Quick, how many coronavirus pandemics have there been?
A. 1
B. 3
C. A lot
The answer is obviously, if you read here, C. We have no way to know how many coronavirus pandemics there have been because we didn't even parse it out from the common cold family until the 1960s. We know there were two coronavirus pandemics, SARS and MERS, in the 16 years prior to COVID-19 but we don't know before then how many had happened and were just called 'flu' or were regular respiratory distress that put people with co-morbidities on ventilators or killed them and were labeled as one of the co-morbidies.
There is little reason to wonder why so many didn't trust government approval of the COVID-19 vaccine; the public hadn't trusted government science decision-making for decades prior to that, vaccine deniers had simply switched from Democrats to Republicans.
The reason distrust is so endemic is because of epidemiological hype and media outlets treating it like it is science, rather than noting that correlation is placed over in the EXPLORATORY pile and maybe interesting enough for science to prove.
Few authors dare to say aloud things about physics or the history of physics that may go against the status quo. Alexander Unzicker is one of them. In his last work,
Make Physics Great Again. America has Failed (2023; translated into English from the original in German: 2022,
Einsteins Albtraum – Der Aufstieg Amerikas und der Niedergang der Physik, Westend Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt), like in his previous works, he dares to touch a raw nerve that is usually avoided in politically correct environments. This book is certainly polemical.
Electric cars are great on paper; if electricity is powered by solar and wind, and mining and maintenance can be done reasonably, it is an environmental win.
Yet despite $4 trillion in subsidies for solar and wind, 80 percent of electricity is still from conventional energy, and that means if electric cars don't have good range, they are worse for the environment than conventional automobiles. The electricity is generated from regular sources, then sent over transmission lines inefficiently, then often converted to 110 volts with losses, then stored in a battery that decreases in efficiency quickly.
It is popular for some political activists to lament the modern Supreme Court(1) but the 1970s and '80s Supreme Court had 5 justices to the left of Sotomayor. That led to a lot of bad law.
For trust in science the worst thing from that dark period was their ruling in 1984's Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837, now commonly called "Chevron deference."
The decision was so lopsided toward government, and therefore the environmental groups that collude with career government employees, that it gave the White House the power to create laws without needing Congress. It meant that a government agency could create regulations that act like laws if it was in their "mandate."
A new
paper in
Canadian Medical Association Journal has linked irregular heartbeats in 322 Chinese cities to small-micron particulate matter, invisible pollution that needs an electron microscope to visualize. Given its minute size, PM
2.5 is one-fourth the size of real pollution, PM10, there is four times as much of it, so the paper could have used PM
10 and achieved the same statistical significance. It just would have been less dramatic
A revolution is taking place, but we seem to not yet realize it.
Paradigm shifting technologies often produce an abrupt transition when they get adopted. However, that transition is not easy to recognize early on: the effects of an exponential trend appear linear at the begninning, so the explosive force of the transition that occurs a little later takes many by surprise.
An American Heart Association article ranks 10 diets in
its Circulation in-house journal and they are about what you expect; keto bad, vegetables good, despite all the money they get from beef trade groups.
The Biden administration wants to make sure its policy of banning conventional cars succeeds, which means getting Americans to buy electric ones.
Which is why the ironically named Inflation Reduction Act gives everyone $7500 toward an electric car. Mandates and subsidies are always the road to success, right? Not really, unless you are still using CFL bulbs that the government spent billions on. They instead add to costs because everyone has access to more money but a limited supply. This is such simple economics even Paul Krugman can understand it.