Comments opened on the recent EPA nominations to serve on the Scientific Advisory Panel (SAP) established under section 25(d) of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), since three member terms will expire during the next year.

Decades ago, Velveeta had to be labeled “Pasteurized Prepared Cheese Product" so that customers could have truth in labeling. It was not "cheese", said the government.  The U.S. Federal Trade Commission even even told Kraft they could not even advertise that their "singles" contained five ounces of milk because of the implication the cheese might have as much calcium as 5 ounces of milk when it only had as much calcium as 3.5 ounces of milk.  Government was all about mandating consumer trust in labels then.

Raw dairy is diarrhea and vomiting waiting to happen, there is a reason heat pasteurization is credited with saving a billion lives, but a company in Australia has used a legal loophole to milk raw believers into buying their un-pasteurized product.

On surveys, parents believe they are doing a great job helping teens be more independent, but today's kids are just too immature.

That last part is probably not true. It was overwhelmingly people in their mid-20s who won World War II and put man on the moon, we're the ones who've now decided that age is not mature enough to buy health insurance. If we want to do the dishes it is the nature of other human beings to let us do the dishes, because other people think that makes us happy. Believing that someone else will eventually want to do the dishes when they mature is wishful thinking.

On The Joe Rogan Experience podcast (which you can view a video of below, because podcast doesn't mean what it used to mean) Senator Bernie Sanders pledged to release government information about aliens. He says it's an issue for his wife.

It's also an issue for Democrats. When I wrote Science Left Behind with Dr. Alex Berezow in 2011 there was a lot we had to leave out. Why, I had wondered in articles in 2008-9, did our Scientist In Chief in President Obama surround himself with UFO believers, a vaccine denier, and a guy who thought girls couldn't do math?

Does it work to communicate the scientific consensus to the public?

If anti-science beliefs about energy, medicine, and agriculture are any indication, sure.  We don't get bans on science in the U.S. the way Europe aggressively denies the consensus precisely because the American science community does a great job at talking with the public about data, exporting critical thinking is a big reason we are creating Science 2.0 Europe. European scientists have been impressed at how well we have beaten back ban-happy activists. They want to make positive changes there as well.