Cool Links

To bolster declining electric car sales, President Biden told EPA to create a new emissions standard. The agency put epidemiologists to work and declared that X (fill in any number you like, it's epidemiology, that's what they did) life-years have been lost without electric cars and trucks, and created a new emissions-standard that is effectively a ban on their competitors.
The Tennessee Valley Authority couldn't be done today. When it was done, it transformed an area mired in poverty. With affordable electricity, they had water. With water, they could farm. With farming, food became affordable. 

In a generation, the area was transformed and soon had libraries, schools, and much better quality of life.

Environmentalists need to be needed, it is how they feed their $3 billion-per-year appetite, and so TVA could never happen today. Environmental lawyers are so obstructionist and culturally corrosive, TVA can't even replace a coal plant without a lawsuit.

A coal plant. When activists claim they care about climate change.
If you are a vegan and opt your child out of a nornal diet, they are going to suffer from malnutrition and you may end up in jail.

Dr. Paul Saladino,  on the other end is just as dangerous, because he claims science doesn't exist so infants should be eating honey, raw milk and even meat.
For around 15 years, I have joked 'that's why they got sold for a dollar' when nonsense got published in Scientific American and my statement was both funny and factually correct.

They've been in decline for a while, their only hope for survival lay in what The Atlantic and Washington Post also got - a rich progressive (well, 'progressive' when it comes to other people paying taxes while they hide money offshore) who wants to say they own it as a vanity project. They have had that, thanks to the Holtzbrinck family of Germany, since 1986.
President Biden was thrilled when Tesla announced it was creating a Tesla Supercharger network, because electric cars were not legitimate until they stopped needing government hand-outs, and few wanted electric cars until they were sure they could charge them on trips.

Which no company wanted to do because there were no government handouts.

Tesla believed it could solve the problem, and President Biden was going to add to an alarming federal deficit to give them handouts, but the problems seem insurmountable, because Tesla pulled out.


As announced a few years ago and stated every few months in preparation, EPA has created a timeline  for a ban of non-industrial uses of methylene chloride. 

It was used in the past as a paint stripper but could also be found in things like automotive cleaners and various other consumer products. In home use, acute deaths did occur but only after shocking violations of common sense and boldly stated safety precautions.  If you used it to strip a bathtub in a closed room, well, you need to learn to read. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has long had stringent safety controls in place.
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the science community was right to openly wonder about the Wuhan labs next to the wet market where the disease took the world by storm. A Chinese government researcher had been arrested and found guilty of selling lab animals and everyone with any experience knew that a biosafety rating in America and in China were much different levels even if a the communist government slapped any number they wanted on there.
California Democrats know to strike when the anti-science iron is hot, so hot on the heels of banning red dye No. 3, using nothing but the same suspect epidemiology that turned the state into a laughing stock with Prop 65 'may cause cancer' warnings on 65,000 products, they are going after red dye 40.

Think of all the lives being saved by all those bans. There must have been corpses lining the streets!
A New Yorker writer extols bucking modern food militancy in a story about a world where infants could try lemons and schnitzel.

Basically, before the 1990s, when pregnant women were shamed into believing if they had a glass of wine their child would have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (but only US babies - European pregnant women are fine without Puritan mullahs) and that they needed to stay home and breast feed for two years and then only feed their infant USDA Organic, Non-GMO, Shaman-Blessed bland purees of 'nutritious' vegetables.
With the solar and wind replacements touted by the German Green Party shown to be expensive failures, and environmentalists helping the German coal industry lie about its emissions to avoid blame for getting nuclear energy banned being exposed, the knives are out for the activists who drove Germany into such a state that German companies are closing plants and dumping money into America.

To Germans, even American runaway inflation and trillion-dollar subsidies for government union workers is an improvement.

Solar Uber Alles
If you have to pay for companies to make a product, and then pay for people to buy it, and then pay for them to use it, you don't have a product, you have government wishful thinking.

That is the problem with solar power. When the Obama administration first took a basic research funding effort and decided it was time to subsidize it, and a miracle of free markets would take over, companies which had lost money on it for 50 years were amused. Then he started throwing money at it. A lot. Predictably, it went to Democratic donors, like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and many of them declared bankruptcy after getting the loans, but $4 trillion later the industry is starting to recoil.
A new study has shown conclusively that no matter how many 'organic' industry companies give money to Environmental Working Group and Non-GMO Project to spread misinformation and doubt about their competitors, none on the market are free of genetic modification. 

Most of them were engineered before the "organic" process even existed and all of the strawberries we eat now were engineered in France just a short while ago, shortly before synthetic fertilizers were invented. 
In the 1990s, Julia Roberts starred in a movie about a lady who interviewed people in a California town who insisted they were being poisoned by the evil PG&E utility. What the film left out is that the chemical is found naturally in animals and plants and rocks and soil, plants. It is everywhere. It is also used in some manufacturing processes.

Despite the lack of any science, she was a big hit and the movie ended with the utility settling the case for an amount that changed the lives - of the attorneys, anyway.(1)


In the last 50 years, vaccination has averted 154 million deaths, 146 million kids under 5 years, and 101 million infants, according to this World Health Organisation report. They translate that to over 10 billion years of health gained and 52% of those child lives were in Africa, since the Expanded Programme on Immunization began in May of 1974.

It is a shame Europe wants to block Africa from the same health benefits in agriculture.
The Biden EPA has let scientists win over environmental epidemiology claims just this once. They have debunked claims that acephate 'causes' autism. 

Anti-science activists have long claimed everything causes autism and a whole spectrum of 'neurodevelopmental disorders' that covers 85 percent of the world. Vaccines were the big one for 25 years, every kid gets vaccines so that is a huge class-action settlement for lawyers, but then Republicans decided they wanted to be anti-vaccine for a little while so the anti-science left had to scramble for something new.
The International Energy Agency is estimating that global electric car sales will rise to 17 million by the end of this year
U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris has started to take on more leadership in the Biden administration, for obvious reasons. A President declared too mentally unfit to face criminal charges is likely not going to finish out a second term if he wins re-election, so it is important for Democrats to get voters comfortable with her today, or else the 40 percent of their party who didn't want him to run for re-election at all may not show up in November.
The Voyager 1 spacecraft launched in 1977 and is therefore the most remote human object in the universe, until it went dark 5 months ago and NASA engineers feared it lost.

For Oppenheimer's birthday today, there is good news; it has resumed sending engineering updates to Earth. The voyage continues. 

The thing about space is, we can't even be sure it left the solar system, because the definition of solar system has nothing to do with actual space.

Recycling in America has long been controversial and no place more than California, where 'recycling garbage' was a short time ago one of California's top exports.

No one believed China was recycling it but that they said they did was good enough for politicians and elites on the coast, so California claimed they met pollution targets - by continuing to add new items to dump into those blue bins that went into Chinese landfills for the next 300 years.
Sometimes a picture tells a thousand words and sometimes it tells a whole book on how markets and freedom to science without government blockades can improve the lives of everyone.

This USDA chart shows the land in use versus affordability of food versus population and it is breathtaking. Imagine what the world would have done if backward places like Europe and Russia adopted American science and technology. If we are dreaming, let's imagine a world where every country used science to grow food. Farmland equal to the entire country of India could revert to nature.