Out of order: Courts shouldn’t rule based on ‘trust us’ science



A training manual for federal judges just ditched its biased chapter on climate change. Good. But the same manual still peddles quackery about how science works — and it risks teaching the judiciary to treat models and “consensus” as proof.

The “How Science Works” chapter in the “Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence” invites judges to overvalue computer models built on unproven assumptions and to accept “consensus” as evidence even when empirical testing cuts the other way. That is not science. It is a distortion of the scientific method, which demands observation, experimentation, and results that can be challenged and falsified in the real world.

This is the posture of pseudoscience: conclusions protected by authority and repetition rather than disciplined testing against reality.

The problem runs deeper than emphasis. In defining hypothesis, theory, and scientific law, the writers omit testing, observation, and experimentation. They also fail to acknowledge that all three can be disproven — even though demonstrating falseness has long been central to scientific progress. Science advances not by protecting favored conclusions but by trying — relentlessly — to break them.

The chapter even claims that science cannot “disprove hypotheses.” That is historically indefensible. Science has disproven hypotheses repeatedly, and entire revolutions have turned on that process.

Geocentrism gave way to Copernicus’ heliocentric model. Phrenology, eugenics, spontaneous generation, and miasma theory all enjoyed “consensus” before evidence refuted them. Alfred Wegener’s plate tectonics also met decades of rejection before the evidence won. Consensus delayed the truth. It did not deliver it.

The chapter also stumbles over prediction. It says prediction is a logical consequence of a hypothesis, “not necessarily what will happen in the future.” That drains prediction of its most important feature: testable claims about what should occur under specified conditions. A hypothesis can be tested against the past as well, but the logic stays the same — it must match reality.

Then the chapter offers reassurance that reveals the posture: “The fact that there is room for improvement in the process of science does not necessitate distrust of hypotheses that have gained widespread acceptance in the scientific community and about which consensus has been achieved.” In practice, that treats consensus as a shield against contrary evidence — a common ploy among climate alarmists.

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In places, the chapter contradicts itself, sometimes gesturing at rigor, elsewhere diminishing falsification and redefining key terms. The result is confusion. Its length and muddled definitions do not clarify how science works; they blur it. Worse, they introduce judges to wrongheaded practices — overuse of models and consensus — as if they can settle disputed scientific questions.

That is not the empirical tradition of Isaac Newton or Marie Curie. It is the posture of pseudoscience: conclusions protected by authority and repetition rather than disciplined testing against reality.

U.S. District Judge Robin Rosenberg removed the manual’s climate chapter after objections from state attorneys general and others. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine still hosts the manual — including “How Science Works” — on its website.

Rosenberg, as head of the Federal Judicial Center, should take the next step and remove this chapter as well. Federal judges and the public they serve deserve a guide to science that prizes evidence over consensus and observation over simulation.

Trump's MAHA pick for surgeon general has Big Pharma-backed lawmakers shook



President Donald Trump announced in May that he was nominating Dr. Casey Means to become surgeon general.

Trump said that Means, a tech entrepreneur and Stanford-educated doctor who has long criticized the exploitative nature of the health care system, has "impeccable 'MAHA' credentials" and would help Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. "reverse the Chronic Disease Epidemic, and ensure Great Health, in the future, for ALL Americans."

It became painfully clear over the course of Means' nomination hearing on Wednesday that some lawmakers are anxious about her MAHA views on vaccines and other profitable pharmaceuticals.

'Devil's in the details.'

Chairman Bill Cassidy (R-La.) — whom Open Secrets indicated has raised over $1.3 million from the health professional industry and $712,000 from the pharmaceutical/health product industry in campaign contributions since 2019 — noted that "some [parents] have been scared to vaccinate their children because they've been told incorrectly that vaccines cause autism."

Cassidy asked Means whether she believes "vaccines, whether individually or collectively, contribute to autism."

Means, who told lawmakers that she thinks vaccines "save lives," responded, "The reality is that we have an autism crisis that's increasing, and this is devastating to many families, and we do not know as a medical community what causes autism."

Means noted that the Trump administration is investigating the matter and suggested that "until we have a clear understanding of why kids are developing this at higher rates, I think we should not leave any stones unturned."

Cassidy rushed to suggest "there's been a lot of evidence showing they're not implicated."

While Means accepted such alleged evidence exists, she emphasized that "science is never settled."

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — who ranks in Open Secrets' "Top 20 Member Recipients of Money from Pharmaceuticals / Health Products, 1990-2024" — similarly pressed the issue, trying unsuccessfully to get Means to refute Kennedy's July 2023 assertion "that autism comes from vaccines."

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In her questioning, Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.) focused on one vaccine in particular: the hepatitis B shot, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under previous administrations recommended for all American children but as of this year recommends only on an individual basis.

Means has suggested in years past that "hepatitis B vaccine at birth is a crime."

When Blunt Rochester generalized her concern and asked whether Means thought it was "unethical and dangerous" to hypothetically withhold life-saving vaccines from children, Means noted, "I don't believe that Dr. Jay Bhattacharya or the HHS would be interested in withholding" them and stressed that the "devil's in the details."

Democratic Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), who has received over $600,000 from the health professional industry since 2019, grilled Means over her past criticism of hormonal birth control and its overuse — which has been linked to increased risk of breast and cervical cancers and other medical issues.

After Murray concern-mongered over Means' suggestions that hormonal birth control is consumed "like candy" and poses "horrifying health risks" to women, Means said, "I'm curious if you're aware of what the side effects of hormonal contraception are."

Means suggested further that while such medication should be "accessible to all women," women should be having thorough conversations with their doctors to ascertain "whether they are higher risk for side effects when prescribed the medication."

Kennedy noted at the time of Means' nomination that she "will help me ensure American children will be less medicated and better fed — and significantly healthier — during the next four years. She will be the best Surgeon General in American history."

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FDA caution is starting to look like cruelty to sick kids



Biomedical research has produced extraordinary breakthroughs that have saved countless lives. But too many promising drugs now stall in federal review, and children with rare diseases are paying the price.

I’m a bioscientist. My work has focused on how healthy cells function and how that knowledge can be applied to therapeutic enzyme development. I’ve spent my career working inside the disciplines that move a treatment from lab bench to patient: protocol design, reproducibility, evidence standards, and layered human testing to ensure safety.

Is this simply bureaucracy doing what bureaucracy does? Or are rare pediatric therapies effectively facing a higher bar inside the system?

Standards, evidence, and process matter. But so does urgency.

Children with rare diseases do not live on regulatory timelines. They lose function month by month — speech, mobility, independence, even the ability to breathe on their own.

Of the more than 6,800 known rare diseases, about 70% begin in childhood. Better-known examples include Duchenne muscular dystrophy, Gaucher disease, and cystic fibrosis.

Developing therapies for these children is difficult, expensive, and slow even under the best conditions. Treatments such as Ultragenyx’s UX111 for Sanfilippo syndrome, Sarepta’s Elevidys for Duchenne, and Regenxbio’s RGX-121 for Hunter syndrome can take decades to develop, years to move through trials, and still more time to reach the children who need them.

That reality makes avoidable regulatory delay even harder to defend.

Too often, applications do not stall because the underlying science has failed. They stall over manufacturing or procedural concerns — in many cases, issues that are fixable and not directly tied to whether the therapy is clinically helping patients. Those delays can undermine the purpose of the FDA’s accelerated approval pathway, which exists to move critical treatments to patients faster while additional data is collected.

As a scientist, I was particularly troubled by the FDA’s recent rejection of a promising Hunter syndrome treatment and by yet another clinical hold placed on its development despite positive trial results.

That raises an uncomfortable question: Does the review process itself need review?

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The approval path for UX111 is another example. The therapy went through the rigorous biologics license application process, only to be delayed by a manufacturing hold.

Elevidys offers a similarly painful lesson. More than 1,200 Duchenne patients received the treatment over three years. Then, after two non-ambulatory patients (including one with underlying complications) tragically died, the FDA pulled the treatment from all patients, leaving families crushed and panicked.

Children are waiting too long for access to potentially life-changing therapies.

Yes, medical breakthroughs have increased. But so have regulatory burdens tied to approval and release. By the time many of these therapies reach the market, a decade or more has passed. In rare pediatric disease, that delay has a name: time children do not have.

Sometimes, it is their entire lifetime.

Manufacturing processes can be improved. Facilities can be upgraded. Paperwork can be corrected.

Lost neurons and muscle fibers cannot be replaced.

FDA leaders, along with Congress and the White House, should push for a smarter accelerated approval process — one that allows multiple requirements to be addressed simultaneously when appropriate, instead of serially dragging out timelines. If regulatory review had moved more efficiently, the Sanfilippo treatment might have cleared on its original 2025 approval timeline. Duchenne patients might not have lost access to the only available gene therapy. Hunter syndrome patients might not still be waiting.

This debate is not about abandoning safety or efficacy standards.

Ultragenyx has said manufacturing improvements are addressable and not directly related to product quality. Sarepeta responded to FDA concerns over Elevidys by requesting black-box warnings while allowing treatment to continue for ambulatory patients. In the RGX-121 Hunter syndrome case, the FDA rejected the use of a long-accepted biomarker (cerebrospinal fluid) used in the trial.

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These decisions do not help children with rare diseases. Timely, science-based approvals would.

And the stakes go beyond today’s patients. Regulatory efficiency also affects whether companies continue investing in rare-disease therapies at all. Orphan drug development requires major upfront investment, long timelines, and often poor financial returns. In many cases, these programs are closer to philanthropic science than blockbuster pharma economics.

When developers face repeated slowdowns across different diseases, sponsors, and technologies for reasons unrelated to core clinical safety or efficacy, the signal to the market is clear: Don’t take the risk.

That is how innovation gets smothered.

At some point, the pattern at the FDA becomes impossible to ignore. Is this simply bureaucracy doing what bureaucracy does? Or are rare pediatric therapies effectively facing a higher bar inside the system?

Those are scientific and ethical questions that deserve honest answers.

Accelerated approval does not mean lower standards. It means applying standards intelligently. It means allowing earlier access while confirming evidence continues to accumulate. It means recognizing that “wait and see” is not neutral. It is a choice that guarantees disease progression in children who cannot afford delay.

Good science and compassion are not competing values. We can maintain rigor and still act with urgency.

The FDA has the authority. The science is moving. The children cannot wait.

Accelerated approval is not cutting corners. It is using every tool we have to save time families do not have.

Waiting to exhale? Trump’s EPA just made it possible.



The Trump administration has rescinded the Obama administration’s 2009 Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding for gases such as carbon dioxide. You may now exhale without worrying that the carbon dioxide in your breath will contribute to global warming.

After all, with 8.3 billion people on the planet exhaling an average of 2.3 pounds of CO2 per person per day, roughly 9.5 million tons of CO2 are respired into the atmosphere daily. That is a lot of hot air — literally.

If you have been holding your breath while waiting for more sensible environmental regulations that focus on both people and the planet, you may now breathe easier.

Fortunately, plants use the air we exhale. It is part of the life cycle that sustains a healthy biosphere. Add the full carbon cycle — in which carbon is sequestered and released throughout the living and nonliving components of the global ecosystem — and a natural balance is generally maintained.

The serious question has been whether human activity, especially the increasing use of fossil fuels since the late 1800s, has tipped that balance.

The major “consensus science” conclusions tied to the endangerment finding include the confident assertion that modern climate change can be attributed to people burning fossil fuels and releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. According to one professional organization, these human-caused changes “are larger and faster than any humanity is known to have endured over the last 10,000 years.” The same view also holds that many harmful impacts already under way will intensify and outweigh any benefits.

Yet another perspective deserves consideration. One of the greatest forces lifting people out of poverty has been the burning of fossil fuels. The progression from coal to oil to natural gas — along with advances in pollution controls — has helped produce dramatically higher living standards in societies that use their energy resources well.

Arguably, the human-caused improvements in comfort, productivity, and longevity made possible by fossil fuels are also “larger and faster than any humanity is known to have [enjoyed] over the last 10,000 years.”

As for harmful impacts, the rhetorical pattern often looks familiar: find an extraordinary weather event and blame it on anthropogenic global warming. Extreme heat? Human activity. Extreme cold — as the United States recently experienced? Human activity again.

At least most scientists acknowledge that positive effects exist. These include substantial increases in global vegetation and the advantages of warmer temperatures over colder ones for human well-being and development.

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Any honest assessment of climate change and its effects on people, infrastructure, and the natural world should weigh both benefits and harms. Complex systems demand that kind of accounting.

The current retraction of the endangerment finding will be a particular breath of fresh air for the auto industry. In essence, the Environmental Protection Agency concluded that it “lacks statutory authority under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act to prescribe standards for [greenhouse gas] emissions” from “new motor vehicles and new motor vehicle engines.”

According to the EPA:

As a result of these changes, engine and vehicle manufacturers no longer have any future obligations for the measurement, control, and reporting of [greenhouse gas] emissions for any highway engine and vehicle, including model years manufactured prior to this final rule. This final action is only related to [greenhouse gas] emissions and does not affect regulations on any traditional air pollutants. Rather, this action realigns EPA’s regulatory framework with the best reading of the CAA, which does not authorize EPA to regulate [greenhouse gas] emissions from new motor vehicles.

As the agency notes, traditional health-based air pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, ground-level ozone, particulate matter, lead, and carbon monoxide — not CO2 — are unaffected by this EPA action.

So if you have been holding your breath while waiting for more sensible environmental regulations that focus on both people and the planet, you may now breathe easier.

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at American Thinker.

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Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘philosophy’ wasn’t deep — it was dirty



Anyone can search the currently available Epstein files and see what turns up. As a professor at Arizona State University, I searched for my own school. I did not expect to find so much ASU-related material.

One reason: ASU employed Lawrence Krauss, paying him a substantial salary to write books arguing that the universe created itself from nothing.

Epstein’s philosophy collapses under its own weight because it begins with a lie about God.

That claim is its own story. You will object, rightly: “But we can’t get something from nothing.” Krauss replies, “By ‘nothing’ I mean quantum foam.” And you respond, “Then the title misleads. You don’t mean nothing. You mean quantum foam.”

Krauss also became close with Jeffrey Epstein. In one exchange, Krauss wrote: “I really do love you deeply as a friend Jeffrey. I don’t think I know anyone else who so honestly cares about me, and I don’t think I can ever truly express how wonderful that feels. Thank you. The cruise was a great reset.” In other messages, they discuss science and religion.

That is what caught my attention. As I read Epstein’s comments about religion — and listened to his interview with Steve Bannon on similar themes — a picture began to form of how Epstein made sense of the world and, more chillingly, of himself.

How a monster sleeps

A question hangs over every moral horror: How does a moral monster live with himself? Even if we limit ourselves to the explicit immorality in the files — without speculating about coded language or hidden networks — how did he sleep at night? What silenced his conscience?

Several pieces fit together.

In the ASU-related material and in interviews, Epstein does what I have often seen among intellectuals: He retreats into abstraction. He speaks about the history of ideas, mathematics, and cutting-edge research in a way that floats above concrete people and particular moral obligations.

That retreat protects a self-image. He can pose as the enlightened patron of science, funding humanity’s progress. That image sits in grotesque contrast with the cruelty he inflicted on actual human beings.

Abstraction as a moral anesthetic

This pattern tracks with Paul Johnson’s thesis in “Intellectuals”: Intellectuals who talk about serving “humanity” often treat individuals in their orbit badly. Grand claims become a shield. The rhetoric of progress becomes moral insulation.

Think of the professor who preaches liberation while using DEI programs to impose racial essentialism and ideological coercion. He can tell himself he is helping “the marginalized” even as he harms colleagues and students in the real world.

Or consider the pop star who repeats slogans like “no one is illegal on stolen land.” The moral performance happens at the level of abstraction. The carelessness happens at the level of reality.

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Epstein’s ‘unknowable’ God

Epstein goes further by trying to dissolve moral accountability at the metaphysical level.

He argues that physicists once believed reality could be fully captured by mathematics. Now, he claims, we understand reality is irrational. Mathematics can only approximate what he calls “the limit,” but the limit itself remains unknowable. Some call that limit “God.”

But if God is unknowable, then God becomes irrelevant to our calculations about life and moral choice.

At one point, Epstein frames this as a male-female divide. The male mind, he says, runs on logic and mathematics. Reality, however, does not fit that paradigm. Reality is fundamentally irrational and accessed through feminine intuition. Ultimate reality, in his telling, is best understood as the divine female.

Humans, in Epstein’s view, are beasts with frontal lobes sophisticated enough to rationalize their impulses.

He may have believed he was elevating the feminine. The framework reads more like a metaphysical excuse: reason fails, therefore the standard fails.

The tension between reason and intuition is ancient. Epstein narrows “reason” to a single project: reducing the world to material causes through mathematics. When that project does not deliver what he wants, he does not abandon reductionism. He abandons reason.

Francis Schaeffer described this move in godless intellectual life: When autonomous reason cannot sustain itself, the thinker does not repent. He escapes into irrationality. Intuition becomes the alibi. Mystery becomes permission.

Religion as therapy, not truth

In conversation with Krauss, Epstein defends a kind of religion, but not biblical religion.

Krauss, echoing the New Atheists, treats religion as an evolutionary leftover — maybe useful in an earlier age, unnecessary for modern man. After all, modern man allegedly knows universes can create themselves out of nonexistence.

Epstein pushes back, but only to reduce religion to psychological management. Religion concerns the “inner world,” he suggests, while science and mathematics concern the outer world. We cannot ignore the inner world. Its purpose is peace. Anxiety and depression signal inner disorder; religion restores equilibrium. That, for Epstein, becomes religion’s function.

Not worship. Not truth. Not repentance. Peace.

That is New Age self-help with a faux religious vocabulary.

A Nietzschean pattern

Put the pieces together and a Nietzschean outline emerges.

Nietzsche described the dialectic between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Apollonian seeks order, reason, structure. Yet it can become sterile and suffocating. The Dionysian seeks raw experience — ecstasy, pleasure, intoxication, release. Dionysian revelry becomes not only indulgence but purgation: a controlled environment where darker impulses can be acted out so a man can return to ordinary life and call himself functional again.

God’s moral law is written on the heart. We are not left with "unknowable limits" as our excuse. We are without excuse.

Humans, on this view, are beasts with frontal lobes sophisticated enough to rationalize their impulses.

That is the worldview of the modern pagan: order and chaos, calculation and intoxication, “science” by day and ritualized transgression by night. Add Epstein’s skepticism about knowable truth and his reduction of religion to inner peace, and the method of self-justification comes into focus.

His reported fascination with longevity technologies and strange diets fits too. Death becomes the great enemy. It must be cheated — through science, mythic elixirs, or Silicon Valley innovation.

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Temptation is not his alone

The unsettling part: These temptations are not unique to Epstein.

Many people oscillate between cold rationalism and irrational indulgence. Many treat morality as a social construct and religion as therapy. Many use abstractions to excuse what they would never defend in plain language.

That should drive self-examination, not mere disgust. Are we living inside the Apollonian-Dionysian loop, shifting between self-justifying “reason” and self-excusing “release”?

The lie at the center

Epstein’s philosophy collapses under its own weight because it begins with a lie about God.

God has not hidden Himself. Scripture teaches that His eternal power and divine nature are clearly revealed through creation. His moral law is written on the heart. We are not left with “unknowable limits” as our excuse. We are without excuse.

The claim that reality is fundamentally irrational is not a profound insight. It is an evasion. It is a way to suppress what is plain.

That is why Lawrence Krauss’ self-creating universe and Epstein’s divine female belong in the same category: idols. They exchange the truth for something else — something that grants permission.

Romans 1 describes the pattern of Epstein’s life: the darkened mind, the suppression of truth, the exchange of glory for self-justification, and the descent into sexual corruption. The cure is not oscillation between sterile rationalism and ecstatic purgation. The cure is redemption. The cure is communion with God restored.

We need Christ, who alone frees us from the pagan dialectic — ancient and modern — and grants eternal life, “that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent” (John 17:3).

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