Scammers like to scare the elderly using coronavirus and Social Security fraud. Now, the AARP likes to scare old people over the food they eat.
fearmongering
The Lancet has gone on an ideological bender against alcohol consumption and refuses to publish data that challenges their shaky assertions.
Bloomberg's recent hit piece on milk touches upon almost every sensitive issue that worries parents: food, school and their children. Toss in a conspiracy theory about "Big Dairy," and that's how Bloomberg came up with a fear-mongering headline, complete with a disgusting photo that is supposed to make readers feel queasy.
Cigarette smoking is at an all-time low, and secondhand smoke exposure is also collapsing. So some public health officials have manufactured a new threat: Thirdhand smoke.
There aren't many things today that unite both sides of the political aisle, but leave it to some environmental activists to achieve the impossible. There's bipartisan opposition to a proposed Colorado law that would severely curtail fracking in the state.
Gene editing – a brilliant demonstration of how basic research can yield world-revolutionizing technology – is seen as unsafe in Europe. The good news is that some scientists aren't going to sit idly by while Europe attempts to destroy an entire field of scientific research. The scientists are striking back.
Normally a reliable source of information, Live Science published an article that is a dream for anti-pesticide and anti-chemical fearmongers.
A study published in The Lancet concludes that one additional drink per day increases a person's risk of stroke, coronary disease, heart failure, fatal hypertensive disease, and fatal aortic aneurysm. Alcohol may not be to blame, but we can't determine this because the authors didn't even bother to collect data on it.
The reason The Population Bomb was so terrible is not that its predictions were wrong; most scientists make incorrect predictions. No, the book is terrible because of how it made people in the developed world feel about people in the developing world. Namely, that they are little more than hungry cockroaches who shouldn't be fed.
This uniquely American tendency to assign racism where none exists has struck again in yet another bizarre way. And it's absurd to try to make the case that we are racist toward Chinese food, when the number of Chinese restaurants triples those of U.S. cultural icons such as McDonald's and Starbucks.
In what's become an eagerly anticipated tradition, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warns us that we're all moments away from annihilation. The international media uncritically reports this nonsense, even though the Doomsday Clock has been around since 1947. Yet we're still here. Guess there's something wrong with the clock.
To make our society better informed, we have to fight back against the Fear Industry. We can do so by publicly identifying those people who spread misinformation. And then we encourage people to never listen to them again.