Science 2.0

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.

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Despite Vermont's Agricultural  Innovation Board (AIB), created to inform regulatory recommendations using science, flatly stating there was no basis for a ban on a class of safe pesticides called neonicotinoids, and agreement by Vermont’s Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets, the Vermont Senate just passed House Bill H706, which will ban such insecticides despite decades of safe use.

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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.

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Evolutionary psychology, the discipline that claimed we're being manipulated by flowers and evolved to like the appearance of black men, also made the bold assertion that the income of your parents during pregnancy made you...gay?

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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!

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With a porous southern border, street fentanyl continues to enter the United States and be purchased by recreational drug users, all while the U.S. government continues to treat suffering cancer patients like criminals when it comes to legitimate pain medication access. It isn't much better in Canada, according to a new study.

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A year ago, corporate media promoted the provocative claim that dinosaurs like Tyrannorsaurus rex had so many neurons they had to be substantially more intelligent than assumed, since these high neuron counts could directly inform on intelligence, metabolism and life history.

They even added that T. rex was monkey-like in some of its habits and may even have used cultural transmission of knowledge as tools. Corporate media sells ads so they love such 'scientists are baffled by' narratives and a scenario where dinosaurs could be ruling on other planets. Other scientists were instead baffled that it got by peer-review.

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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.

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From April 30 to May 3 more than 300 researchers in fundamental physics will gather in Amsterdam for the first edition of the EUCAIF conference, an initiative supported by the APPEC, NuPecc and ECFA consortia, which is meant to structure future European research activities in fundamental physics with Artificial Intelligence technologies.

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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

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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.

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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. 

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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)

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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 102 billion years of health gained and 52% of those child lives were in Africa.

It is a shame Europe wants to block Africa from the same health benefits in agriculture.

Lives saved are obviously important but so is quality of life. Throughout history, when a people devotes less of their time and money to basic necessities like food and energy, culture flourishes. Life improves.

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 kids get 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.

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The International Energy Agency is estimating that global electric car sales will rise to 17 million by the end of this year

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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.

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The Voyager 1 spacecraft launches in 1977 and therefore the most remote human object in the universe, 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. 

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.

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If even a wealthy like Germany has to lie about emissions to placate government-funded environmentalists and burn wood and buy gas from Russia, it seems unfair to criticize a poor country like Congo, but the culture war on oil can't think about any of that.

If you don't want to look like a rich, white progressive telling poor black people that the climate is more important than their children, the way to do it is to write...anonymously.

And an ironically-named humanities journal like Critical Historical Studies will still publish it, uncritically. 

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