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When it comes to denying science, California leads America, and sometimes the world. In early 2020, for example, when the President of the US said to cut travel from China due to SARS-CoV-2, Governor Newsom said he was xenophobic and racist and that since the World Health Organisation denied it was a pandemic, he was opposed to science also.

Prior to that it was a state where we had to hammer the legislature for 10 straight years to eliminate arbitrary exemptions from vaccines, because California schools on the coast had more unvaccinated kids than the rest of the US combined. Prior to that, they tried to ban modern agriculture, along with Happy Meals and Golf.
Do you take fish oil supplements, believing they are boosting your brain power? A lot of people do, but they are a placebo; another in a long chain of Miracle Foods created by epidemiologists when they aren't using suspect statistical correlation to create Scary Chemical claims.

Yet journalists at places the New York Times and Washington Post love to create false balance by 'suggesting' epidemiologists are doing science - their work is in the EXPLORATORY pile, like with all computer models, mouse experiments, and findings from cells in Petri dishes.(1)
Polish Grandmaster Jan-Krzysztof Duda won the 2023 Armageddon Championship Series in convincing fashion but the intriguing science story is his biology while doing so.

Armageddon Chess is often used as a tie-breaker, and in it, black plays second but is the winner if the game is a draw - and has a shorter clock. The Armageddon Championship Series compresses time and uses a double-elimination format once the regional finalists are obtained.


The trial lawyer outfit Environmental Working Group paid to publish a claim that a for-fee group paid by them 'detected' chemicals that a few fringe epidemiologists correlate to cancer - in animals - and therefore humans are at risk.
Newsweek doesn't have any science journalists so they dutifully repeated it, but if you want an answer you can trust, rather than corporate media, here are the facts. 

1. Any chemical at high enough dose can harm you. That includes H2O. 'The dose makes the poison.' 
Epidemiologists correlate eating more fish to better health and while skepticism is warranted - we're talking about what people claim on food surveys and taking it as scientific truth - there is no question its economic impact is real.

Yet food activists then piled out to an environmental strain problem by claiming that farmed salmon is somehow worse. It resonated without any skepticism because many weealthy elites want to go to restaurants and know blue collar workers risked their lives for expensive fish. 
In the past, you may have seen various 'we detected X in urine' papers written by suspect names like homeopathy believer Phil Landrigan and endorsed by organic industry apologists like Chuck Benbrook.

What do such claims even mean? In science, nothing. We can detect anything in anything in the last 20 years, but lawyer-created groups like Heartland Health Research Alliance Ltd are ready to help the litigators who fund them sue "at the drop of a rat" so any detection in humans - bonus points if they can claim pregnant women - of any chemical that can kill a mouse at 10,000 times a real-world dose is going to get a teary press release sent to the New York Times.
In July of 1937, Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan, on their way around the world, missed a planned stop at Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean.

You may not even have known Noonan was on the flight, it's always been a better narrative to suggest she was solo, but one thing is well-documented. No one knows what happened to them.


Uncredited 
I have often felt that "The Economist" is one of the best-edited publications around. Since it primarily involves economics, and there is no scientific basis to it beyond supply and demand, it is easy to appreciate writing and editing, the same way I could be impressed if the world had a great magazine devoted to astrology.

Sometimes "The Economist" forgets its wheelhouse and ends up looking more ridiculous than Javier Baez swinging at something so far off the plate the catcher was lucky to grab it.
A few months ago, the Supreme Court continued to play Whack-A-Mole with the Biden administrationon's efforts to give control over US family farms to the EPA - under the guise of a Waters of the United States Act they expanded without a vote, and then the Clean Water Act, and then using an interpretation of the Endangered Species Act.

Eventually they may be forced to fall back on the CDC and say control over puddles in rural areas is needed due to Covid-19 Variant Seti Alpha V, or whatever we'll get before the election in November of 2024. 
Last century, $3 billion in environmental groups opposed 19th century technology - oil. To win their war on extinction they promoted an unscientific concept that caught on with journalists and allied academics - "fossil fuels" - and insisted alternatives were better. Alternatives like hydroelectric and geothermal and natural gas.(1) 

Today, they oppose all of those. They want to tear down all of the dams they told government to build, they claim natural gas will cause earthquakes, and that geothermal will cause earth to deflate.
We use an atomic orbital in our logo, even though it is scientifically wrong.

Scientists spend a lot of time nit-picking minutiae(1)  but sometimes you have to go with imagery the broad public understands, not try to satisfy that guy at a conference Q&A session who doesn't have a question but just wants to talk about himself.

An atomic orbital doesn't ruin trust in science, the way garbage like the manufactured 'balance of nature' or claiming sugar-free soda causes cancer or denial of agricultural breakthroughs do. What about thinking of small structures as primarily empty space?
Do you think being a barber will cause you to get cancer? Listening to the radio? Drinking from a paper straw?

If the answer is yes, you are an International Agency for Research on Cancer epidemiologist. If you know better, then you know it is safe to keep on chewing Trident gum, or any other gum with aspartame. A message that dentists are in the awkward position of having to reinforce for patients who believe that New York Times endorsements mean IARC is a legitimate force for public health.
Are universities and medical schools racist? They must be if a Supreme Court decision based on ending discrimination against Asians means fewer doctors.

Yet that is the argument in a recent JAMA op-ed; that black people won't be able to get into medical school unless a secret sauce gives them a boost. Even more, they contend, there will be more health inequity because minorities may refuse to go to a physician who is not their skin color.
The coasts of the US take a lot of criticism in the science community for being opposed to well-understood science like nuclear power, natural gas, cell phones, agriculture, and, until 2021, vaccines.

The surest sign the pandemic is in the past is that they are reverting to their old ways. A movement is on to create a clinical diagnosis of "fire brain" - psychological trauma suffered as a result of natural disasters that can be attributed to climate change.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration Human Foods Program is a welcome switch from the old morass of government agencies covering food safety, chemical safety and technology, with EPA (which today is in 'everything is linked to cancer' mode), USDA ('as long as it's farmers doing the lying, we don't care what the National Organics Standards Board says about other farmers') and finally FDA, which isn't even allowed to tell rice companies they are not broccoli or a garbage whiskey company that claiming to be non-GMO doesn't make a carcinogen healthier.
Photos of the 55th Annual Butter Sculpture have been spread far and wide thanks to the New York State Fair.

It's a train, which is on brand with the theme of how dairy helps brains, bones and bodies work together grow. It's an important message; thanks to bizarre fads and activist campaigns, kids probably don't get enough food-based calcium and Vitamin D. New York, like California and a dozen other states, instead prefer pills and supplements because they think 'food is medicine' - unless it is yogurt.

The conductor of the train is, unsurprisingly, a cow.

State Fair attendees won't get to eat it, though. After the event it will be recycled.

In 1994, President Bill Clinton listened to his constituents who said Big Pharma was a corporate conspiracy and instructed the FDA to waive away any real control of the alternative-to-medicine industry. Unless they will kill someone, as long as the $35 billion industry writes a tiny disclaimer noting that there is no scientific basis for their claims and that therefore FDA doesn't agree with any nonsense on the label, they could be set free on a gullible public.

Dr. Mark Hyman, one of the Four Horsemen of the Alternative, was pleased that his future "patient" did all that for those who think powder made from endangered species has magical properties. It's Big Business now.
Do you think particles so small you need an electron microscope to view them can cause dementia? Then my guess you are a trial lawyer looking for something new to sue about, a greedy person hoping to leverage a family member's illness to get rich, or an epidemiologist trying to get an expert witness contract.
Greenpeace is a horrible organization. I used to wonder how anyone could support them, but even the KKK has 3,000 members so awful people can do awful things and rationalize why they are saving us all.

Greenpeace doesn't wear funny white hats and burn crosses, but they sure hate minorities. They hate them so much they claim brown and black people are too stupid to farm using science. Greenpeace is steadfastly opposed to all genetic engineering that could make locally grown, affordable food available to countries that are not rich - unless it is a corporate donor to Greenpeace. Like the organic food companies who use lobbyists, trade groups, and marketing reps to create an 'organic' standard that exempts anything about their products from scrutiny.
Racism has been technically banned in California higher education since 1996 but schools have routinely gone around it with a wink from a majority party that never followers voter mandates they happen not to like.
Instead of using race for admissions - but only preferred minorities determined by secret sauce, which is why racism in admissions went to the Supreme Court multiple times - they declare they're doing enrollment based on needs of the state work force. And the background of applicants, except for race.

Little surprise that ends being the same racist policy that got it banned by voters, who went around the legislature to do it. Asian heritage kids without American last names are still penalized by California.