1. A student at Emerson College has gone John Birch Society, alleging he just sort of knows fluoridated water must be bad for us because he read it somewhere on the Internet and thinks being contrarian to accepted science and medicine is journalism. Well, it is. Shoddy journalism, anyway, and the world is already deep in that. The error he makes is a common one for people who don't understand science - a pathogen equals pathology or any chemical that can be toxic at high levels must be toxic at low levels too.
That's absolutely untrue. This has been known for centuries, even by liberal arts majors.
The commenters go even battier, invoking names like Mark Hyman ("The Clinton's Dr.") who brought the credibility of Cleveland Clinic way down when they hired him to be a rainmaker for all that alt-med/supplement money floating around out there. But one sane voice invoked us and the numerous other science bodies who have seen the benefits of fluoridation.
I hadn't heard of Emerson before, their About page says they are a fine liberal arts college. Clearly they need to hire a science teacher.
2. Mike Huckabee on Meryl Streep: 'A Guardian of the Truth She Is Not'
I caught the Golden Globes award ceremony - it is where the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, or something like that, gives awards to movies they happen to like. Since no one really cares, celebrities took the opportunity to put on $10,000 outfits and sit in a friendly ideological bubble and tell us all what they really think about President-Elect Donald Trump and lament how they were being silenced even though they were saying so on national television.
Well, didn't we know all that by now? If not, it's been hard to miss, since both Hollywood and mainstream media have continued to campaign against him. Meryl Streep (they call her "Dame", because they want to be European, and don't realize feudal titles in America are not legitimate) provided a dreary ode, and the media loved it. But former Governor Mike Huckabee has a better command of history than Streep and those journalists who believe Natural Resources Defense Council is a source of credible science - and we appreciate that he invoked us in debunking them.
"Meryl Streep is a gifted actress, possibly the best of her generation, but let's get real: a guardian of the truth she is not ... she helped stir up a hysterical fear of cancer caused by Alar, even though, as the American Council on Science and Health reported, to get a dose of Alar equivalent to what was fed the mice in the study, a human would have to drink 19,000 quarts of apple juice every day for life. Cancer would be the least of your worries, since you'd drown in apple juice on day one."
Look for a "Guardians of Truth" cartoon starring us later this year. It's for the kids.
3. Ignore Anti-Vaccine Hysteria, Mr. Trump: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s conspiracy theories have no place in the White House in Wall Street Journal.
What do PEOTUS Trump and PEOTUS Obama now share in common? They both spouted anti-vaccine nonsense during their campaigns, they both met with anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, and both camps were reported to have offered him a position.
IN 2008, I am proud to say that our work at Science 2.0 helped head off a Kennedy place in the administration. He had raised a lot of money for PEOTUS Obama, and that gets rewarded by politicians, but the outcry was huge and his transition team later denied they had made any offer (yet a principal in his firm did get just the job we said he would, so the source was not inaccurate) but it's too important to take any chances, so when Kennedy discussed his meeting with Mr. Trump and claimed to have been offered a position, we took to the Wall Street Journal to try and make him see reason.
They published it one hour later, so we're clearly not the only organization that can be called Guardians of Truth.
"Although it is encouraging that Mr. Trump is reaching out to people who did not support him, Mr. Kennedy belongs nowhere near the reins of power. We encourage the incoming president to follow his predecessor’s lead—and stay far away from this nonsense."
Our article came out and within two hours, the Trump team was distancing themselves from Kennedy. You're welcome, America.
We also got a special mention on their MSN program television program.
4. CNN noted our defense of life-saving vaccines as well. They get a little bit wrong - that Trump was catering to libertarians about vaccines rather than the Manhattan elites he has been around for most of his life - but that's okay, most of journalism has longed to believe anti-vaccine beliefs aren't most strongly held in the wealthy coastal communities and he gave them a reason to be concerned that they didn't have when Senator Obama catered to those coastal communities in 2008.
But they got it right linking to our criticism of Cleveland Clinic, which to most journalists is only now an anti-science hotbed, whereas we have been criticizing the place for years over its money-chasing "wellness" nonsense.
