A graphic from the Washington Post about motorcycle deaths is making the rounds again on Twitter, and it will set off a lot of comments by people who can't put it in context, so let's go back to the source paper.Here is what you need to know:If you ride 15 miles every day on a motorcycle for a year, you have a 1 in 860 chance of dying. If you fly 500 miles every day on an airplane for a year, you...
read moreDuring the Obama administration, the credibility of the US Centers for Disease Control went into serious decline. Though it only became evident to most how incompetent career government bureaucrats were when COVID-19 hit - they denied it was a pandemic and said the President was being xenophobic for wanting to ban travel from China(1) - those of us inside the system saw that they were long not...
read moreRunning a pro-science nonprofit is a poor business model. Especially compared to lawyer groups like Environmental Working Group or rich deniers like Greenpeace.'Your food is safe' is a terrible call to action but 'evil chemical corporations are killing you' gets the money rolling in - even though the former is true and the latter is a paranoid conspiracy theory with no basis in fact.read...
read moreSocial authoritarians like to make people more reliant on government and then control what people do with the government assistance they are now reliant upon. It keeps those in control in positions of power. The most recent example is with government funding for food coming attached to strings telling people what they can buy with the money.read...
read moreCalifornia government has a new proposal that could ban thousands of chemicals, even if they are natural.California is, of course, famously anti-science. The reason lawyers who wanted to sue over weedkillers filed in San Francisco is because it is the most anti-science city in America's most anti-science state. And it worked. Juries readily believe that plants are just tiny green people so a...
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