In 1989, the communist dictatorship oddly named Union of Soviet Socialist Republics reached the extent of a third giant hole in the Arctic Circle, Kola Superdeep Borehole SG-3, where they'd been drilling for 19 years. It clocked in at nearly 8 miles deep.
Starting tonight, and lasting until Thanksgiving, Earth has a second moon.
With a 4th generation nuclear plant finally getting built in the U.S., 30 years after the federal government blocked all advanced energy research, there are so few old environmentalists still in power that alternative energy wishful thinking can make way for science. They aren't going without a fight, though. Solar and wind haven't improved in 50 years but have still gotten $4 trillion in subsidies - all to change conventional energy share by 0.1%.
When COVID-19 broke out, it was a US election year and that meant a lot of common sense gave way to politics. Democrats charged that then-President Trump was putting lives at risk by telling FDA to fast-track a vaccine, after insisting that closing airports to China was racist and xenophobic because the World Health Organisation had not declared a pandemic. Government insiders spread the word to debunk concerns about a nearby wet market in Wuhan and the safety of its two labs even though an employee had been convicted of selling lab animals in that wet market. China scrubbed its coronavirus database out of existence to outsiders.
New mothers are under a lot of pressure. They are told they have to breastfeed and if they don't, the formula they use may cause their child to have worse grades in school. And if the government shuts down formula factories for no coherent reason and imports aren't allowed because the identical product in Europe hasn't spent a billion dollars and 10 years to get FDA approval, that is a worry.
Prior to the takeover of environmentalism by Earth Day's overt communist malcontents (1) it was devoted to clean water and neighborhoods in cities, where the poorest lived.To get attention and money from other wealthy elites, it pivoted to rural rivers and streams and minorities were marginalized in the rush to control government that would control conservation and "endangered" species(2) and clean water for people of colors stopped being important.
American health care is expensive as are drugs. Both are due to government involvement. If a company is forced to spend 10 years and a billion extra dollars in clinical trials that don't improve safety, they are just placebos so government can say they held companies "accountable", that raises costs for everyone.Other countries exploit America that way. They wait until the costs are incurred and approval is set in the US, and then tell the company they can only sell in that country for less. The company has to get its biggest profit in the country that made the success possible and Americans pay the cost so Canada can get cheaper drugs.
There are about 3X as many white women as black in the US but white women get 8X as much for donated eggs and Diane M. Tober in "Eggonomics" suggests wealthy people looking for specific traits has gotten to the point of being eugenics.
The World Health Organisation, the last major body to accept that COVID-19 was a pandemic, is out in front extending its highest emergency level over, of all things, monkeypox.We now know WHO held off on declaring COVID-19 an emergency because former President Donald Trump said it was an emergency and we should cut travel from China. Then he instructed FDA to prepare emergency use authorization standards for a vaccine they believed the private sector could create fast if government got out of the way.(1)
Astrology is one of those things that makes no sense to literate people. The position of stars a billion light-years away determined your personality, but if you are in the eastern world that personality could be completely different than if you were born 2000 miles west? See: I was a Virgo this morning, now I am a Leo! I totally feel different.
If you ever get the chance to visit Turkey, I encourage you to do so. Like Civil War battlefields in the southern US, you can trip and stumble across something old - except in the case of Turkey it could be 2,000 years old.Some sites are archaeological research and you can't just wander around like you can in Cappadocia. That is the case with the Göbekli Tepe temples in southern Turkey. It was inhabited in neolithic times and is ground zero in the culture wars over whether agriculture begat civilization or the other way around. Archaeological evidence shows they processed grain there, for example, but not that they grew it.
Activists who just happen to take donations from competitors to normal farming - e.g. organic industry trade groups, corporations, and foreign nationals laundering money through offshore donor-advised funds - get paid to claim farming is a problem.(1)
During last evening's Republican National Convention, speakers repeatedly invoked the fentanyl crisis and blamed lax border control and unchecked illegal immigration. Democrats, on the other hand, blame Big Pharma, and argue corporate exploitation of supply chain monitoring loopholes fueled the US opioid epidemic.They are both right. Every high-profile death related to fentanyl had it purchased illegally, that is due to crime syndicates, while the other side argues that it doctors and pharmaceutical companies caused the addiction which forced them to go the illegal route.
