A recent op-ed argues that the way to curb climate change is to invoke Malthus, or at least 20th century progressives like Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, and economist John Maynard Keynes and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes who all believed that retreating to the past was the only way to protect the future - well, the future for white elites, anyway.The ultimate state control of culture in the name of progress was not the National Socialists in Germany or the Fascists of Italy, it was the Soviet Union under communism. Communists fought to gain ground everywhere, Mussolini fought them in Italy and won, Hitler fought them in Spain and won(1) but they succeeded in a lot of other countries, which ultimately meant failure.
The World Health Organisation, fresh off nodding along while China claimed SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic resulted from American frozen food rather than their fake BSL rating at a Wuhan lab, is getting back to business as usual; manufacturing problems using suspect epidemiology.They are claiming salt is killing millions per year, and Washington Post is readily repeating it (look for 'women, minorities impacted most' to appear soon) despite there being no scientific evidence it is true.
Do you want protection from changes that would increase competition and threaten your profits? Who wouldn't? That does not make it better for everyone else.
In the 1980s, "transhumanism" had an air of truthiness because digital became all the rage. Left out of that inconvenient math was that in order to digitize a human brain you'd need CDs as tall as a skyscraper.This never stopped Ray Kurzweil from saying the singularity was just around the corner. The corner being 25 years from whenever he was speaking.
France made wine famous - the prominent chemist Louis Pasteur set out to solve the spoilage problem the domestic wine industry faced and his success set off an international craze- but they didn't make it first.
During the Obama administration, the government rightly exposed how Russia was using offshore donor advised funds to send dark money support to American environmental groups and NGOs undermining US science in energy and food, Russia's two biggest exports.
An environmental activist switched to an electric car. It cost $50,000, but wealthier people are fine with that if it is saving the planet, and she got a $7,500 rebate overwhelmingly paid for by poor people who can't afford electric cars. She says she did it because flowers are blooming two weeks early.
A new analysis of energy use involving conventional fuels shows greenhouse gas emissions in the UK went down 3.4 percent. The bulk of that drop came due to coal but above-average temperatures helped. Unfortunately, so did record-high fuel prices, which means quality of life may have declined for the poor.Certainly there has been no end to protests in the UK about the cost of energy but overall the economy has survived, which is proof that economies and conventional energy can be "decoupled."
Last weekend, 46 University of Massachusetts Amherst students were hospitalized after participating in a drinking game popularized by China's second most dangerous export this century, TikTok. The idea behind these "blackout rage gallons" - BRGs, pronounced "borgs" - is that a gallon of water and electrolytes will mitigate the after-effects of drinking 16 shots of a known carcinogenic central nervous system depressant.
In early March of 2020, I was aghast that the newest James Bond film might be postponed due to the pandemic. It seemed an overreaction.It is not that I denied there was a disease, I noted the death of a Chinese "Wuhan Flu" whistleblower when corporate media still said that concerns and calls to ban travel were racist and xenophobia. It is because I believed the science community had the best interests of the public at heart instead of politics, for once.
