The “study” that the left is citing is junk science. In fact, as JunkScience.com explains, the study the US Consumer Product Safety Commission is citing wasn’t actual research on children, but “meta-analysis of previously published (and ignored) studies”:

The authors did a literature search for previous epidemiologic studies on gas stoves and asthma in kids and then just mixed those results together in an effort to contrive statistical significance. This is a bogus technique for a number of reasons including publications bias in the component studies — i.e., studies with null results aren’t published.

In other words, the researches wanted to reach a conclusion and cherry-picked studies in order to get to said conclusion.

So this study qualifies as a lie, and it’s a lie that Democrats, including AOC, are pushing on you. The question to ask at this point is why they are pushing so hard to make you afraid of gas stoves, or more accurately, what’s in it for them?

WASHINGTON – Disgraced first son Hunter Biden lived off and on at the Delaware home where classified documents from Joe Biden’s time as vice president were found last month — giving him unrestricted access to America’s secrets while he was addicted to drugs, hammering out shady foreign business deals and under federal investigation.

The now-52-year-old began listing the Wilmington home as his address following his 2017 divorce from ex-wife Kathleen Buhle — even falsely claiming he owned the property on a July 2018 background check form as part of a rental application. //

Hunter also listed the home as the billing address for his personal credit card and Apple account in 2018 and 2019, respectively, Fox News Digital reported Friday after reviewing emails from his abandoned laptop.

After launching on a Falcon 9 rocket in August 2022, the Korean Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter slid into orbit around the Moon last month. This was South Korea's first lunar probe, and among its chief objectives was surveying the polar regions of the Moon for resources such as water ice.

One of the six instruments carried by the half-ton satellite was a hyper-sensitive camera built by NASA called ShadowCam. The camera was designed with maximum sensitivity to light, such that it could provide images of permanently shadowed regions of the poles—which is to say, capture images of things that are inherently very dark.

Earlier this week, the ShadowCam team released its first image, which reveals a wall and the floor of Shackleton Crater near the south pole of the Moon. At first glance, there's nothing remarkable about the photo. It looks a lot like... the Moon.

However, what you're actually looking at is an area of the Moon that lies in total darkness. Here is a photograph taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2009, shortly after it reached the Moon. That black area on the left of the photo? That's the region of Shackleton Crater imaged by ShadowCam. Yeah, it's pretty phenomenal. //

According to the imaging team, the camera's ability to capture clear images at high sensitivity is the equivalent of increasing from ISO 100 to greater than 12,800 without increasing grain.

Exxon's scientists accurately projected things its executives didn't want to hear. //

Currently, the major oil companies appear to have settled on an awkward compromise with the reality of climate change: They generally acknowledge that their product is helping drive it but plan to continue to produce as much of that product as they can. But that reflects a major change for these companies, which up until recently were funding think tanks that minimized the risks of climate change and, in many cases, directly denying the validity of the science.

In the case of ExxonMobil, that includes denying its own science. Thanks to documents obtained by the press, we now know that Exxon sponsored its own climate researchers who did internal research, collaborated with academic scientists, and came to roughly the same conclusions about carbon dioxide that the rest of the scientific community had—and executives were made aware of it. //

A climate projection's skillfulness is a measure of how closely it agreed with the historic record. And again, Exxon scientists performed well. The aggregate skillfulness of their internal climate models is over 70 percent. By that measure, they outperformed contemporary models from the scientific community. //

jhodge Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
11y
6,193
Subscriptor++

Dark Jaguar said:
We can't trust corporations though. That's not how we solve this problem. Taking their autonomy away and making them a branch of the government may just be an absolute necessity to get through this. The fundamental need of any society is survival. All other rights take a back seat to this, because they are dependent upon it. I don't care if someone's an Ayn Rand objectivist, survival is more important than A=A.

No - down that path lies totalitarianism. If survival trumps all other values, and the state is charged with ensuring that survival, then no limits on the power of the state can be tolerated.

We're just going to muddle through this, keeping in mind that people generally don't act until a crisis is immediate. The climate is going to change, and there are going to be widespread impacts with winners and losers.

We are not as ultimately as rational as we like to think, and our actions pretty much always optimize for the short-term.

NOTAM: Notice to Air Men (non PC)

"Notice to Air Missions"

Notices of Temporary changes in procedures at an airport or airspace, many end up being "permanent" and properly classified, so important info gets buried in the deluge.

Ops Group and ICAO want to reduce the number of codes in use and weed out the "permanent" notices so that appropriate notices can be prioritized and pilots only needs to be concerned with relevant notices, rather then wading through hundreds of pages looking for critical info, like it is now.

McGehee in reply to TheFineReport.com. | January 10, 2023 at 7:52 pm
Decades ago in California, I served on a jury in which the judge instructed us that, if we believed the prosecution had proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt, we may but need not return a verdict of guilty. I thought that was interesting, because it is exactly how “jury nullification” is argued to work.

It was a DUI case, though, and none of us were in a mood to nullify that law.

Someone may start off as not an imminent unlawful threat, then become an imminent unlawful threat, then cease being an imminent unlawful threat. It’s analogous to a window that’s shut, then open, then shut again.

The privilege to use defensive force exists only when that “window” is open. Prior to the window opening, no defensive force is justified. Similarly, after the window is closed, no defensive force is justified. The privilege to use defensive force ends when the threat is no longer imminent. //

It’s important to remember that what controls your legal destiny under this justification is not your sense of what was reasonable. Rather it is the sense of reasonableness of other people that control your fate—that of the police, the prosecutor, the judge, the jury. If you believe you acted reasonably, but they believe you acted unreasonably, it’s their determination that sends you to prison regardless of what you believed. //

REMEMBER
You carry a gun so you’re hard to kill.

Know the law so you’re hard to convict.

Stay safe!

–Andrew

Attorney Andrew F. Branca
Law of Self Defense LLC

If the Sites Reservoir, which is located west of the Sacramento Valley and has been in the planning process for more than 60 years, had been finished, the location would store excess flow from the Sacramento River. //

“Gavin has been in the grip of pro-scarcity Malthusian environmentalists his entire career,” Shellenberger explained. “He hasn’t done what he’s needed to do to raise the heights of the reservoirs we have or build the new reservoirs we need.”

Prolonged drought periods that sometimes last up to 200 years are common in the American West, which, according to 2020 Census figures, is now home to nearly 79 million people.

“Water, it’s the dumbest thing in the world,” Shellenberger said. “It’s easy to store water, just dig a bigger hole, build higher walls.”

As different states and municipalities across the country adopt ranked-choice voting, it’s become obvious this mind-boggling election system deserves a new name: rigged-choice voting. //

What’s behind the RCV takeover? As The Federalist has previously reported, partisan Democratic activists and moderate Republicans are pushing RCV as a legal mechanism to push out more revolutionary (read: populist) candidates in favor of establishment-backed contenders. As Project Veritas has documented, the moderate, nominal Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski was behind the campaign to change Alaska’s primary to an RCV system, ensuring the defeat of her Trump-backed challenger Kelly Tshibaka. Had Alaska not implemented RCV, Tshibaka likely would have defeated Murkowski in the primary. //

The Foundation for Government Accountability notes that ranked-choice voting causes ballot exhaustion (when a ballot is cast but does not count toward the end election result), diminishes voter confidence, and lags election results. It can take weeks or even months for a ranked-choice race to be counted, threatening the security of the process.

If Americans desire democracy and election integrity, rigged-choice voting is clearly not the way to go.

• When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone he had three missed calls from Chuck Norris.
• Chuck Norris went skydiving and his parachute failed to open, so he took it back the next day for a refund.
• Chuck Norris has a grizzly bear carpet in his room — the bear isn’t dead it is just afraid to move.
• Chuck Norris counted to infinity. Twice.
• There has never been a hurricane named Chuck because it would have destroyed everything.
• The Great Wall of China was originally created to keep Chuck Norris out. It didn’t work.
• Chuck built the hospital he was born in.
• Chuck was once bitten by a cobra, and after five days of intense pain, the cobra died.
• Chuck Norris has a diary. It’s called the Guiness Book of World Records.
• Chuck is the only person who can actually kill time.
• When Chuck looks in a mirror, even his reflection is scared to look him in the eye.
• Chuck once killed fifty men with one grenade, and five seconds later, the grenade exploded.
• Chuck can hit 11 out of 10 targets, using 9 bullets.

To boldly consider a future with clean energy for all

Cheap energy is essential for human prosperity. Always has been. Molten salt reactors have the potential to deliver the cheap, clean and safe energy that is needed to lift billions of people out of energy poverty, without endangering the climate. //

In 2007, Google took up an ambitious plan. Google believed that the most effective way to terminate the use of fossil fuels is by outcompeting them. Google’s RE<C plan was targeted at developing strategies to achieve this goal. After investing $850 million, Google terminated the program because it failed. In their article ‘Today’s renewable energy technologies won’t save us. So what will?’ RE<C project leaders Ross Koningstein and David Fork explain why they are convinced we need new technologies to outcompete coal. http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change

Placing all eggs in the basket of wind and solar increases the chances of a sustained victory of today’s big winner: fossil fuel.

It looks like we have to choose between lowering CO2-levels and improving social justice.

Unless we take a fresh look at present developments in nuclear. Over the last decade, molten salt reactors have become the focal point of a quickly growing number of business startups, researchers, and investors, supported by an also quickly growing number of supporters. Even though they presently only exist on paper, molten salt reactors have managed to create the first pro-nuclear grassroots movement since the early sixties.

The enthousiasm can be easily explained: molten salt reactors have the potential to produce cheap, abundant, safe and clean power. Some companies claim this can be done starting in 2021.

The key to the MSR’s techological advantages the liquid fuel. This technique makes it possible to take sixty to hundred times more energy out of the same amount of fuel. This brings the radical new perspective of cheap, clean, safe and abundant energy for all of us.

In nuclear reactors as we know them, the fuel is solid. Present day reactors are engineered to be safe, and they are: even if we take accidents like Fukushima into account, nuclear reactors are by far the safest means of producing energy. But in many European countries, there is a strong but unfounded fear of radioactivity. Opponents have kept the industry in a stalemate for about forty years, leading to a virtually halted development.

Sorensen has remained firmly convinced that his thorium reactor, fully named liquid fluoride thorium reactor, is short lftr (pronounced ‘lifter’), is the ultimate in clean, safe and abundant energy. //

A lftr in its full form will be a superb energy machine. This machine can burns thorium and may do so with 99% efficiency. This means a lftr-powered electricity plant will deliver a year of electricity for a western city of a million, with one single tonne (1000kgs) thorium. The resulting ‘waste’ can be worked up as precious (rare earth) metals or can simply be stored for about 500 years – nothing compared to a regular nuclear power plant. The Earth has plenty of thorium, enough to last us for tens of thousands of years.

This thorium reactor is very safe: the core consists of a vessel of a molten salt mixture at high temperature (650C) at nearly atmospheric pressure. There’s simply nothing that can explode, and the smart design makes sure that if anything goes wrong, the machine shuts itself down without human interference. In case of any malfunction, the hot melt drains away safely into passively cooled drainage tanks.

Raspi-config is a shell script in /usr/bin on Raspbian. In the version I'm looking at from a 2015-01-31 image, the "Advanced Option":

Enable/Disable automatic loading of I2C kernel module

Does a couple of things:

1. It checks /boot/config.txt for an uncommented line beginning w/ device_tree_param= or dtparam=. If it does not find one, it asks,

       Would you like the ARM I2C interface to be enabled?

If you do, it adds dtparam=i2c_arm=on to the end of /boot/config.txt.

2. It then looks for an /etc/modprobe.d/raspi-blacklist.conf, which does not exist by default. If it doesn't exist, it creates it, but leaves it empty. Then it asks,

       Would you like the I2C kernel module to be loaded by default?

If you do, it runs modprobe i2c-bcm2708 (i.e., loads the module) and deletes any line in that raspi-blacklist.conf file beginning with blacklist and i2c-bcm2708 or i2c_bcm2708.

If you don't, it adds blacklist i2c-bcm2708 to the end of that file if such a line doesn't exist.

But as silly as it all seems, there are two significant underlying problems. The first, and most obvious, is that progressives have zero limiting principle of governance. If they could ban Americans from saying things they detest or owning a gas-powered car, they would in a heartbeat. They’re authoritarians in both petty and significant ways. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, the brainchild of nomenklatura Elizabeth Warren, is a perfect example of this inclination. It’s an institution that exists without any democratic oversight or constitutional authority. When Washington banned useful light bulbs years ago, they at least had the decency to do it with the consent of elected officials. //

The state should have no right to dictate such things, either way. Electric stoves are probably far more dangerous to an average family than gas stoves. Of course, nearly everything we do is imbued with some level of risk. Refrigerators, dryers, computers, and dishwashers are likely just as dangerous as your stove. When the state is imbued with the power to pick and choose which risks it can abate, it can do basically anything it likes. Of course, it’s all a big joke until some bureaucrat is controlling your thermostat during a heat wave.

Zelensky has been putting me in a tough position lately, mostly because I agree with my colleague streiff that some investment in demolishing Russian military strength actually makes sense. The question for me has always been how much and with what accountability. We spend $858 billion a year on defense in the United States. If it costs us $100 billion over two years to degrade Russia’s military capability and decimate its stockpiles (modern Russia is a third-world economy that can’t just replace everything), that’s actually a much better return on our money compared to what we normally spend on the Department of Defense.

With that said, if we look at funding the war in Ukraine as an expenditure for our national defense, shouldn’t we carve those appropriations out of the already sky-high defense budget, reducing spending in other places? It’s no secret the US military is one of the most wasteful, unaccountable entities in existence, but instead, we’ve been handling Ukraine as a separate matter via separate spending packages, stacking money on top of money. //

It is also not our “common victory” if Ukraine is successful in pushing Russia out of its territory. It will be largely Ukraine’s victory because it is their country being attacked. Why does that kind of language rub me the wrong way? Because it is an attempt to make it seem as if the stakes for the United States are equal to that of Ukraine, thereby justifying unlimited spending with absolutely no end game articulated. //

Sojourner
5 days ago edited
The main question and one that should remain at the forefront is: Is US support of UKR in the US' national interest?

I think, yes.

But I also agree with Bonchie; the text rubs me the wrong way. I'm in a good mood this a.m. so I will chalk it up to the problem of crossing over the language divide. But also, having worked in that region for a third of my (30 yr) military career, it's how "they" phrase things. It's always irritating, but often not meant to offend or be pushy. YMMV in how you read it.

Key Takeaways
The Fair Tax plan is a 23% sales tax that would replace the current U.S. income tax.
It would reduce the headache of annual tax preparation because it's simple, but it would raise the tax burden for 90% of taxpayers.
Only the top 10% of incomes would actually see a tax cut. //

William Gale of the Brookings Institute has noted that it isn’t accurate to refer to the Fair Tax as 23%. He indicates that the rate is actually 30%. Fair Tax defines the sales tax as "$0.23 out of every dollar spent," which means that a $0.23 tax is added to every $0.77, not to every dollar.6

Gale also points out that the tax rate would likely need to be raised even higher because states would have to abolish or significantly alter their income tax systems without the IRS to determine tax on wages. This lost state revenue would require an additional 10% sales tax to replace it.

Another 5% would have to be added to recoup revenue from those who have figured out how to avoid the sales tax.

These three adjustments push the sales tax to 45%. Many Americans would protest having such a high tax on essentials such as food and health care. The effective rate could skyrocket to 67% on other items if food and health care weren't taxed. ///

Anna thus voters would increase pressure on Congress to reduce spending and taxes, because they directly see the cost of their taxes, rather than the "hidden" income tax.

Almost everyone agrees that our current income tax system is too complicated. For that reason, it’s easy to get behind the idea that throwing out our current tax system is the only answer.

But tax reform is rarely so simple.

Dwyane
@Dwyanosaurus
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"In 1995, America’s cannabis had an average strength of 4% THC, the active compound used to measure pot potency. The pot sold in California's pot shops today often boasts potency over 40% THC, a 900% increase in THC potency."

-SFGate article
10:44 AM · Nov 10, 2022 //

Most of the cannabis complications are “caused by injuries and falls, paranoia, cardiovascular trouble or cannabis interfering with other medications,” according to SFGATE.

The study used government data from more than 300 hospitals statewide to measure emergency department visits between 2005 and 2019. The analysis found that 366 people over the age of 65 visited a California emergency department after using cannabis in 2005, but by 2019, that number was 12,167. The frequency of visits increased every year in the study, although the legalization of cannabis for recreational use in California in 2016 did not cause visits to increase at a faster rate.

While the numbers might be concerning, alcohol still causes far more senior ER visits, with over 187,000 admitted in 2020. //

Before author Alex Berenson became a renowned COVID vaccine critic, he penned a book called “Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence” in which he details “the link between teenage marijuana use and mental illness, and a hidden epidemic of violence caused by the drug—facts the media have ignored as the United States rushes to legalize cannabis.” Mother Jones wrote that the book “takes a sledgehammer to the promised benefits of marijuana legalization, and cannabis enthusiasts are not going to like it one bit.”

Scoundrels have always been in the halls of power, along with amateurs, the inept and the deranged. But these days the criminality of some political leaders has reached levels worthy of the tyrants of antiquity. And the ineptitude of those in power now has much graver consequences due to globalization, technology, the complexity of society, as well as the speed with which things happen. //

No, in a kleptocracy criminal behavior is not individual, opportunistic, or sporadic, but rather collective, systematic, strategic, and permanent. It is a system in which all the high-level government officials are complicit, where they deliberately work to enrich themselves, and then use their accumulated wealth to perpetuate themselves in power. For the kleptocrats the common good and people’s needs are secondary and only looked at when they are at the service of their primary goal: to fatten their fortunes and make sure they stay in power. //

No, in a kleptocracy criminal behavior is not individual, opportunistic, or sporadic, but rather collective, systematic, strategic, and permanent. It is a system in which all the high-level government officials are complicit, where they deliberately work to enrich themselves, and then use their accumulated wealth to perpetuate themselves in power. For the kleptocrats the common good and people’s needs are secondary and only looked at when they are at the service of their primary goal: to fatten their fortunes and make sure they stay in power.

The case of the inept in power is something different. Kakistocracies (literally, governments by the worst) proliferate in weak and disorganized political systems that repel the talented and attract the inept and most debased. Obviously, sometimes they they come together producing a government that is both criminal and incompetent. When the two coincide, the kleptocracy and the kakistocracy feed back on each other.