Philosophy & Ethics

A new paper says Generation X adults in the United States are more likely to have a greater number of chronic health conditions than those that preceded them, which will please environmental groups who claim that everything from pesticides to natural gas to cell phones is killing us, but is not science. There are two issues to think about. One is that diagnoses don't mean much. If you get a diagnosis of chronic lyme disease, it does not mean that is suddenly a real disease, and life expectancy is basically meaningless. Diagnoses and even medication prescriptions are not the same as diseases.…

President Biden is using his Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) agency to mandate vaccines for companies - by saying they need it to protect workers' safety. The administration has been a fan of executive orders, where possible, and then regulatory fiat where not. Whenever possible he does not seem to want his former branch of government - Congress - involved. The problem with his strategy, especially worrisome for a former member of Congress, is he knows that is constitutionally suspect. Yet he believes legally he can. Thanks to the 'Chevron deference' ruling at the Supreme…

Right now, the cotton in the clothes you are wearing may have originated from slave labor of the Uighurs of Xinjiang (not) Autonomous Region of China. The Chinese Communist Party puts out propaganda which shows happy smiling dancing Uighurs. People happy to be relocated to “reeducation” camps where they must speak Mandarin Chinese and not their own quite different language. I know this not just because I heard it on a great YouTube channel, China Uncensored. I know it because I know the history of the Americas and because those same things happened here. First lets review the unbiased…

Last year it was announced that the Chinese government was going to pay for a third season of the Russian TV show "Better Than Us", a drama about an advanced AI robot that has a neural network bordering on free will, no limitations on killing, and drops terminology about family so often it could be in a Vin Diesel movie.(1) It was an odd move for a totalitarian regime historically afraid of culture they don't control centrally. China had little interest in science-fiction in the past but "The Three Body Problem" by Liu Cixin may have changed that(2), and during the Obama administration their…

The recent announcement that scientists have made human-monkey embryos and cultured them in the lab for two weeks made international headlines. The technology to make animals that contain cells from other species has been available for decades and used extensively in research. These organisms are called “chimeras”. But this latest advance highlights the need to broaden the discussion around the possible benefits of such research and, specifically, how inter-species chimeric research should be conducted in future. Human-animal chimeras blur the line about what it means to be human, and this…

I still believed in God (I am now an atheist) when I heard the following question at a seminar, first posed by Einstein, and was stunned by its elegance and depth: ‘If there is a God who created the entire universe and ALL of its laws of physics, does God follow God’s own laws? Or can God supersede his own laws, such as traveling faster than the speed of light and thus being able to be in two different places at the same time?’ Could the answer help us prove whether or not God exists or is this where scientific empiricism and religious faith intersect, with NO true answer? David Frost, 67,…

The 1948 Samuel Beckett play "Waiting for Godot" is about two people that are, as you can guess, waiting for Godot. They wait at a tree, but they have no idea who he is or if he will arrive. When the person they do not know and had no idea was ever arriving does not arrive, they decide to commit suicide using the tree, but give up on that because they don't have a rope. They say they are leaving, but stay. You get the idea.  It is the archetype of the Theatre of the Absurd, and it is everything wrong with existentialism, dystopian scaremongering, and postmodernism. It believes, as Camus…

The antimalarial drug chloroquine (analogue hydroxychloroquine) is also successfully used to treat lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and autoimmune diseases said to have similar biological mechanisms as COVID-19 and, lacking any remedies besides what can be done for the flu, in March the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted emergency use authorization for those compounds as treatments. A paper claimed statistical evidence it worked, but then other papers claimed statistical evidence it does not. Now journalists authoritatively claim it does not work and it will cause heart attacks, but…

Because of concerns about spreading coronavirus, tens of millions of people are working from home that didn't before.  In past years, people who were more likely to have a respiratory syncytial virus, an enterovirus, or a coronavirus rather than influenza still said they had the flu; many of us need to live in important times and my-flu-would-just-be-a-cold-if-you-had-it rationalization was common. Employees were expected to tough it out even as company policies officially said to stay home. Though 60,000 Americans died from the flu in 2018, no one panicked. People even casually…

The True Health Initiative (THI) describes itself as a nonprofit devoted to “fighting fake facts and combating false doubts to create a world free of preventable diseases, using the time-honored, evidence-based, fundamentals of lifestyle and medicine.”  That sounds like a terrific place to be, Science 2.0 does the exact same thing. Except we actually do that. We are not instead selling a belief system promoted by scholars here. And that is what True Health Initiative does, despite the legitimate-sounding name. Imagine a bill in Congress put forth by lobbyists for Big Pollution that…