professor, stated on February 2 2020 that a likely explanation for the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic was leak from one of the nearby labs in Wuhan.

For Christmas, my wife purchased a Keurig K-Supreme Plus SMART, the latest iteration in coffee pod machines from the company. It came out a few months ago, I even got a special pre-order offer, but when I went to the website a few times there were persistent failures in being able to buy it. So I forgot about it.

After using it, you may be wondering if the website issues were created by the same groups doing the code for the machine. When it works, it is fine. The problem is it does not work too much of the time.

The encapsulated introduction to it is that this is a smart device. It is hooked up to your network and using an app you can customize your coffee to your preferences. That sounds great, but there are caveats.

The James Webb Space Telescope successfully launched earlier today from French Guiana, ending years of doubt and skepticism that the successor to Hubble would ever be finished. 
The Europeans did their part with Ariane 5 and now it's up to a NASA that's been under constant criticism about overruns and a low joint confidence interval since the first delays were announced in the early part of the century and routinely since. 

If you have been in the pro-science community for even a short while, you know that the anti-agriculture and anti-vaccine and anti-natural gas contingents have tremendous overlap. Take a compass and draw a circle around a Whole Foods and you are going to find a nexus of people believe their Tesla uses electricity, but not fossil fuels, for energy, that organic food and supplements make medicine unnecessary, and that cancer is caused by things like cell phones, formaldehyde, or other supernatural things.