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Updated: 39 min 11 sec ago
Biden EPA Continues Its War On American Farmers
Ask a farmer what their most important asset is and they will tell you it's their land. Without it, nothing happens.
Yet the Biden EPA has shown breathtaking hostility to American farmers, insinuating by regulation that not only do American farmers not care about their most important asset, they are systematically destroying it.
It makes no sense but neither does the method EPA is using to undermine American science; namely that they are doing no science at all. Instead, they have stuffed panels with epidemiologists who don't need evidence, they have correlation. Then they use correlation to invoke other regulations and claim it is the Constitution at war on American agriculture, not generational bureaucrats who only even touch grass in photo-ops.
Yet the Biden EPA has shown breathtaking hostility to American farmers, insinuating by regulation that not only do American farmers not care about their most important asset, they are systematically destroying it.
It makes no sense but neither does the method EPA is using to undermine American science; namely that they are doing no science at all. Instead, they have stuffed panels with epidemiologists who don't need evidence, they have correlation. Then they use correlation to invoke other regulations and claim it is the Constitution at war on American agriculture, not generational bureaucrats who only even touch grass in photo-ops.
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Twice As Many Trans People Get Cirrhosis
A new analysis has found that cirrhosis, a liver disease that occurs when scar tissue prevents the liver from functioning normally, occurs twice as often in trans adults as those whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth.
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Some Additional Tests Of The RadiaCode
In the previous post I have described some of the main functionalities of the RadiaCode 103 radiation spectrometer, which the company graciously made available for my tests. Here I want to discuss some additional tests I have done, using radioactive samples from my minerals collection as well as a couple of test sources we have in our Physics department in Padova.
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The Duck Curve: California Learns The Awful Secret About Solar Power
California mandates and subsidizes solar power, but the money for that isn't from all taxpayers, it is instead taxes and fees tacked onto the bills of people who use conventional energy - people in apartments, renters, and anyone who can't afford solar installations.
Worse, solar owners, already privileged, also 'sell electricity back at the same rate they buy it', which everyone knows is impossible. Utilities have employees, infrastructure, and repairs, so without a markup to cover those, they'd be out of business. Thanks to a bulletproof-majority in state politics, science is pushed to the side, and conventional energy users pay even more to so the state can engage in fiscal magic.
Worse, solar owners, already privileged, also 'sell electricity back at the same rate they buy it', which everyone knows is impossible. Utilities have employees, infrastructure, and repairs, so without a markup to cover those, they'd be out of business. Thanks to a bulletproof-majority in state politics, science is pushed to the side, and conventional energy users pay even more to so the state can engage in fiscal magic.
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Study: Diet Soda Has No Negative Effects - And Aspartame Has One Additional Big Positive
It is routinely claimed by trial lawyers and their allied epidemiologists that diet soda has lots of nasty effects on humans. Science has never found that but that is why epidemiology is invoked. If an epidemiologist with an agenda looks at enough rows of diseases and enough columns of foods people claim they ate, it is easy to claim meat causes cancer. Or prevents cancer. Just like organic food causes autism and DDT improves male fertility.
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Eco-Terrorist Attack Causes Italy To Extend GMO Policies
Eco-terrorists perhaps thought Italy was like other European countries and destroying a CRISPR food test plot would make the government apologize and change their evil science ways.
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Sickle Cell Disease: A Pill Cure In Mice And Monkeys
Scientists led by Dr. Pamela Ting have reported the discovery and characterization of the first molecular glue degraders of the WIZ transcription factor for fetal hemoglobin derepression in Sickle Cell Disease, which means a pill-based therapy for humans could begin development.
Sickle Cell Disease is a genetic life-threatening condition caused by mutation in β-hemoglobin. Inducing fetal hemoglobin safely has been the goal for years but has remained out-of-reach. The discovery of dWIZ-1 and dWIZ-2 molecular glue degraders of the WIZ transcription factor that induce HbF in erythroblasts is a milestone toward a pill for therapy. The authors say WIZ is a previously unknown repressor of HbF.
Sickle Cell Disease is a genetic life-threatening condition caused by mutation in β-hemoglobin. Inducing fetal hemoglobin safely has been the goal for years but has remained out-of-reach. The discovery of dWIZ-1 and dWIZ-2 molecular glue degraders of the WIZ transcription factor that induce HbF in erythroblasts is a milestone toward a pill for therapy. The authors say WIZ is a previously unknown repressor of HbF.
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Your Portable Radiation Spectrometer - The Wondrous Radiacode 103
A few days ago I put my hands on a RadiaCode 103, a pocket radiation counter, dosimeter, and spectrometer that has recently appeared on the market. The company that produces it, RadiaCode, is located in Cyprus (see https://radiacode.com). The instrument is a portable device that pairs up with a smartphone or a PC for maximum functionality, but can well operate as a standalone unit to provide quite a bit more functionality than the standard monitoring and dosimeter capabilities of other instruments.
Here is the unit as it comes, packaged in a style similar to that of smartphones. The package contains the unit and a USB-C cable, plus a card with a QR-code link to the manuals and software.
Here is the unit as it comes, packaged in a style similar to that of smartphones. The package contains the unit and a USB-C cable, plus a card with a QR-code link to the manuals and software.
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The Oldest Profession May Be Fashion Design
There are five professions(1) but lots of occupations and trades lay claim to being the oldest one despite predating the concept by millennia.
Farming is around 14,000 years old but a new study reveals one less-considered trade predates it by tens of thousands of years: fashion.
Humans wore clothing prior to that, but fashion is a different animal skin. It is clothing for social and cultural purposes, marking the major shift from clothes as protection to clothes as an expression of identity. Paleolithic eyed needles are now known to be as old as 40,000 years, and with it came the evolution of dressing.
Farming is around 14,000 years old but a new study reveals one less-considered trade predates it by tens of thousands of years: fashion.
Humans wore clothing prior to that, but fashion is a different animal skin. It is clothing for social and cultural purposes, marking the major shift from clothes as protection to clothes as an expression of identity. Paleolithic eyed needles are now known to be as old as 40,000 years, and with it came the evolution of dressing.
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Exchange Sac In Blitz
Time and again, I play a "good" blitz chess game. In blitz chess you have 5 minutes thinking for the totality of your game. This demands quick reasoning and a certain level of dexterity - with the mouse, if you are playing online as I usually do.
My blitz rating on the chess.com site hovers around 2150-2200 elo points, which puts me at the level of a strong candidate master or something like that, which is more or less how I would describe myself. But time is of course running at a slower, but more unforgiving pace in my life, and I know that my sport prowess is going to decline - hell, it has already. So it makes me happy when I see that I can still play a blitz game at a decent level. Today is one of those days.
My blitz rating on the chess.com site hovers around 2150-2200 elo points, which puts me at the level of a strong candidate master or something like that, which is more or less how I would describe myself. But time is of course running at a slower, but more unforgiving pace in my life, and I know that my sport prowess is going to decline - hell, it has already. So it makes me happy when I see that I can still play a blitz game at a decent level. Today is one of those days.
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It Took Biden Abuse Of Science To Get 'Chevron Deference' Limited But SCOTUS Finally Did it
In 1984, a court much farther to the left than today's is to the right made arguably its worst 'social justice living document' ruling - they found that an agency controlled by the president could create new regulations that act as laws if those regulations were in the agency's "mandate." All a president had to do was broaden an agency's mandate, or have a Congressional law written poorly, and anything was possible.
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President Biden Calls It 'Good Neighbor', The Supreme Court Calls It Unconstitutional
New York makes a big show of banning natural gas and nuclear energy while preventing brownouts across Manhattan by buying natural gas from neighboring Pennsylvania.
President Biden's EPA recently decided that not only should New York be allowed hypocrisy about the sources of its that even Russia-addicted Germany thought was laughable, he wanted Democratic states to be able to sue Republican ones for the emissions created by selling energy to the wealthy elites nearby. So California could sue Idaho and even states as far away as Utah because those states keep Governor Newsom from being the target of a recall vote yet again by selling energy - all the state would have to do is claim PM2.5 "virtual" pollution is wafting over the Sierra Nevadas.
President Biden's EPA recently decided that not only should New York be allowed hypocrisy about the sources of its that even Russia-addicted Germany thought was laughable, he wanted Democratic states to be able to sue Republican ones for the emissions created by selling energy to the wealthy elites nearby. So California could sue Idaho and even states as far away as Utah because those states keep Governor Newsom from being the target of a recall vote yet again by selling energy - all the state would have to do is claim PM2.5 "virtual" pollution is wafting over the Sierra Nevadas.
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FDA: America Has Created Health inequity In Men
The National Center for Health Statistics shows that average life expectancy for American men in 2022 was down to 74.8 years, 5.4 years lower than American women.
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CRISPR Isn't a GMO But Italian Eco-Terrorists Destroy It Anyway
Last week, eco-terrorists attacked and destroyed a new optimized rice called Telemaco Ris8imo, using genetic engineering (assisted evolution techniques) so that it needs less fungicide.
Rice is one of those rather ridiculous crops that western government subsidize and people who don't know anything about agriculture believe needs to be covered in water to grow. It is actually covered in water in Asia to keep it safe from...nature.(1) In many places, water takes energy and if we care about climate change, we want less energy pumping water or importing rice from China on emissions-belching ships. Science to the rescue. So scientists created a rice with three genes tweaked to make it naturally resistant to Pyricularia oryzae, rice blast fungus.
Rice is one of those rather ridiculous crops that western government subsidize and people who don't know anything about agriculture believe needs to be covered in water to grow. It is actually covered in water in Asia to keep it safe from...nature.(1) In many places, water takes energy and if we care about climate change, we want less energy pumping water or importing rice from China on emissions-belching ships. Science to the rescue. So scientists created a rice with three genes tweaked to make it naturally resistant to Pyricularia oryzae, rice blast fungus.
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More State Run Liquor Stores May Prevent Suicides
Suicide is the runaway leader in gun deaths in the United States and a new demography paper says more government control of the alcohol business might provide a solution for that, and homicides also.
This was a statistical analysis, so only EXPLORATORY, but they correlate more restrictive alcohol laws with a reduction in specific states’ homicide rates. The authors at RAND used the Alcohol Policy Scale index, which measures state-year alcohol policy environments, higher is more social authoritarian, lower is more freedom, plus vital deaths data (total homicides, total suicides, firearm homicides, and firearm suicides) drawn from the National Vital Statistics System.
This was a statistical analysis, so only EXPLORATORY, but they correlate more restrictive alcohol laws with a reduction in specific states’ homicide rates. The authors at RAND used the Alcohol Policy Scale index, which measures state-year alcohol policy environments, higher is more social authoritarian, lower is more freedom, plus vital deaths data (total homicides, total suicides, firearm homicides, and firearm suicides) drawn from the National Vital Statistics System.
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Utah Shows California How To Provide Real Clean Energy
Each year when air conditioners are needed, California has to ask EPA for permission to violate federal emissions standards and burn enough natural gas to keep the brown-outs that nearly got Governor Gavin Newsom recalled from happening again.
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Monsanto Trial Judge: Zhang Glyphosate Meta-Analysis Is Nonsense
Trial lawyers suing over a popular weedkiller saw six words they never want to read in a court document approving a motion to dismiss a study they consider vital to their future yacht payments: "Zhang’s meta-analysis is junk science."
This is not just authoritative, it is humiliating.
It doesn't end there. The court saw through their pay-to-publish scam and was immune to their time-honored technique of immediately having a bunch of other papers cite it to increase its impact factor and H-index.
This is not just authoritative, it is humiliating.
It doesn't end there. The court saw through their pay-to-publish scam and was immune to their time-honored technique of immediately having a bunch of other papers cite it to increase its impact factor and H-index.
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Opposer At A PhD Defense
Yesterday I was in Oslo, where I was invited tro serve as the leading opposer in the Ph.D. defense of a student of Alex Read, who is a particle physicist and a member of the ATLAS collaboration. Although I have served in similar committees several times in the past, this turned out to be a special experience for me for a couple of reasons.
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The World Is Richer Than Ever, But It's Not Due To Communism Or Capitalism, It's Science
There are lots of stories about the poor in America, and have been for decades. Smart demographers know that, like racism, if everyone is talking about The Poor, it's almost eliminated.
One of the giant cracks in the communist dictatorship called the USSR last century was when the television program "60 Minutes" had a segment on poverty in America. It was designed to tug at the heartstrings of those with more money. The USSR ran it for their citizens but it actually backfired. Being in 'poverty' in America meant having a television and more living space than anyone not an elite in the Soviet Union had.
One of the giant cracks in the communist dictatorship called the USSR last century was when the television program "60 Minutes" had a segment on poverty in America. It was designed to tug at the heartstrings of those with more money. The USSR ran it for their citizens but it actually backfired. Being in 'poverty' in America meant having a television and more living space than anyone not an elite in the Soviet Union had.
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Sen. Sanders Still Opposes Nuclear Energy But The American Science Community Marches On
If you tell me an old white person in America opposes nuclear power, I can tell you how they vote. I can also tell you with alarming accuracy what they think about lots of science, like food and medicine. They think natural gas is why climate change happens.
The reality is that climate change happened due to...them. Democrats gutted nuclear energy in America 30 years ago. Democrats cheered when Senator John Kerry and President Bill Clinton declared that any nuclear energy research could be a nuclear bomb. This was the capstone of a 30-year effort to undermine nuclear power in America, with politicians, their supporters, and allies in corporate media invoking the Precautionary Principle and saying any risk was too much.
The reality is that climate change happened due to...them. Democrats gutted nuclear energy in America 30 years ago. Democrats cheered when Senator John Kerry and President Bill Clinton declared that any nuclear energy research could be a nuclear bomb. This was the capstone of a 30-year effort to undermine nuclear power in America, with politicians, their supporters, and allies in corporate media invoking the Precautionary Principle and saying any risk was too much.
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