“When we see deliberate efforts to spread misinformation, we view that as an impediment to the country's public health and will not shy away from calling that out.”
"A report from Roll Call last summer noted that the USCP is currently exempt from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) because it is part of the legislative branch, giving it a level of secrecy and a lack of established accountability methods that aren’t the case for other law enforcement agencies.
“Congress is not subject to the law, and the Capitol Police, as a component of the legislative branch, is also exempt from any FOIA request,” the report stated."
In defense of higher ed diversity policies, we’re sometimes told that we can’t expect people to attend — or taxpayers to support — institutions made up of people who “don’t look like them.” But politically, higher education doesn’t look like America. It doesn’t even look like the blue states, where the conservative/Republican minority is huge by comparison to virtually every university campus.
For some reason the answer to the problem is always universal slavery to the State...
GUESS WHO LOSES? ‘Climate Change’ vs. the Uyghurs. “Politico reports on growing tensions within the Democratic coalition, with the environmental activist faction of the party objecting to even the mildest attempts by the Biden administration to confront China over its human rights violations and international aggression. . . . But for the environmentalists, none of this really matters. They’ve convinced themselves that climate is the preeminent political issue, and no other consideration even comes close. Many of them would even argue that American capitalism and climate change are inseparable — even indistinguishable — political problems, never mind the fact that, while the U.S. has led the world in total carbon emissions decline since 2000, China’s new coal-fired energy capacity alone outstripped the rest of the world by 300 percent in 2020. Like the tankies of old, who invariably defended the Soviet Union’s various atrocities, the modern variety can’t imagine any bad actor on the world stage aside from the United States.”
A New Zealand academic says Twitter temporarily restricted her account after she mocked Chinese President Xi Jinping.
University of Canterbury Professor Anne-Marie Brady is an expert on China’s attempts to exert political influence around the world and has been an outspoken critic of its ruling Communist Party. Last week, she sent tweets poking fun at the party’s 100th anniversary celebrations.
She said two of those tweets were temporarily marked “unavailable” by Twitter and her account was temporarily restricted over the weekend, before it was restored on Monday.
Twitter did not say what prompted its actions.
Edward Lucas, a columnist for The Times newspaper in Britain, wrote that it probably resulted from an online campaign of complaints by Communist Party agents which would have triggered an automatic response from Twitter while it investigated.
“After I had stoked a furor on Twitter and sent umpteen complaints, her account was restored,” Lucas wrote. “Less prominent victims of Chinese censorship would have scantier chances of redress.”
BIBLE IS RACIST. BECAUSE SCIENCE: The now-hilariously mis-named “Scientific American” claims those who deny evolution are white supremacists. No, I am not making that up. That’s what you get when you combine Critical Race Theory (CRT) with a crude caricature of the dominant explanation for human origins.
“If they can convince you not only that your Donald Trump-voting Christian neighbor is a racist but that the Bible itself is the epitome of white supremacy, they can ban it from polite society and ostracize anyone who would defend it. Critical race theory is good. Jesus is bad. Now cough up your hard-earned tax dollars so we can teach that to your kids.”
That’s it in a nutshell (no pun intended). Evolutionists of sound mind, common sense and a genuine commitment to real science should be flooding SA with protests.
Malone announced his removal several hours after sharing his LinkedIn post on Health Canada’s response to concerns raised by him and others about the “spike protein” on COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.
He appears to be referring to the regulator’s new heart-inflammation warnings, directed toward younger male adults and adolescents, on the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines.
“This is certainly a big step forward in my opinion — particularly in contrast to the communication (or lack thereof) and denial from the US and other governments,” according to an incomplete archived version of his LinkedIn post. “At least we are now discussing the merits and limitations of the scientific data.”
It’s the latest allegation of Big Tech suppressing contrarian views on COVID from highly credentialed scientists, even as medical and legal experts call attention to reported risks of mRNA vaccines for younger people, including college students and active-duty military men.
Twitter locked Harvard Medical School epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff out of his account for a month in response to his stated skepticism of the protective power of masks. He took to LinkedIn to share his thoughts and has continued to do so after Twitter reinstated him.
Kulldorff told Just the News that LinkedIn’s action against Malone was “disturbing” but didn’t answer how it would affect his own use of the professional social network. Malone is retweeting followers sharing screenshots of their LinkedIn account cancelations.
“Open debate is especially important during a public health emergency when many important public health question[s] do not yet have a known answer,” Kulldorff wrote in an email. “To censor and silence scientists under such circumstances can lead to many unnecessary deaths,” which is why LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube should “restore all suspended accounts.”
When you go out of your way to silence people, it doesn’t suggest that you have nothing to hide. Responding to scientific arguments with scientific arguments, not censorship, is the only scientific way to respond to criticism.
In order to save the planet from catastrophic climate change, Americans will have to cut their energy use by more than 90 percent and families of four should live in housing no larger than 640 square feet. That's at least according to a team of European researchers led by University of Leeds sustainability researcher Jefim Vogel. In their new study, "Socio-economic conditions for satisfying human needs at low energy use," in Global Environmental Change, they calculate that public transportation should account for most travel. Travel should, in any case, be limited to between 3,000 to 10,000 miles per person annually.
Vogel and his colleagues set themselves the goal of figuring out how to "provide sufficient need satisfaction at much lower, ecologically sustainable levels of energy use." Referencing earlier sustainability studies they argue that human needs are sufficiently satisfied when each person has access to the energy equivalent of 7,500 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity per capita. That is about how much energy the average Bolivian uses. Currently, Americans use about 80,000 kWh annually per capita. With respect to transportation and physical mobility, the average person would be limited to using the energy equivalent of 16–40 gallons of gasoline per year. People are assumed to take one short- to medium-haul airplane trip every three years or so.
In addition, food consumption per capita would vary depending on age and other conditions, but the average would be 2,100 calories per day. While just over 10 percent of the world's people are unfortunately still undernourished, the Food and Agriculture Organization reports that the daily global average food supply now stands at just under 3,000 calories per person. Each individual is allocated a new clothing allowance of nine pounds per year, and clothes may be washed 20 times annually. The good news is that everyone over age 10 is permitted a mobile phone and each household can have a laptop.
How do Vogel and his colleagues arrive at their conclusions? First, they assert that "globally, large reductions in energy use are required to limit global warming to 1.5°C." The 1.5°C temperature increase limit they cite derives from the 2015 Paris Agreement in which signatories agreed to hold "the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels."
To achieve that goal, the researchers focus on what they call provisioning factors, which are intermediary institutions that people use to satisfy their needs. Provisioning factors that affect the amount of energy a society uses include public service, public health coverage, access to electricity and clean fuels, democratic quality, income equality, economic growth, and extractivism. These provisioning factors are the basis for providing sufficient human needs such as nourishment, drinking water, sanitation access, basic education, and a minimum income, all of which help secure the basic need of healthy life expectancy.
In order to stay below the 1.5°C temperature increase threshold, they cite earlier research that calculated that the average person should be limited to using annually as little as 18 gigajoules (equivalent to 136 gallons of gasoline or 5,000 kWh) of total energy, but allocated more generously for their study a cap of 27 gigajoules (equivalent to 204 gallons of gasoline or 7,500 kWh) annually. They then checked to see if any country in the world had met their definition of decent living standards using that amount of energy per capita. "No country in the world accomplishes that—not even close," admitted Vogel in an accompanying press release.
Vogel and his colleagues are undaunted by the fact that there are absolutely no examples of low-energy societies providing decent living standards—as defined by the researchers themselves—for their citizens. So they proceed to jigger the various provisioning factors until they find that what is really needed is a "more fundamental transformation of the political-economic regime." That fundamental transformation includes free government-provided high-quality public services in areas such as health, education, and public transport.
"We also found that a fairer income distribution is crucial for achieving decent living standards at low energy use," said co-author Daniel O'Neill, from Leeds' School of Earth and Environment. "To reduce existing income disparities, governments could raise minimum wages, provide a Universal Basic Income, and introduce a maximum income level. We also need much higher taxes on high incomes, and lower taxes on low incomes."
Two things that humanity for sure doesn't need according to the study are economic growth or the continued extraction of natural resources such as oil, coal, gas, or minerals. Vogel concluded: "In short, we need to abandon economic growth in affluent countries, scale back resource extraction, and prioritize public services, basic infrastructures and fair income distributions everywhere." He added, "In my view, the most promising and integral vision for the required transformation is the idea of degrowth—it is an idea whose time has come."
The researchers' assertion that "large reductions in energy use are required" is actually a non sequitur because it is not energy use per se that is contributing to man-made global warming, but the emissions of carbon dioxide associated with the burning of fossil fuels. In fact, when they set their 27-gigajoule per capita threshold, they specifically ruled out "speculative" technological progress. However, transitioning to no-carbon energy sources such as nuclear, wind, and solar power would solve the problem without forcing humanity to go on the ridiculously strict energy diet they call for.
Founder of the ecomodernist Breakthrough Institute Ted Nordhaus was correct when he argued, "The utopian dreams of those who wish to radically reorganize the world to stop climate change are not a plausible global future." The far better course for addressing the problem of climate change (and many others) is for humanity to aim for a high-energy planet. Instead of energy abstinence and degrowth, ecomodernists call for a "massive expansion of energy systems, primarily carried out in the rapidly urbanizing global South, in combination with the rapid acceleration of clean energy innovation."
Developing a high-energy planet will spur economic growth and innovation, helping to provide for all of the human needs that concern Vogel and his colleagues. Instead of trying to force Americans to live on the amount of energy currently available to Bolivians, the goal should be to enable people in energy-starved poor countries to gain access to energy supplies currently enjoyed by average Americans.
Disclosure: I have had the pleasure of attending several Breakthrough Dialogues and participating in discussions where I made the case that supporters of free markets are natural ecomodernists.
Related: “Indian Point Energy Center (I.P.E.C.) was a three-unit nuclear power plant station located in Buchanan, New York, just south of Peekskill. It sits on the east bank of the Hudson River, about 36 miles (58 km) north of Midtown Manhattan. The facility has permanently ceased power operations as of April 30, 2021.”
