Yet when I asked him why of the top 10, the top 9 all had mask mandates, he pivoted to the final argument:

“I get what those numbers say, but I am still going to wear a mask to help other people feel more comfortable.”

The trap was sprung.

He knew at that moment he had screwed up. Mask-mandates do nothing to stop the spread of COVID-19, full-stop. The data shows it, the numbers coming out of these states show it, and any state that has lifted their mask-mandates has not seen an increase in cases or deaths (aside from the predicted second wave) after the action was taken. Masks are worthless, aside from the performative relief it provides certain people. If you are fully vaccinated (that is, two weeks after the second shot), you have even less of a reason to wear a mask. This isn’t a directive that people should ignore mask-mandates on private property, rather it is an argument against government forced mask-mandates. //

It is the basis for 95% of my arguments. Government is a failure at every turn. More government control almost exclusively ends with disaster. People say that government is here to protect us. The truth of it is, government is here to protect itself and expand its own tentacles of control into anything into which it can. Government inherently grows. No government has ever willfully retracted power it has asserted. As Ronald Reagan said, “There’s nothing more permanent than a temporary government program.”

from the so-much-for-shutting-the-guy-up dept
Tue, Oct 29th 2019 9:38am — Tim Cushing

Longer yellow lights are on the way, thanks in part to a man a state government agency once forbade from criticizing red light cameras without a proper license.

As The Newspaper reports, the Institute of Transportation Engineers -- which develops standards for managing all aspects of driving under the US Department of Transportation -- has agreed with recommendations made by a team of engineers that found ITE-approved yellow light timing standards reduced public safety and resulted in more accidents. //

An ITE panel concluded in September that a team of engineers who objected to the practice were right on the fundamental issue: drivers approaching an intersection to make a turn under certain conditions can neither safely stop nor legally proceed without risking an automated ticket.

The appeal of ITE yellow light timing standards was brought by a group of engineers that included an engineer who the Oregon Board of Engineers once infamously claimed wasn't an engineer. //

Jarlstrom was fined $500 by the Oregon Board of Engineers for practicing engineering without a license. Jarlstrom does, in fact, have an engineering degree. He's just not licensed by the state. The Board took this to mean it could tell Jarlstrom to stop presenting his red light camera research to public entities. A federal court disagreed and Jarlstrom obtained an official apology from the Licensing Board.

His criticisms of red light cameras (and the consequent shortening of yellow light times) were correct. ITE guidance allowed city engineers to shorten yellow times on left/right turn signals by approving a calculation that shaved 5 mph off the speed limit solely for the purpose of determining yellow light timing.

The research presented to ITE showed this made things much more dangerous for drivers approaching turning lanes during a yellow light. It created a "dilemma zone" where drivers were given two options, both of them bad: make an unsafe stop or get a ticket.

New Jersey extends $300 million in nuclear subsidies for Salem County reactors
by Andrew Maykuth, Posted: April 27, 2021 - 5:05 PM
New Jersey extends $300 million in nuclear subsidies for Salem County reactors
JOHN COSTELLO / FILE PHOTO
PSEG operates the Salem Nuclear Power Plant in South Jersey.
New Jersey on Tuesday renewed subsidies of about $300 million a year for the state’s three nuclear power reactors at Salem and Hope Creek, the source of 90% of the state’s carbon-free electricity.

The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities approved the subsidies, called Zero Emission Certificates, for three years for the Hope Creek Generating Station and the twin-unit Salem Nuclear Power Plant, located in Lower Alloways Township on Delaware Bay. The giant reactors supply New Jersey with about 37.5% of its power, including about 90% of its electricity produced without greenhouse gas emissions. //

The subsidies add about 0.4 cents to the price of a kilowatt hour of electricity, or about $2.60 a month for a typical residential customer that uses 650 kWh. That’s about 2% of a typical residential customer’s $123.44 monthly bill from Public Service Electric & Gas, the state’s largest utility and an affiliate of the majority owner of the nuclear plants. //

Several states, including Illinois, New York and Connecticut, have provided subsidies to keep nuclear plants operating, though Pennsylvania in 2019 declined to award support for atomic power, leading Exelon to permanently shut down Three Mile Island Unit 1.

Watch below as Cuomo asks Slavitt four different times why can’t the CDC’s/White House’s messaging simply be that vaccinated people can get back to normal, no masks, no social distancing indoors or outdoors? It could, Cuomo argued, be a great way to discourage vaccine hesitancy and hasten the country’s return back to business as usual.

Slavitt never directly answered the question. Instead there was much obfuscating. Watch and see for yourselves (here’s the transcript as well): //

Ben Shapiro
@benshapiro
Vaccine demand is dropping, particularly among the young and among minorities. To reverse this, we should tell people they can go back to normal if they get vaccinated. This is precisely what Biden refuses to do, because continuing covid panic is his lever for change. //

Greg Borchers
@GregBorchers
When Chris Cuomo holds someone on the left to the fire, and they can't hold up to his scrutiny, it is time to evaluate the position.

We now know that on April 1 last year, the U.S. had 331.5 million residents, an increase from 2010 of only 7.4 percent, second smallest in the Census’ 230-year history to the 7.3 percent of the 1930 Great Depression decade.

This time, think aging population, delays in marrying and having children, and slower immigration.

What we also know now is more good news for Republicans. Six states will gain a total of seven additional House seats and electoral votes, most in Republican areas. Seven states, mostly Democratic and in the Rust Belt, will lose House seats and, thus, electoral votes.

Gainers are Florida, Montana, which regains the seat it lost three decades ago, North Carolina, Oregon, and two new seats go to Texas. That’s the result of about four million new residents, many of them financial refugees from California. Such historical internal migration to the Sun Belt continues but has slowed.

Besides leading to increased COVID deaths due to fewer vaccinations, Kulldorff said, the vaccine pause also was likely to decrease people’s trust in vaccines. Public trust in COVID vaccines has been shaky, with the percentages of poll respondents saying they wouldn’t get such a vaccine fluctuating between 21 and 50 percent since last July. Hesitancy about vaccines in general has also increased in the past decade.

Both pausing the J&J vaccine and refusing to acknowledge its low blood clot risk can increase vaccine hesitancy that can damage lives, Kulldorff said: “It reduces the confidence in vaccines that is unnecessary and damaging. All of us who work with vaccines know about this vaccine hesitancy and we work hard to maintain confidence in vaccines.”

Two methods for reducing hesitancy are public transparency and early detection of negative outcomes, he said. That’s why he recommended keeping the Johnson and Johnson vaccine on the market while also encouraging women at risk of blood clots from it to take one of the other two COVID vaccines.

Instead, the CDC communicated unwarranted certainty about the vaccine to the public, potentially costing lives. //

Kulldorff has repeatedly publicly stated that he does not support “let it rip,” but “focused protection” of well-known high-risk populations, such as the elderly and those in nursing homes. In a March panel with DeSantis, for example, Kulldorff said, “Lockdown is just a form of ‘let it rip,’ but at a little bit of dragging it out more, and by dragging it out more it actually makes it more difficult people for older people to protect themselves, because they have to do it for a longer time. So ‘let it rip’ is not a good strategy.” He also publicly countered the John Snow claim that natural COVID infection does not confer immunity.

Given this, the CDC pushing Kulldorff out of helping oversee vaccine safety systems he helped invent smacks of retaliation against a scientist who has dissented against scientifically indefensible positions repeatedly communicated to the public by top CDC officials.

Why getting lead out of aviation fuel won't be easy or cheap.

By Rob Mark
Updated: August 5, 2019

The success of the stretched-fuselage 767-300 and -300ER variants caused Boeing to consider producing a larger version. This would have had a wider fuselage than the original 767’s existing seven-abreast 2-3-2 setup, and initially designated as the 767-X. It first proposed this in 1986, but the concept garnered minimal interest among prospective customers.

Two years later, Boeing reworked the 767-X design into a new twinjet family that would later become the popular 777 series. This design first flew in 1994, and United introduced it commercially a year later. As such, the 767’s decline can partially be seen as a consequence of its own success in that it led to the development of the 777. Had the 767-X remained a 767 family member, the series may have experienced greater sales and a slower decline.

More recently, Boeing has also launched another twin-engine widebody in the form of the 787 ‘Dreamliner’ family. This nine-abreast design is smaller than the 777 series, putting it on a par, capacity-wise, with some of the 767’s larger variants. Since its introduction in 2011, many airlines have ordered the 787 as a replacement for the 767 due to its greater range and efficiency, further contributing to its fall in the last decade. //

In terms of cargo, the aircraft still has an important role to play. Boeing is reportedly producing three 767 freighters a month, and states that it:

“… continues to see strong market demand for 767 airplanes, which offer outstanding operational efficiency and payload configuration. Cargo operators around the world keep the global 767 Freighter fleet busy, flying the model an average of 10 hours a day.” //

According to Boeing’s Orders and Deliveries data, the company still has 97 outstanding orders for the 767. Of these, more than a third (33 aircraft) are to be delivered to FedEx. The Memphis-based logistics giant already has 100 767s in its fleet, according to Planespotters.net. Interestingly, 57 of the outstanding orders are for air tanker companies, showing that, in the domain of air-to-air refueling, the 767 remains a versatile aircraft.

Tom Elliott
@tomselliott
Psaki: “I can assure you” the Biden DoJ raiding Giuliani occurred “in an independent manner” //

There are many reasons to brush this claim of independence off as gaslighting, not the least of which is that Psaki is a known liar.

Past that, ask yourself why the FBI only seems to want to push the enforcement of FARA laws when it comes to Trump associates? We’ve got John Kerry literally tipping off the Iranians about Israeli military operations, but he’s not being investigated as a foreign agent. Hunter Biden was paid to testify for a foreign actor before Congress and never even registered as a lobbyist. Yet, Giuliani pokes around in Ukraine to try to expose corruption by Americans like the aforementioned Hunter Biden and that makes him an emissary of the Ukrainians? This is going to strike a lot of people as selective justice, and that’s assuming Giuliani even did anything wrong, of which no evidence of that exists publicly yet. //

Heck, you don’t even have to look past this story for proof of that. Why was this raid immediately leaked to The New York Times so it could be reported through a left-wing, anti-Trump prism? Of course, the investigation into Hunter Biden is locked down like Fort Knox, though. Amazing how the leaks stop the moment a Democrat is the target, right? Tell me again how the DOJ isn’t politicized.

What is .radio ?

.radio is a new top-level domain (such as .com or .net) which is exclusively dedicated to the radio stations, web radios and others closely associated with the sector.

Why choose .radio ?

The .radio TLD is one of the few recognized community-based resources representing the interest of around 65,000 radio stations, 60,000 web radios, and others closely associated with the sector. Beneficiaries of this new TLD include licenced broadcasters, radio stations from accross the world, unions and related organizations, trade-mark owners, licensed radio amateurs, web radios and radio professionals. //

URL SHORTENER for .radio registrants
(100% FREE)

On.radio is a free service offered by the EBU (.radio registry) to the .radio Community.

It allows registrants of .radio domains to shorten any .radio internet address to a short version easy to share and remember.

Judith Love Cohen was a tenacious engineer. This fact check is just a tribute.

Snopes has published an article that claims that Apocalypse Never is being “challenged by scientists he cites.” The author, Alex Kasprak, claims scientists “say their work either refutes or is irrelevant to the broader points Shellenberger makes in his book.”

In fact, Kasprak quotes scientists who confirm several key claims of Apocalypse Never:

The most dramatic confirmation is around my debunking of the myth that humans are causing a “sixth mass extinction.” As background, Facebook censored my article announcing Apocalypse Never in part because an activist scientist writing for the web site Climate Feedback insisted humans were, in fact, causing a mass extinction. Kasprak quotes a scientist who admits that it would “require current rates to continue for several tens of thousands of years to reach the 75% species-level extinction characteristic of the ‘Big Five’” mass extinctions. //

Kasprak either didn’t read Apocalypse Never, didn’t understand it, or chose to deliberately misrepresent it. //

10. Kasprak uncritically quotes a scientist falsely asserting that “the industrial food system is effectively a poverty-generating machine.”
    Industrial agriculture has played a major role in lifting nations out of poverty by reducing the share of the population that must farm from over 80 percent in poor nations to just two percent in rich ones. The notion that the industrialization of agriculture drove economic growth is only controversial among Malthusian scientists, several of whom are debunked in Apocalypse Never, and in ways that Kasprak never addresses. //

11. Kasprak falsely suggests there might be some better way to determine whether or not natural disasters have become “worse” than death toll or property damage, even though that is how IPCC and others define disasters.