Our topsy-turvy morals: Marco Rubio is considered a safe, “normal” nominaiton for Secretary of State even though/because he’s a rabid neoconservative (read: warmonger). Tulsi Gabbard is considered quirky, even loopy, despite her military service because she shares the view of the rest of the world that the US is too imperialistic and aggressive. RFK Jr., who desperately wants to clean up our food, is considered frightening.
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Watch Ted parse his way thru sanity.
It isn’t RFK Jr.’s “clean food” that frightens his opponents. It’s that he thinks raw milk is good for you, that he thinks vaccines cause autism, that he thinks COVID is ethnospecific.
H5N1, the avian flu (with an estimated fatality rate of up to 50% — compare COVID, which killed about 3% of the time), is already in cattle herds. Add raw milk and the sort of lax scrutiny that surrounds the factory farms where these animals are kept, and it’s almost a guarantee that we will see humans come down with H5N1. Next stop? The mutation to take it from cow-to-human to human-to-human. About half of us will be around to collect the final data sets on that.
Barbara Tuchman once wrote of Philip II of Spain: “No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence.” That sounds a lot like Kennedy, the astrology set, the fake moon landing people, the 9/11 conspiracy buffs, the Bigfoot trackers …
Raw milk doesn’t come from factory farms. It comes from small farms with high cleanliness standards and strict testing. I’m not a milk drinker, but fair is fair. As for your other “eyerollers,” I’ll go with 2 of your 4, but astrology is, at the very least, a good tool for self-understanding, and there is far too much weirdness about the mainstream story of 9-11 for me to accept it.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/h5n1-bird-flu-raw-milk-california-united-states-of-america/
Kennedy was widely respected as a successful environmental lawyer for decades, in part due to his good understanding of science and willingness to challenge conventional wisdom. It was only when he turned his sights on America’s sacred (cash) cows that those who benefit from those cash cows started using the power of the press to ridicule him. Note that Fauci has not sued Kennedy over “The Real Anthony Fauci.” “If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law and the facts are both against you, make an ad hominem attack on your opponent.”
Part of the problem here is that this is, at its heart, a case of science vs. feel-feel. Gwen Paltrow is not a scientist. Neither is RFK Jr. Neither has set up an experiment to evaluate the “health benefits” of raw milk. Frankly, neither has any business talking about how everyone else has it wrong. It’s junk science spot-welded to the particularly American mindset — that fear-hate response so many of us have about any science, be it climate, vaccines, the shape of the Earth, evolution. We don’t trust scientists, we don’t respect their training or learning, but we come to attention every time Elon Musk posts a tweet about something completely outside of his wheelhouse.
Everybody drank raw milk for centuries. Given current knowledge about sanitation and current ability to test for pathogens, raw milk can be safe to drink.
Raw milk works best in a local, small-scale food production environment. It does not lend itself well to factory farming.
“Science” is not value-neutral. It can be twisted to justify bias, or profit–note the large number of pharmaceuticals that, after FDA approval, have been found to be ineffective or dangerous. You don’t have to be an ordained scientist to be able to study what scientists say and get an understanding of whether they are bullshitting the public for money or not.
It’s hard to get funding for scientific studies that nobody will profit from.
Again, Fauci did not sue Kennedy over statements in Kennedy’s book that would have been libelous if they were false.