More things that will go over your head

The problem at the very fundament of our society that has created this slow motion trainwreck is education. The way we teach kids is wrong, they grow up associating education with the wrong things and approaching it in the wrong light, results are lauded above effective curricula and age-appropriate study, and in the end most public and often private schools are more social boot camp than places of intellectual instruction.

Like almost everything else in Western culture, education has been approached as an industrial business: in the end you get unmotivated students that work under a lack of respect for the real process of determining the truth as opposed to getting a given conclusion. This is a generalization, but as a rule it has profound effects on society, from climatology to - as in your case - understanding of what we're putting into our bodies and exposing ourselves to.

It may be too late: the issue gets so little attention in favor of end-result practices like 'protesting for climate change' and research for the purpose of advertising that we may not have time to pull back before our bad habits end us.

When money is regarded as a central pillar of society and given precedence over the standard tenets such as education, obligation to democracy and due diligence, money will continue to dictate the trajectory of that society right up to and over the cliff of self-sabotage in its name.

We have to begin again at the bottom and change the way that citizens and children are taught, both about practicable phenomena like self-governance and about more abstract ideas like proper scientific process, language, politics, ethics and so on. Is there time for that? It's hard to say, but until society suffers a major breakdown (and the causes are properly identified), the chances of changing anything fundamental about it are slim.


Misprioritization combined with the technical ability to create and use chemicals for short-term purposes can and will end in a world swamped in long-term consequences. Only a fundamental pole shift can change a world like ours: we've followed the penny-piper as far as the river, and unless the spell is broken we'll have no option but to pile in and drown.

Let's play a game called guess who is on what planet.

What planet do you think that you are on, and define the word 'planet'.

A sphere that spits rain and shines brighter than lights and creatures that appear every 12 years.

Let's play a game called guess who is on what planet.

What planet do you think that you are on, and define the word 'planet'.

I'd call it a petri dish, but I'm looking from a research standpoint at the moment.

Have you ever traveled extensively around the United States? When I did it back in the 90s, I noticed an interesting phenomenon. Despite most household products being national at the point, many new products were only tested on one state. So, there would be twenty roll outs of new products, and each state would get one of the products.

From a scientific perspective, it always looked like research, like they were treating each state's population as a petri dish.

If they weren't, they were wasting an opportunity.