Philosophy & Ethics

A few months ago JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, published a "Letter" noting that glyphosate was detected in urine. Nothing odd about that, in modern times we can detect anything in anything, but their media bait worked. For example, a journalist at TIME rewrote the press release and used Paul Mills, the lead author and adjunct at a California university for a quote, without bothering to use Google for five seconds and learn his degree came from Maharishi University of Management in Iowa, which teaches transcendental meditation and yoga and is not a legitimate…

With tax cuts in 2018, the federal government is going to either increase the deficit or cut spending. And conservatives argue spending should be cut. Will that impact science? It certainly will, but science was also not helped by the Obama administration, which focused on solar panels and healthcare but not science. After the heady days of the George W. Bush era, when NIH funding practically doubled, academics likely felt that increased on top of that could be realized, but it was not the case. What now? The answer may lie once again in the private sector. Decades ago, before the federal…

Life is a gamble, every day, all day, in a most greedy casino with unwritten rules and players rewriting the rules, re-interpreting them if you accidentally won too much without having the right friends, putting you back in your place. How do people of different smarts gamble?   1) Stupids gamble their money away in stupid ways such as listening to smart people. They look back on a life of hard work and lost savings. Smarties laugh at them, about how stupid the stupids were, having lost their money to the bankers instead of investing, or having invested in a bubble, or having saved…

Meleah Geertsma, a senior attorney in the midwestern US for Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) - yes, they have so many attorneys they have titles like "Senior" and for geographical regions - says they are suing the federal government...again. This time over natural gas. Their complaint is that the government rolled back the previous administration's increases, basically some expanded parking space, near national monuments and is allowing development again. And development may mean clean-burning natural gas, which NRDC now claims causes cancer. You read that right: they think Trump is…

Christopher Portier, Ph.D., recently gave a deposition in liability litigation hearings related to cases filed by environmental lawyers against Monsanto’s Roundup. If you are not aware, Dr. Portier is external special adviser to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) working group that prepared the Group 2A classification (“Probably carcinogenic to humans”) for glyphosate, the key component of Roundup. The classification sent shockwaves throughout the science community because no government safety agency had concerns, but now Portier's testimony has undermined the…

A previous blog post posits that the Hilbert Book Model impersonates a creator and that our creation is a "modular design." (See: Our creator is a modular designer) At the lower end this starts with elementary modules, which physics knows as elementary particles. They are point-like objects that hop around in stochastic hopping paths and they form coherent hop landing location swarms. On earth the creator achieved to create intelligent species. He did that via a stochastic evolution that applied a stochastic modular design and construction process. This means that even with stochastic…

What will cost $400 billion, a giant leap over California’s total health care budget for 2018 of $179.5 billion, yet is not mentioned by California lawmakers? California's free "single-payer" healthcare proposal. Clearly providing greater health care access to American poor people, at giant cost, has been a failure. A few million people not already eligible for Medicaid did get access, but they were primarily young people forced into plans they neither wanted nor needed in their early earning years. Those without private health care due to pre-existing conditions did get access, though many…

Attorney Patrick Murphy is representing infamous sue-and-settle environmental lawyer Stephen Tillery, senior partner and founder of Korein Tillery, as plaintiff in the court of Senior U.S. District Judge Phil Gilbert in a lawsuit against Advanced Analytics Consulting Group, who Tillery says he gave $500,000 to in order to have them come up with results he could use in litigation against minor league baseball, but did not. Nothing special about that, Tillery and Murphy have worked together dozens of times and Tillery has made them both tens of millions suing everyone over everything. (1)…

In an earlier article [1], I outline the case that, contrary to traditional legal presumption, most people are actually competent to make decisions on their own behalf as early as age 13. Put another way, the empirical evidence strongly suggests that, if the required level of maturity to warrant autonomous decision-making is higher than that of a typical 13-year-old, then the threshold is so high that a significant portion of the adult population should be, as a matter of fact, found incompetent. Because this is absurd, I made the case for lowering the age of majority to 13 years (with some…

A group called US Right To Know is embracing the rich history of the anti-science movement; a history filled with lots of revenue for smear campaigns against scientists, companies in the science business, and more overtly, political allies opposed to the same science they are. What science do they accept? Only the doomsday narratives, so they embrace climate science but then weirdly deny all of the research that shows how we are keeping people healthy and alive. Vaccines and medicine, food, energy, they hate all of that. For science historians, it is no secret that the environmental movement…