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I like comedy news host John Oliver. He was among the top nine funniest guys in the first season of "Community" and he even won an Emmy when Jon Stewart made the jokes of Oliver's colleagues sound hilarious. So I was excited on Saturday when I got to send an email to our Board of Trustees and the staff at the American Council on Science and Health giddy that Oliver, host of HBO's "Last Week Tonight", was going to do a hit piece on us.

Maybe it's not a hit piece, maybe he is pro-vaccine, one replied, and is going to applaud our work on that. Or cheer our dismantling Dr. Oz and his supplement empire (along with half his audience) in 2015. Or note how we helped cause smoking in the US to collapse...

Bloomberg Businessweek has written another anti-Monsanto article, nothing special about that, but this time they did something new; they consciously sought to interfere in an environmental lawsuit against Monsanto in California and to promote fear and doubt about the science community and regulators who overwhelmingly accept the science consensus on genetically-modified foods - colloquially called GMOs, because Monsanto received a patent on that one kind of genetic engineering.

It's not the first time members of this team of Peter Waldman, Lydia Mulvany, Tiffany Stecker, and Joel Rosenblatt have...

Gary Ruskin, the chief junkyard dog of US Right To Know, an industry front group created by Organic Consumers Association to harass and intimidate scientists, has managed to pay-to-publish a Short Article which allows him to claim he has been in a peer-reviewed journal.

That has to be placed in context. In an open-access digital world, where thousands of predatory journals now exist which allow anyone to buy the right to claim they have been peer-reviewed, being peer-reviewed doesn't mean what it used to mean. If I gather five astrologers to review some article on astrology and put it in an online astrology...

In the 1990s, a term began to become propagated around the science community; watermelons. These were people who were 'green on the outside but red on the inside'. And those people were the new generation of environmentalists. Essentially, unlike their ancestors in environmentalism, they did not care about people, they only cared about tearing down institutions, like companies and universities and the free market itself. 

That movement only gathered steam through the early part of this century, once science media went into decline while environmental activism shot past the billion dollar mark on its way to the $2 billion it's at now. 

It's little surprise that the Russians have worked with the leaders of anti-science groups to leverage their "useful idiots" in the...

Hoping to keep their cause alive in the wake of the pandemic, the anti-GMO movement has glommed on to a lab-leak origin story for SARS-CoV-2. Their rhetoric sounds quite reasonable, at least at first glance, and centers around important issues we all should be concerned about. The organic industry-funded outfit US Right to Know, for example, observes that “we are still without answers as to how and why this virus emerged seemingly out of nowhere” and alleges that federal agencies like the NIH have withheld information about the pandemic's origins.

Some scientists, conspiracy theory experts and media outlets have reacted to USRTK's sudden interest in virology by highlighting...

1. In Washington, D.C., I went to Capitol Hill and met with the Chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, who was intrigued by our Little Black Book of Junk Science. Rep. Smith keeps a copy of the U.S. Constitution in one suit pocket and I encouraged him to keep our book in the other. He didn't commit to that just yet but he asked for copies to be sent to him so he could give it to the committee and that is part of our goal. We want it in the hands of every member of Congress and everyone in America too. It's time to take decision-making back from activists and engage in evidence-based thinking again.

He had his scheduler Gina take the picture on the left, which I told him was a nice thing to do, and he...

The Age of Social Media has been an eye-opening experience. As a friend of mine once noted, "Social media has made us realize that our neighbors are a bunch of jerks."

Of course, he's absolutely right. One of the bigger surprises (for me, anyway) is the realization that some of the people that we looked up to as children are also a bunch of jerks. And some of those people are K-12 teachers.

Recently, I had the misfortune of encountering a former Oregon high school environmental and marine science teacher on Facebook by the name of John Borowski. In his spare time, he blogs for politically extremist websites, including an anti-Semitic one called...

One religious group forecast an apocalypse a few weeks ago. They used the Bible as their source. More recently, a newer religion warned of their apocalypse. And they used Science magazine

What's the real difference? Scientifically, not much. Activists tweeting Science think their religion is more ethical than the hedonistic ways of others and they claim their beliefs are grounded in natural law. Just like the other sect a few weeks ago.(1) When you look at both apocalypses with the same skepticism, you see the flaws in their doomsday forecasts: both saw what they wanted to see. And both ignored common sense to do so. 

The religion in the second...

1. Tech Times seeks to inject some science into police violence discussions and uses our work to do it. In the ongoing debate over gun ownership, a lot of papers are produced but not all of them make sense. "Virtual lives lost" is one such metric. Like virtual water, virtual money, and virtual emissions, pretend assets can't be utilized. If someone dies young, is is correct to assume they will live to be 80? Not really, which is why average life expectancy is a flawed notion. And if a paper is publicized in the political The Guardian, even more suspicion is warranted. To offset their bias, John Diente used the non-partisan work of Dr. Alex Berezow, who showed the paper Guardian gushed about...

In October 2017, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) added to the weight of evidence they care more about media attention than science by publishing a "Letter" claiming that glyphosate was detected in urine. 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...