If epidemiologists were held accountable for the high costs, drug shortages, and food and chemical misinformation they cause, nonsense like claiming a type 2 diabetes drug that is popular off-label for weight loss in rich people also prevent dementia would stop.

Yet the reason so many "studies" by epidemiologists are being pushed onto the public now is because it is a fad. Fads, creating them or capitalizing on them, is big business for lawyers on one side and corporations on the other, and epidemiologists capitalize on that.

Suicide is the runaway leader in gun deaths in the United States and a new demography paper says more government control of the alcohol business might provide a solution for that, and homicides also.

This was a statistical analysis, so only EXPLORATORY, but they correlate more restrictive alcohol laws with a reduction in specific states’ homicide rates. The authors at RAND used the Alcohol Policy Scale index, which measures state-year alcohol policy environments, higher is more social authoritarian, lower is more freedom, plus vital deaths data (total homicides, total suicides, firearm homicides, and firearm suicides) drawn from the National Vital Statistics System.

Each year when air conditioners are needed, California has to ask EPA for permission to violate federal emissions standards and burn enough natural gas to keep the brown-outs that nearly got Governor Gavin Newsom recalled from happening again.

There are lots of stories about the poor in America, and have been for decades. Smart demographers know that, like racism, if everyone is talking about The Poor, it's almost eliminated.

One of the giant cracks in the communist dictatorship called the USSR last century was when the television program "60 Minutes" had a segment on poverty in America. It was designed to tug at the heartstrings of those with more money. The USSR ran it for their citizens but it actually backfired. Being in 'poverty' in America meant having a television and more living space than anyone not an elite in the Soviet Union had.

If you tell me an old white person in America opposes nuclear power, I can tell you how they vote. I can also tell you with alarming accuracy what they think about lots of science, like food and medicine. They think natural gas is why climate change happens.

The reality is that climate change happened due to...them. Democrats gutted nuclear energy in America 30 years ago. Democrats cheered when Senator John Kerry and President Bill Clinton declared that any nuclear energy research could be a nuclear bomb. This was the capstone of a 30-year effort to undermine nuclear power in America, with politicians, their supporters, and allies in corporate media invoking the Precautionary Principle and saying any risk was too much.

It will be up to science history to try and gain insight into the reasons the federal government engaged in "Reefer Madness" narratives about marijuana, and then backed off that yet did the same to smoking cessation and harm reduction tools like vaping.