Sunday, January 31, 2021
Recognizing Reality is Not Their Strong Suit
In a post discussing the Wired article "The spiralling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction," Steven Hayward comments:
For the longest while I have been asking, “Where do environmentalists and Democrats think all these batteries for our oil-free transportation fleet are going to come from?” It seems they think there is a Battery Fairy out there somewhere who will magically supply the ginormous battery capacity, and additional supply of electricity to charge them, in order to deliver us to our blessed fossil-fuel-free future.
Labels: party of science
Equity Equals Inequality
The term “equity” has become ubiquitous of late. It has replaced “equal opportunity” and “equal treatment” with “equal results.” Pro tip: “Equity” is intentionally nebulous, innocuous-sounding shorthand for leftist social engineering. Whenever you hear or see the term outside the context of finance, understand that someone’s likely pulling a fast one on you.Also, from Scott Johnson:
“Equity” is not equality (i.e., equal rights). It is a substitute for equal rights. “Equity” requires the authorities to determine who gets what according to the race, the ethnicity, or other status of the beneficiaries. It is updated Marxist claptrap in which race replace [sic] class.
Make sure you check out the Michael Barone column Johnson links to in his post.
War on Science
Even those who share Biden’s goal of reducing CO2 emissions shouldn’t support his move to block the pipeline. Blocking its construction will, most likely, lead to higher emissions, not a reduction.
Why?
Well, Keystone had already promised to use green technology and eliminate all CO2 emissions from its operations by 2030. And it’s not as if blocking this pipeline will actually mean the oil doesn’t get transported. It will just have to be transported by more costly, less efficient measures like rail shipping.
“The Obama State Department found five separate times that the pipeline would have no material impact on greenhouse gas emissions since crude would still be extracted,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board explains. “Shipping bitumen by rail or tanker would result in 28% to 42% higher CO2 emissions and more leaks.”
Ironically, this unintended consequence will likely mean that more carbon gets emitted—the exact opposite of Biden’s goal.
Of course, reducing emissions takes a back seat to punishing Americans with these clowns.
Labels: party of science
ChiCom Virus: The Beginning
The existence of bat virus RaTG13 is therefore not necessarily evidence of a natural bat origin. In fact, it seems to me to imply the opposite: New functional components may have been overlaid onto or inserted into the RaTG13 genome, new Tinkertoy intermolecular manipulations, especially to its spike protein, which have the effect of making it unprecedentedly infectious in human airways.
This is where the uniquely peculiar furin insert and/or the human-tuned ACE2-receptor-binding domain may come in — although it’s also possible that either of these elements could have evolved as part of some multistep zoonotic process. But in the climate of gonzo laboratory experimentation, at a time when all sorts of tweaked variants and amped-up substitutions were being tested on cell cultures and in the lungs of humanized mice and other experimental animals, isn’t it possible that somebody in Wuhan took the virus that had been isolated from human samples, or the RaTG13 bat virus sequence, or both (or other viruses from that same mine shaft that Shi Zhengli has recently mentioned in passing), and used them to create a challenge disease for vaccine research — a chopped-and-channeled version of RaTG13 or the miners’ virus that included elements that would make it thrive and even rampage in people? And then what if, during an experiment one afternoon, this new, virulent, human-infecting, furin-ready virus got out?
I highly recommend reading Baker's entire article. It seems to make a lot of sense, so I'm sure it has been labeled racist.
Via John Sexton.
Nonessential
Are they seriously unaware that many millions of people have kept working right through the Wuhan epidemic? And that many millions more have returned to work in recent months? Maybe so. I am not sure they understand that most people work in the Summer.
I am tired of hearing about how heroic teachers are. At this point, I would rather have my children taught by clerks at Total Wine stores than by members of teachers’ unions. At least the Total Wine clerks will show up.
Divided Against Itself
Pluralism internalizes diverse customs and rituals, and makes our lives more interesting and fulfilling, but multiculturalism erodes the social capital — shared identity, trust, cooperation — that makes it all possible. But vacuous universalism and a fetishization of “diversity” don’t make us stronger. A coherent set of values does.
