Scientists have recorded that chimps climb hills to observe the numbers and location of rival groups of chimps.

New imitation "vintage clothing" is being made and sold. Is there anything wrong with this?

In my opinion, there is nothing bad about it. If people want clothing in a style that was made a few decades ago, why shouldn't people get it?

Pretending that newly made similar clothes are old is a false pretense, but that matters only if the people buying those old-styled clothes make a fuss about whether they are "genuine old". Why should that matter to anyone? There is no reason to pay attention to it. Some people may try to profit because other people pay inordinate attention to the difference between "genuine old" clothes and new imitations, but is no reason to care whether they succeed in profiting from that.

Disney has a plan to remake Snow White with drastic changes to give it a woke moral.

I have no particular esteem or attachment for the story of Snow White. I am sure I saw the old Disney cartoon once when I was a child but I doubt I would ever watch it again. If it disappeared, I would not miss it.

But it makes no sense to alter an old story in the drastic way that appears to be proposed (assuming it is a real plan, not trolling). Projects to confront real issues, by situating them in old stories that disregarded them, can result in interesting reading. But this project does nothing like that. It would restage Snow White in a totally unrealistic woke world of the past, one that wasn't even imagined back then.

The book, Catherine Called Birdy, was a bit of a stretch for plausibility for a young noblewoman in the 13th century, but not utterly unimaginable, and that made it fun. The movie made from that book went far beyond credibility — it became propaganda to inculcate an openly defiant form of feminism, an attitude that exists today but was not even imagined back then.

Indeed, the only reason I can see for someone to want to stage Snow White in a woke world that never existed is the goal that all stories (for children, at least) must support a certain ideological position. That project seems like brainwashing to me.

The article I linked to participates in the campaign to eliminate each word that means a person with certain characteristics or in a certain role, and replace it with a phrase that contains the word "people" together with modifiers.

The motivations for some of these proposed changes to English are well-meaning, but I doubt that they would improve society in the ways that their proponents claim. Meanwhile, they would mutilate English. I've decided not to go along with this campaign. I will continue using the nouns.

A new LNG export facility for Canada's Pacific coast is predicted to endanger humpback whales with the number of collisions that they would suffer with ships transporting the fossil gas. This is not to mention that exporting the gas would drive us faster into climate disaster, when what we need to do is put the engines into "full reverse".

The UK's official government science advisors could tell ministers that their plans for dealing with Covid-19 were absurd, but they were not allowed to tell the public this — and they were used to give an air of scientific legitimacy to the absurd plans.

I think that science officials in the US are more independent than in the UK, and that this problem is less here. But it must have been difficult for an official who is in principle allowed to state per own views to the public to disagree publicly with the bully when that last was president.