I used to do R&D on insecticides. Blue Strat is completely full of crap. DDT was banned for use as an insecticide in agricultural use in the USA and in many other countries, as it should have been given its propensity for bioaccumulation and broad target spectrum. DDT continues to be used for combating mosquitoes that are malarial vectors and vectors for other diseases. However the only locations that successfully used DDT to eradicate malaria were wealthy, had well-developed public health programs, and had only seasonal malarial outbreaks or lower rates of malaria. Mosquito resistance to DDT was noted back in the 50's and today is a significant problem, unsurprising since mosquitoes have enormous populations that can go through over 40 generations in a year providing ample opportunity for the evolution of resistance. The need for rationally designed insecticides specific to mosquito species of interest is dire but funding simply is not there...and about to get worse if Trump and the Republicans cut even more funding from the already resource-starved NIH and USDA.

I drove through parts of the midwest to visit family in Texas two years ago and started spotting Armadillo roadkill in central Missouri. You can find armadillos in Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, as well as extreme southern Illinois and Indiana. Prior to ~1850 armadillos were not found north of the Rio Grande. That's not to say that much of the growth of Austin (and Houston and Dallas) isn't due to yankees though.

You originally stated "Last I checked, there wasn't any data showing that "spreading out" vaccinations either helped or hurt a damned thing." It took me mere seconds to find an article that unambiguously states that yes, the schedule matters, and parents delaying vaccinations in a misguided attempt to reduce risk to their child are achieving the exact opposite outcome. Further the only way you could describe as a "guess" that increasing the length of time a child is not vaccinated will increase their risk of disease is if you don't believe that vaccines are effective. As for the degree of parental control over vaccination I agree with the American Medical Association: nonmedical exemptions to immunization mandates should be barred.

When did you check and how did you check? It took me seconds to find a recent article from Scientific American entitled "Delaying Vaccines Increases Risks--with No Added Benefits."

I want people to get vaccinated based off the CDC's recommended timing because their schedule is based on science (epidemiology, virology, immunology, bacteriology, etc.) and not the evidence-free opinion of some random person who has zero training in any relevant field.

China has claimed basically all the South China Sea, including parts that are within the Exclusive Economic Zones of other countries. So China has territorial disputes with Vietnam, Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia, as well as any nation sending its navy through "Chinese" waters. The China-Philippines dispute is the most prominent one due to the Philippines recent win against China at the Permanent Court of Arbitration as well as the 2012 Scarborough Shoal standoff where a Philippine Navy ship directly encountered "Maritime Surveillance" ships from China. China seems to come into conflict the most with the Philippines, probably in part due to the Philippines having a woefully ill-equiped military that is by far the weakest in the region.

Basic research (at least for the life sciences) is funded by the government to such an extent that industrial funding is all but absent. For academics, peer-reviewed papers and grant money are the metrics by which you are judged. Industry generally doesn't do grants, while papers are done only in collaboration with academics (to maintain good relationships with them), or on fairly rare occasions as a form of advertising and/or to accompany a patent. Industrial scientists are judged by their patents, by the new products or improvements to existing products/processes, and support of coworkers' efforts to do the same or otherwise improve the position of the company.

Government officials do not pick and chose who gets awarded a research grant. When you write a grant proposal you are presenting a research proposal, giving the background of the area, the questions you'll be asking and why, the methodology you'll be using and why, what preliminary experiments back you up, where potential pitfalls of the research might be and what alternatives you may use to succeed. This is submitted to a panel of fellow scientists in the field of study or an allied field, who are unknown to you. Your proposal is judged on its merits and ranked among a pool of other proposals submitted, the total number of proposals being much greater than what the granting agency can fund. In this highly competitive process the best research proposals get funded.

Ending government funded research will kill privately funded research as sure as sitting on top an H-bomb when it goes off will be fatal. Drugs work on specific cellular components. Drug companies target specific cellular components to develop drugs. Grant-funded public research teases out what cellular components do what and interact with what, and when they don't do as they should how they might be related to what disease. Biotech/pharma are reluctant enough to spend money on applied research as it is. Strip funding for basic research out of government and add that cost onto the front end of the drug pipeline and the entire biotech and pharmaceuticals industry is completely fucked.

BTW trying to present stem cell research as an example of the wonders of private enterprise over government is laughable. They were discovered at UCSF by researchers funded by an NIH grant--our tax dollars hard at work!

If you were to pick up a scientific journal and flip to the end of each article you'd find where the money came from to fund the research. It's rarely from somewhere other than government grants. Privately funded researchers are utterly dependent upon the published literature--we can't make a new drug or vaccine without a lot of research telling us how the system works or where to focus on. Get rid of publicly funded science and privately funded research will quickly grind to a halt.

The government's pockets are so deep and grant money comes in such a torrent that when I left my job as a scientist funded by government grant money to work a similar job in private enterprise my salary only doubled.

From your link: "cowpox bears no analogy to smallpox." Cowpox and smallpox viruses are very similar, assigned to the same viral genus. We have sequenced the entire genome of each and their close relationship is undeniable. Here's an article for exampleAnalysis of the complete genome of smallpox variola major virus strain Bangladesh-1975. From the abstract: "Most of the virus proteins correspond to proteins in current databases, including 150 proteins that have > 90% identity to major gene products encoded by vaccinia virus, the smallpox vaccine." I'm sure if I spent more than 10 seconds on google I could find a lot more.

"The main thing that needs to be reversed is to restore the separation of management and science."

What separation? If as a PhD you can't think up more ideas worth following up than you can do the hands-on work yourself you're a piss poor PhD. This can start at a very junior level: I am no one special but I had three undergraduate research assistants assigned to me as a senior grad student and I was able to train them and still get back more work than I had spent in training and managing, a win-win as all were supporting authors on at least one of my papers and all went on to careers in science and medicine. I don't know of any PhD level scientists who did not have at least one direct report before finishing up their postdoctoral positions (which is roughly the transition from early to mid career in science for PhDs). Now that I'm nearly ten years post-PhD I don't see a change in trend: the more senior you are, the more likely you are to have more numerous and more senior people reporting to you. It's more a continuum than anything, and having spent over 15 years in academia successful professors are top notch grant writers, are completely in charge of science, oversee marketing (if any), are completely in charge of data presentation, and at a bare minimum oversee their subordinates' career development. It's a rare professor that does much bench work, and I've known awesome scientists who still spent an amazing 10 hours a week at the bench and awesome scientists who hadn't spent a single second at the bench in 20 years, though both extremes still had a typical 70 hour work week.

"Is anyone actually surprised by these poll results?"

From the top line that so few Americans are scientifically literate with respect to evolution, no. We're always near the bottom when industrialized nations are ranked by understanding evolution. What surprised and encouraged me is how much better it's getting. The poll broke out the demographics and there is a strong age bias:
age______% believe humans (animals) evolved
65+______49 (50)
50-64_____59 (62)
30-49_____60 (64)
18-29_____68 (73)

"Teachers who can't teach (even if they know their subject backwards and forwards) should be fired."

Absolutely.

"It should be possible for anyone with the proper qualifications to teach whether they have a "teaching certificate" or not; imagine a person retiring from IBM teaching a computer class or a retiree from the financial field teaching economics."

Since they don't have any experience teaching, let alone teaching a class full of people aged 18 and younger, they would probably be horrifically bad teachers.

I'm not a climatologist I'm a biochemist, so I'm not qualified to speak professionally on the subject. Data sets may or may not get thrown out in different disciplines. When I worked in an entomology lab the original data sets weren't kept either, there wasn't room in the freezer and they'd degrade after a while there anyway. In protein x-ray crystallography the diffraction patterns (a series of around about a hundred to a couple hundred very large digital images) quickly get processed and reduced to a couple megabytes (that are deposited and publicly available). The stacks of tapes/CDs/DVDs/whatever of diffraction patterns are held on by the original lab for several years to gather dust, but eventually get lost, thrown out, or are on media that nobody can read anymore. If climatologists are doing something similar I don't see reason for concern.

The claim that there are those "...who will do anything including manipulation of the raw data to further their political goals." is an extremely strong claim, the kind that if proven ends careers in disgrace. I would have to have such a claim very well evidenced before I'd accept it, but haven't heard anything that comes close.

Enzymology and protein structure/function relationships. I like my relative /. anonymity so I won't go into details. I redid the work, attempted to fit his model to the data and it was clear that it didn't work, built a new model that did, and that was also compatible with previously known data from several different areas where his model was not. Nothing special.