It is common in a polarized political climate to try and blame the other political party when missteps happen but most government employees are not political appointees, they are career bureaucrats, and sometimes care more about protecting their fiefdoms than in helping the public. read...
read moreThere is no question that COVID-19 is the worst pandemic of my lifetime. It has led to greater absolute US deaths than the Asian Flu of 1957 and the Spanish Flu of 1918, though obviously we are 2X and 3X the population, respectively, of those pandemics so in relative terms they remain way ahead.Where we also lead over the two other large US pandemics of the last 100 years is fear and...
read moreAmericans are inherently skeptical, and American adults lead the world in science literacy, so those two things combine to show up in debates about climate change and other sciences. When you are literate and skeptical it is easy to know just enough to be wrong, when it comes to climate or nuclear energy, vaccines, and agriculture. The difference between the first one and the latter three...
read moreCorrelation can accomplish anything, it's how the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences consistently finds a way to endorse chemicals in the organic food process while scaring people about chemicals everywhere else.(1) It's how the price of steel can be linked to violence in the Mid-East.A recent paper argues that reading scores are going down and phones are to blame, and...
read moreMajor droughts in California happen every 20 years and smaller ones more frequently, yet northern California has not built major water infrastructure since the 1960s while the population has doubled. Environmental lawyers block any infrastructure improvements so no new water storage can be added and regulations about water flow in rivers were based on an optimistic guess. During the current...
read moreOver 26 percent of the western US is in exceptional drought while 72 percent is in severe drought. That has not stopped the federal government from dumping so much water into rivers it creates hazardous conditions for people in them.read...
read more