This blog has been largely inactive for quite a while, but I have continued to be interested in controversial issues in science and medicine, and am trying out a new blogging platform at https://henryhbauer.substack.com. I began with a couple of general discussions:
The Proper Place for Science in Modern Societies; https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/the-proper-place-for-science-in-modern
and
When the Experts Disagree; https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/when-the-experts-disagree-fe2
Of course I hope that those of you who have followed this blog will subscribe to the new one.
Substack gives its bloggers the possibility of offering paid subscriptions, but I do not plan to do so. My hope is that readers will find the discussions sufficiently worthwhile to tell other people about them.
This return to blogging reflects my continuing frustration at the misleading stuff that appears continually in the mass media, even in the most widely respected places and sometimes by even the least biased and most respected pundits.
A great deal is misleading because it ignores contrarian minority views and the evidence that makes those views worth attending to.
Among the things that irritate me more or less continually nowadays is the hysteria about climate change, and the continuing confusion, lack of clarity, conflicting claims, over COVID.
In a number of instances, differing views over supposedly scientific issues correlate with political leanings, and I have observed, unhappily, how political correctness, which first affected me in the 1980s, has become ever so much worse since then and has come to influence even scientific matters in a significant way: see Anna I. Krylov, The peril of politicizing science, Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, 12 (2021) 5371−5376;
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c01475, and
https://quillette.com/2021/12/18/scientists-must-gain-the-courage-to-oppose-the-politicization-of-their-disciplines.
Skepticism about science and medicine 