Cheryl Rofer
Scientific American
New Mexico, United States
Contact Cheryl
Discover and connect with journalists and influencers around the world, save time on email research, monitor the news, and more.
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Past articles by Cheryl:
Lab-Leak Intelligence Reports Aren’t Scientific Conclusions
Intelligence reports supporting the lab-leak theory for COVID are not based in science → Read More
Balloon Juice
WordPress tells me that I have posted 820 posts, starting in April 2017, in Balloon Juice’s total of almost 70,000. That’s about 200 a year. I’ve tried to explain the science of current events and commented politically when I felt I had something to add to the general noise. And now it’s time to move … → Read More
Balloon Juice | If NATO Hadn't Expanded
There’s an ongoing argument about NATO expansion after the fall of the Soviet Union. Within the western political science community, there have been a number of sub-arguments, including whether Russia was promised that NATO would not expand. That has more or less been settled: Although some statements were made to that effect, they were not … → Read More
Balloon Juice | Trump Buddy Tom Barrack Indicted As Foreign Agent
Tom Barrack was the chair of Donald Trump’s inaugural committee. He had been a Trump confidant and financial backer for some time, and thus not surprising he would get a job like that. Today he was arrested for acting as an agent of the United Arab Emirates and trying to influence the President in their … → Read More
Balloon Juice | The Pandemic Will End
Sometimes I think the pandemic will never end, but I remind myself that it will. Numbers are headed up again in the US and skyrocketing in other countries. A Yankee – Red Sox game was postponed because of 19 positive tests within the Yankee organization. One wonders what the vaccination status is of the Yankee … → Read More
Balloon Juice | Caution On The Guardian Scoop
The Guardian today has a document that may be from the uppermost reaches of the Russian government and purports to describe a meeting of Vladimir Putin’s security council in closed session. The meeting was on January 22, 2016, and in it, Putin gave instructions to his spy agencies to support Donald Trump’s run for the … → Read More
Balloon Juice
Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman is the person to follow on Twitter if you want to know where the United States is sending vaccine. Secretary of State Antony Blinken also tweets about sending vaccines out, as you can see above, but it seems to be mostly Deputy Secretary Sherman’s job. Open thread! → Read More
Balloon Juice | Chinese Nuclear Silos
Someone – Goku? germy? – wanted me to see that China has built 120 new missile silos in their western desert. [Disclosure: Jeffrey Lewis has been a friend for years, and we have consulted each other on many things. Our political views are similar, but he has a punchier way of expressing them.] There’s a … → Read More
Balloon Juice | Excellent Science Reads
Following up on science stories that have been badly handled by the media. UFOs I am tempted to refer to this phenomenon as “flying saucers” to emphasize the nonsense that surrounds it. The report was released last week and seems to have been drowned out by Critical Race Theory and other shiny objects thrown out … → Read More
Balloon Juice | Oldies But Goodies Respite Thread
On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions. From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes. → Read More
Balloon Juice
Today is the anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. World War I began a month later. I’ve thought a lot about this and the bloody first half of the twentieth century. It was those two world wars that made the atomic bomb seem necessary. In a way, those two wars were … → Read More
Balloon Juice | Bill Barr Tells All Or Maybe Not
A need has been expressed for more general threads on Sunday morning. And the Atlantic obliges with subject matter. I haven’t read it yet, but some of the commentary is hilarious. But of course it’s no laughing matter how Barr contributed to TFG’s destruction, even if now he assures us he was keeping him from … → Read More
Balloon Juice | Step 1 Completed In Chuck Schumer's Strategy
I agree with Adam’s analysis of Schumer’s strategy. I disagree that if you are going to call your senators, you must have a full understanding of the arcane maneuverings necessary to force Republicans to explicitly come out against voting rights (☑ today) and to convince Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to vote down the filibuster … → Read More
Balloon Juice | President Biden Summarizes The Meetings
He does a better job than I would have. This is from his remarks before he got on Air Force One. The question he is responding to is an explicit variant of Kaitlan Collins’s question, to which he had responded curtly earlier. It’s a silly question, like the other “killer” question the media are obsessed … → Read More
Balloon Juice | A Couple Of Articles
I’ve been quoted in two news articles yesterday and today. I’m reasonably pleased with both of them. Exclusive: US assessing reported leak at Chinese nuclear power facility Zachary Cohen called me with not enough information on this reported leak. The odd thing about it was that France had notified the United States, and high-level US … → Read More
Balloon Juice | Biden Takes Adam's Advice
President Biden met today with the Prime Ministers of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Today is the anniversary of the beginning, in 1941, of the Soviet Union’s deportation of citizens of those countries to Siberia and Kazakhstan after invading. Adam suggested a larger group of countries, but these three, on this day, will send a message … → Read More
Balloon Juice | The Biden-Putin Summit
What can we expect from the summit meeting between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin? Nothing. That is the expectation that Biden is setting. There will be no grand pronouncements, no reset, maybe not even a perfunctory statement of agreement on a minor point. That is part of the reason that Biden plans to hold a … → Read More
Balloon Juice | Quick Open Thread
I plan to write a post on what to expect from the Biden-Putin summit, but here’s a foretaste. Last week sometime I finally said on Twitter, in plain English, what I’ve thought for some time: that nuclear weapons are unusable unless we want to destroy the Earth, so we should say that and explicitly move … → Read More
Balloon Juice | Steve Bannon's Useful Idiots
The story of the alleged laboratory escape (“lab leak”) from the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been shopped by the Trumpies, mostly Mike Pompeo, since early in the pandemic. Its form has varied, sometimes a bioweapon, sometimes not, but there has been a concerted effort to get the story into the media. Thanks to the … → Read More
Balloon Juice | Steve Bannon's Useful Idiots
Scientific opinion on how the SARS-CoV-2 virus got into human beings has not changed much over the past year. The greatest probability is that a human caught it from an animal; a long ways down in probability is that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Nonexistent probability is that it is a … → Read More