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Thursday, October 16, 2025

A Call to Arms About the Threat of Anti-Science

Anti-science kills

By Dan Falk

BOOK REVIEW — “Science Under Siege: How to Fight
the Five Most Powerful Forces that Threaten Our World,’’
by Michael E. Mann and Peter J. Hotez
(PublicAffairs, 368 pages).

In the 1995 book "The Demon Haunted World," the astronomer Carl Sagan warned that the United States was turning its back on science, and that the consequences would be dire. 

Near the start of their new book, “Science Under Siege: How To Fight The Five Most Powerful Forces That Threaten Our World,” Michael E. Mann and Peter J. Hotez cite Sagan’s vision of science as a “candle in the dark,” and argue that what the astronomer feared is now coming to pass. In fact, readers may get the impression that the situation is already much worse than what Sagan envisioned.

While Sagan was primarily concerned with the rise of pseudoscience, Mann and Hotez fear that we’re now in the midst of an anti-science boom, led by people, corporations, and governments who intentionally spread false or misleading information. 

“Anti-science has already caused serious illness and mass casualties in the near term,” they write. “Unmitigated, it will in the long term take millions more lives, produce misguided national policies, and have long-lasting catastrophic consequences, including potentially, the destabilization of our civilization.”

Mann and Hotez are not merely observers, but scientists who have found themselves on the front lines of the ongoing attacks on science. Mann is a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, and director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media. Hotez is a pediatrician and vaccine scientist at Baylor College of Medicine, where he is also the co-director of the Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development. In 2022, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on a patent-free Covid-19 vaccine.

While attacks on science have taken many forms, the authors highlight the current pushback against vaccines and skepticism over climate science as two of the most urgent issues. Mann and Hotez describe the resistance to climate science and vaccines as a one-two punch, but add that there is a third punch as well, in the form of mis- and disinformation. 

The authors point to the devastating consequences of resistance to public health measures, especially vaccines, which came to the fore during the Covid-19 pandemic, the death toll from which currently stands at 1.2 million Americans, according to the World Health Organization.

Many of those deaths, they suggest, could have been prevented had people been vaccinated and followed social distancing and mask guidelines. And they’re not shy about saying who’s to blame: “The deaths occurred mostly along a political partisan divide,” they write, “with those living in Republican-majority (‘red’) states disproportionately suffering most of the deaths and disabilities as a consequence of being targeted by propaganda and misinformation from elected leaders, extremist media, and the modern political Right.”

Tough it out, says Donny Bonespurs

Fight the King

October 18 No Kings protests in Westerly, North Kingstown and Providence

You may have seen a notice that this event was cancelled.  It is NOT!  
NO KINGS PROTEST in Westerly is on!   REGISTER HERE.

There is also a NO KINGS PROTEST in Providence. South County Resistance in Wakefield is organizing a bus to Providence. 
BUY A TICKET HERE. 


Jane Fonda Leads Reboot of Father’s McCarthy-Era Free Speech Initiative

Hollywood reactivates 1950s coalition originally formed to fight McCarthyism - Trumpism is the challenge 

Brett Wilkins for Common Dreams

As the US descends into authoritarianism under Donald Trump and Republicans, hundreds of celebrities led by actor and progressive activist Jane Fonda revived a free speech initiative originally launched by Hollywood stars including her father during the right-wing repression of the post-World War II McCarthy era.

Fonda and over 550 celebrities rebooted the Committee for the First Amendment, which was first formed in 1947 by a bevy of actors including Henry Fonda in response to hearings held by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and blacklisting of actual and suspected communists throughout US society, including Hollywood.

Some of the original committee members - Humphrey Bogart,
Lauren Bacall, Danny Kaye, Paul Henried
“The federal government is once again engaged in a coordinated campaign to silence critics in the government, the media, the judiciary, academia, and the entertainment industry,” the renewed committee said in a statement. “We refuse to stand by and let that happen.”

According to NPR:

Other members of the newly re-formed committee include filmmakers Spike Lee, Barry Jenkins, J.J. Abrams, Patty Jenkins, Aaron Sorkin, and Judd Apatow; TV show creator Quinta Brunson; musicians Barbra Streisand, John Legend, Janelle Monáe, Gracie Abrams, and Billie Eilish; comedians Tiffany Haddish and Nikki Glaser; as well as actors Mark Ruffalo, Anne Hathaway, Kerry Washington, Pedro Pascal, Natalie Portman, Viola Davis, and Ben Stiller. Another signatory is actor Fran Drescher, who last month ended a term as the president of the SAG-AFTRA union.

Cancer breakthrough: UMass-Amherst researchers develop vaccine against multiple cancers

UMass Amherst researchers create nanoparticle vaccine that prevents cancer in mice

The vaccine also proves highly effective at preventing cancer’s deadly spread

Julia Westbrook

A study led by University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers demonstrates that their nanoparticle-based vaccine can effectively prevent melanoma, pancreatic and triple-negative breast cancer in mice. 

Not only did up to 88% of the vaccinated mice remain tumor-free (depending on the cancer), but the vaccine reduced—and in some cases completely prevented—the cancer’s spread.

“By engineering these nanoparticles to activate the immune system via multi-pathway activation that combines with cancer-specific antigens, we can prevent tumor growth with remarkable survival rates,” says Prabhani Atukorale, assistant professor of biomedical engineering in the Riccio College of Engineering at UMass Amherst and corresponding author on the paper.

New ways crooks use to steal your money

Here are the tactics criminals use on you in the age of AI and cryptocurrencies

Rahul Telang, Carnegie Mellon University

Scams are nothing new – fraud has existed as long as human greed. What changes are the tools.

Scammers thrive on exploiting vulnerable, uninformed users, and they adapt to whatever technologies or trends dominate the moment. In 2025, that means AI, cryptocurrencies and stolen personal data are their weapons of choice.

And, as always, the duty, fear and hope of their targets provide openings. Today, duty often means following instructions from bosses or co-workers, who scammers can impersonate. Fear is that a loved one, who scammers also can impersonate, is in danger. And hope is often for an investment scheme or job opportunity to pay off.

Wednesday, October 15, 2025

Do we really need teeth?

Bobby Jr. turns anti-fluoride conspiracy theories into mainstream policy

By Anna Clark For ProPublica

Don't want no stinkin' fluoride
Reporting Highlights

  • Momentum for Skeptics: Fluoridation has long been heralded as a public health triumph, but skeptics increasingly hold sway in government.
  • Public Left in the Dark: Customer notice requirements are patchy, so people may not know about it when their fluoridation stops.
  • Mixed Feelings in Michigan: Fluoridation was pioneered in Grand Rapids, but other Michigan communities are either dropping it or debating it.

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

Just 15 months after receiving an award from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for excellence in community water fluoridation, the city of Grayling, Michigan, changed course.

With little notice or fanfare, council members voted unanimously in May to end Grayling’s decadeslong treatment program. The city shut down the equipment used to deliver the drinking water additive less than two weeks later.

Although it already paid for them, the town returned six unopened barrels of the fluoride treatment to the supplier.

Personal choice was the issue, said City Manager Erich Podjaske. “Why are we forcing something on residents and business owners, some of which don’t want fluoride in their water?” he said. He saw arguments for and against treatment in his research, he said, and figured that those who want fluoride can still get it at the dentist or in their toothpaste.

Drinking water fluoridation is widely heralded as a public health triumph, but it’s had critics since it was pioneered 80 years ago in Grand Rapids, about 150 miles southwest of Grayling. While once largely on the fringes, fluoridation skeptics now hold sway in federal, state and local government, and their arguments have seeped into the mainstream.

Even in the state where the treatment began, communities are backpedaling. And because customer notice requirements are patchy, people may not even know about it when their fluoridation stops.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, has called fluoride “industrial waste” and supports an end to community water fluoridation. The head of the Food and Drug Administration said on a newscast that the CDC’s online description of water fluoridation as one of the greatest public health achievements is “misinformation.”

The CDC, which is in the midst of a leadership exodus and staff revolt, and the Environmental Protection Agency are reviewing their respective approaches to fluoride in drinking water. At the same time, Donald Trump’s administration dismantled the CDC’s Division of Oral Health, which, among other initiatives, provided research and technical assistance on fluoridation. That’s the office that helped present awards for well-run programs like the one in Grayling.

Definitely Joe's fault

Priorities again

Trump gets REALLY irritated about unflattering photos

This week, Trump had a tantrum over Time Magazine's cover shot:

Obviously, he prefers this, his official White House photo:

But there have been so many other photos that just don't live up to Trump's image of himself. Here are some samples.

This one led to speculation that Trump has been suffering mini-strokes

Golfing, first term

Also first term
Clean up in aisle five!

Second term
He's also very touchy about his hair and his trademark orange make-up



Candid photos of Trump show a lot about his character





This photo speaks volumes about his character. Release the Epstein files!


Are your pets trying to kill you?

Two investigations reveal how resistant bacteria may have spread from pets to people

Chris Dall, MA

Investigations into human and animal infections caused by multidrug-resistant bacteria in Massachusetts reveal genetic links that hint at potential transmission between pets and their owners, researchers reported last week in Clinical Infectious Diseases.

The paper describes two separate investigations that were ultimately linked through epidemiologic and molecular detective work. One investigation began at a veterinary teaching hospital in Worcester County, Massachusetts, where a cluster of carbapenemase-producing Escherichia coli infections were detected in cats and dogs in late 2022, a first for the practice. The other involved a cluster of human infections that occurred months later in the same county, caused by the same bacteria.

For months, there were no known links between the two investigations. But molecular analysis of bacteria samples from the two investigations eventually uncovered links that would reveal a hidden One Health connection.

"Once we put the isolates into the same database, that's when we discovered that they all clustered together," coauthor Stephen Cole, DVM, an assistant professor of clinical microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Veterinary Medicine, told CIDRAP News.

Flu season has arrived – and so have updated flu vaccines

Getting the flu is no joke

Libby Richards, Purdue University

He got his, despite all his anti-vax trash talk.
As the autumn’s cool weather settles in, so does flu season – bringing with it the familiar experiences of sniffles, fever and cough.

Every year, influenza – the flu – affects millions of people. Most will experience the infection as a mild to moderate illness – but for some, it can be severe, potentially resulting in hospitalization and even death.

While the start of flu season may feel routine, it’s important to remember that the virus changes every year, making annual vaccination an important part of staying healthy.



Elon Musk’s SpaceX Took Money Directly From Chinese Investors

Will Tik Tok rules apply?

by Justin Elliott and Joshua Kaplan for ProPublica

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has taken money directly from Chinese investors, according to previously sealed testimony, raising new questions about foreign ownership interests in one of the United States’ most important military contractors.

The recent testimony, coming from a SpaceX insider during a court case, marks the first time direct Chinese investment in the privately held company has been disclosed. 

While there is no prohibition on Chinese ownership in U.S. military contractors, such investment is heavily regulated and the issue is treated by the U.S. government as a significant national security concern.

“They obviously have Chinese investors to be honest,” Iqbaljit Kahlon, a major SpaceX investor, said in a deposition last year, adding that some are “directly on the cap table.” “Cap table” refers to the company’s capitalization table, which lists its shareholders.

Kahlon’s testimony does not reveal the scope of Chinese investment in SpaceX or the identities of the investors. Kahlon has long been close with the company’s leadership and runs his own firm that acts as a middleman for wealthy investors looking to buy shares of SpaceX.

SpaceX keeps its full ownership structure secret. It was previously reported that some Chinese investors had bought indirect stakes in SpaceX, investing in middleman funds that in turn owned shares in the rocket company. The new testimony describes direct investments that suggest a closer relationship with SpaceX.

SpaceX has thrived as it snaps up sensitive U.S. government contracts, from building spy satellites for the Pentagon to launching spacecraft for NASA. U.S. embassies and the White House have connected to the company’s Starlink internet service too. Musk’s roughly 42% stake in the company is worth an estimated $168 billion. If he owned nothing else, he’d be one of the 10 richest people in the world.

National security law experts said federal officials would likely be deeply interested in understanding the direct Chinese investment in SpaceX. Whether there was cause for concern would depend on the details, they said, but the U.S. government has asserted that China has a systematic strategy of using investments in sensitive industries to conduct espionage.

Tuesday, October 14, 2025

Can you believe anything the Trump regime says about ANYTHING?

From economic statistics to crime, war, immigration and even the weather, everything they say should be assumed to be a lie.

Justin Glawe

After a gunman opened fire at a ICE facility in Dallas, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem took to X to decry the shooting as yet another attack on federal law enforcement — one made possible by “far-left” rhetoric.

“The violence and dehumanization of these men and women who are simply enforcing the law must stop,” Noem said of ICE agents and other federal law enforcement. “We are praying for the victims and their families.”

But the victims in the attack weren’t ICE agents; they were immigrants. Three migrant detainees were shot by the shooter. One is dead while the other two were seriously injured. No members of law enforcement were harmed.

Still, the narrative had been set: the shooter in Dallas was a far-left radical intent on killing cops.

FBI Director Patel said the shooter had left handwritten notes containing the line, “Hopefully this will give ICE agents real terror, to think, ‘is there a sniper with AP rounds on that roof?’” (“AP” may be an abbreviation for “armor-piercing.”) Some of the shooter’s friends say he leaned libertarian but was mostly apolitical. His attack may have been a result of his nihilistic, edgelord behavior online, Ken Klippenstein reports.

At a press conference, local FBI officials said the shooter “wanted to cause terror; he wanted to harm ICE personnel.” But officials did not allude to a left-wing ideological motive and said the shooter appears to have acted alone.

FBI special agent Joseph Rothrock declined to say whether messages were present on bullets the shooter that were fired, saying that information was part of an ongoing investigation — even though Patel already posted a photo of unspent shell casings with “ANTI-ICE” written on one of them.

Despite the Trump administration’s claims that the attack in Dallas was a cut-and-dry instance of left-wing violence, officials had a hard time keeping their stories straight right from the jump.

Vice President JD Vance initially claimed the shooter was a “far-left radical,” but in the next breath appeared to confirm he targeted immigrants.

“Look, just because we don’t support illegal aliens, we don’t want them to be executed by violent assassins engaged in political violence,” Vance said at an event Wednesday afternoon in Concord, New Hampshire.

In press appearances, ICE director Todd Lyons repeatedly stuck to the narrative that the attack “wasn’t directed at detainees. It wasn’t directed at civilians on the street. It was a definite attack on law enforcement.”

Meanwhile, ICE spokesperson Madison Sheahan said that the shooter “chose to come in and kill these detainees while they were being processed.”

By the time Noem appeared on CNN, she still couldn’t identify the immigrant who was killed or even say whether her agency had reached the person’s family. Given an opportunity to reiterate her statement from earlier Wednesday that the shooting was a “wake-up call to the far left that their rhetoric about ICE has consequences,” she waffled.

Noem did not definitively say the shooter was a left-wing ideologue intent on harming ICE agents. Instead, she resorted to vague language about the shooter “being opposed” to the agency.

Whether a result of incompetence, a misunderstanding of ironic edgelord gamer culture, or purposeful lying, these contradictory statements and the haste to label the shooter as motivated by left-wing ideology make it imperative that the investigation into this event be conducted as independently as possible. But Patel’s FBI, Bondi’s DOJ, and Noem’s DHS have proven that their agencies are not capable of conducting investigations based on anything other than Trump’s political objectives.

Simply put: the federal government can no longer be trusted, and the Trump administration only has itself to blame.

Professional liars

In the first eight months of Trump’s second presidency, federal agencies have been caught lying or twisting the truth to fit various White House narratives over and over again.

In California, DHS section chief Greg Bovino lied about protesters assaulting immigration agents — at least twice — in addition to saying his agents were only targeting migrants with criminal records during a raid in which 77 of the 78 people arrested had no prior record. (Protests and alleged attacks against ICE agents in Los Angeles were used as justification to send in the National Guard and Marines. A federal judge in California ruled that this was a blatant violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.)

Meanwhile, federal officials appear to be exaggerating claims of a coordinated attack on immigration agents elsewhere in Texas. Federal prosecutors in the case of a July attack on law enforcement at an ICE facility in Prairieland have changed their description of events there.

The initial press release from ICE claimed that “nearly a dozen violent assailants equipped with tactical gear and weapons” carried out the attack in Prairieland. But on Wednesday, Patel himself referenced only a lone “individual” involved in the attack. Still, more than a dozen people remain in jail awaiting trial for their alleged involvement in the case.

In Washington DC, former Fox News host turned US Attorney Jeanine Pirro has dropped 11 of her own cases against people accused of assaulting law enforcement because the evidence didn’t add up. In at least one case, Pirro’s office admitted it had reviewed evidence against a defendant accused of injuring a DHS agent only to find the man had never committed the crime for which he was charged.

Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for reporting jobs numbers that showed a weakening economy. Trump’s replacement was the “utterly unqualified” EJ Antoni, who is expected to provide Americans with numbers that are favorable to Trump but not necessarily true. Economists on both the left and the right now say that labor numbers coming from Antoni’s agency can’t be trusted.

Meanwhile, the US military has now carried out multiple attacks on civilian vessels in international waters, killing dozens. The White House says the military is killing drug traffickers, but one former federal law enforcement official told the New York Times that those on board were more likely to be migrants trying to make it to the United States.

Then, Trump announced in a lie-filled press conference that pregnant women shouldn’t take Tylenol because it contributes to autism, going against decades of research and advice from medical experts. Trump’s announcement conflicted with a statement from the FDA on the same day that noted “a causal relationship” between taking Tylenol and autism “has not been established.”

Trump has also mobilized the entire federal government to justify his incessant lies about elections, which now threaten the viability of next year’s midterms.

The president has continued to lie about the integrity of voting machines and mail-in voting, threatening to do away with both despite not having the constitutional power to do so. Lies about widespread illegal voting by undocumented immigrants are at the heart of Justice Department’s demands for lists of registered voters in more than 30 states. The DOJ’s Voting Rights Section has been turned on its head and is now conducting investigations based not on protecting Americans’ right to vote, but on Trump’s election lies.

And then there’s Patel, who is just two weeks removed from a disastrous performance in which he claimed the FBI had arrested Charlie Kirk’s killer only to reverse it hours later. Patel was out front again on Wednesday, posting the aforementioned photo of bullets allegedly tied to the Dallas shooter, one with the phrase “ANTI-ICE” written on it in what appears to be ink.

Friends of the shooter say this was probably for the lulz, and that, like other apparently nihilistic shooters, the attack in Dallas has less to do with specific politics as it did a young man who just didn’t care anymore and wanted to go out with a bang. But the FBI director wasn’t about to let facts get in the way of his narrative.

Selective evidence, broad conspiracies

Dallas police are investigating alongside Patel’s FBI. Hopefully this means that Americans will be able to get a second opinion on the alleged motivation of the shooter.

That’s because there’s evidence that Patel may be selectively releasing information on the Dallas shooter to support the Trump administration’s narrative of out-of-control left-wing extremism. At no point did Patel or any other administration official discuss a map taped to the rear of the passenger side of the shooter’s car. The map showed radioactive fallout patterns from nuclear weapons testing conducted in the 1950s, and comes from an obscure 1999 book titled “Under the Cloud: The Decades of Nuclear Testing.”

“Under the Cloud” was written by Richard Miller, an industrial hygienist who claims to have worked for OSHA. Miller has written two other books on radioactive contamination in the United States, one of which bears a version of the map found on the Dallas shooter’s car on the book’s cover.

During her CNN appearance, Noem confirmed the vehicle in question did belong to the shooter but didn’t discuss the map.

Those with interest in the United States’ nuclear weapons program and conspiracies surrounding it don’t always fit into neat ideological boxes. If the Dallas shooter was familiar with material as relatively obscure as cancer rates in US populations living “downwind” of nuclear test sites — one of the subjects of Miller’s work — it could allude to a much more incoherent political ideology than is being portrayed by Patel and others.

Similarly, Charlie Kirk’s killer appears to have had a more complicated worldview than that portrayed by law enforcement’s assessment of the carvings on his bullets. Kirk’s killer had an online footprint that included a right-wing Pepe the Frog meme, a Trump costume, and furry references among other dripped-in-irony edgelord behavior.

But the killer’s relationship with a trans roommate is being pointed to by Patel’s FBI and local officials as the primary motivating factor for the killing of Kirk, who frequently criticized trans Americans and advocated for traditional gender roles.

In both the Kirk killing and the Dallas shooting, the FBI has proven it can’t be trusted to provide narrative-free evidence to the public. This is par for the course for the rest of the federal government under Trump, which can’t be trusted on really anything, because everything in this government exists to serve Dear Leader — not the American people.