Category: Science

Can gas stations be held liable for selling to DWI drivers?

And now, from New Mexico, comes a Florida-man level of judicial stupidity:

If you make the station attendant responsible for ensuring the sobriety of customers, they will either have to walk out of the station every time someone pulls up to the pumps or discontinue the self-serve option altogether. That would be even more disruptive to the industry.

Source: Can gas stations be held liable for selling to DWI drivers?

Two things I see here. One, it could be the lawyers are just looking for someone with deep pockets to go after. Greedy liberals they are, but that’s redundant. Two, a case could be made that this is another environmentalist attack on the oil industry.

Personally, I’m going with #2.

Covid Vaccine Nonsense

Under EUA status, the government is not permitted to require Covid-19 vaccinations because the vaccines are not FDA-approved and recipients are clinical trial participants. This is why states cannot legally require vaccination, despite suggestions by some legislators to do just that.

Indeed, the US military is barred from mandating the vaccines. This ban on government vaccine mandates explains why some private companies are trying to require vaccination of employees, which makes the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) guidance on this issue potentially relevant.

THE EEOC GUIDANCE ON COVID-19 VACCINATION DOES NOT AUTHORIZE VACCINE MANDATES

Source: Covid Vaccine Nonsense

Democrats Introduce New Green New Deal Bill Calling Fossil Fuels ‘Racist’

Systemic racism was certainly a serious issue, one which was imposed by the Democratic Party wherever it had power. That party divided the nation over the issue of slavery when a Republican — the party that was founded to end slavery — was elected president. President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, re-segregated the federal workforce after Republican President U.S. Grant de-segregated it. Democrats imposed Jim Crow. Democrats even successfully staged a coup against black Republicans, in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898.

Source: Democrats Introduce New Green New Deal Bill Calling Fossil Fuels ‘Racist’

Scientists discover Antartica had a lush rainforest 90 million years

Most of West Antarctica and large areas of East Antarctica were once covered in rainforest, scientists say.

Today’s icy wasteland would’ve once played host to huge amounts of plant-life – during an unusually toasty period in history 90 million years ago.

Evidence for the rainforest suggests the climate was “exceptionally warm.”

How did it get so warm without mankind emitting CO2?

Source: Scientists discover Antartica had a lush rainforest 90 million years

How to Measure the Temperature of the Earth

If you just look at the thing they are trying to measure and the tools they are using to measure it (including the accuracy of thermometers 100 years ago), you can reasonably presume that this particular science is not very scientific.  On my kitchen wall are three thermometers.  Two use technology vastly superior to what was available 100 years ago.  The third one uses fairly old technology.  They are 17 inches apart.  The room temperature is maintained by a state-of-the-art home heating system.  As I write this, they read 68.0, 70.2, and 73.  (Feel free to try this experiment at home.)

Source: How to Measure the Temperature of the Earth

Environmentalists Want To Take Your Food, Your Home, And Your Children

  • The World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency letter published in the Bioscience journal boasted the signatures of 11,000 scientists lending the full weight of their useless degrees to order that “the world population must be stabilized—and, ideally, gradually reduced—within a framework that ensures social integrity.” Reducing populations for social integrity was the specialty of such innovative environmental activists as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mohammed…

  • And so a letter in Lancet Planetary Health by assorted scientists, grad students, people who claim to be scientists, and people who once watched an episode of Cosmos, demanded that meat consumption drop by 2030…

  • “We need another kind of escape route—away from our ideologies of ownership and property, and toward more collective, healthy, and just cities,’ the socialist rag argues.

What do you mean ‘we’? You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.

Source: Environmentalists Want To Take Your Food, Your Home, And Your Children.

Who are these ‘11,000 Concerned Scientists’?

With the disclaimer that I’m just a layman who resides in “flyover country”, who are these “11,000 Scientists,” and do they even have credibility to weigh in on this matter?  Scientists, with few exceptions, are subject matter experts in specific fields — their expertise isn’t inherently relevant and extensible across varying fields of science.  For example, a physicist won’t teach a graduate-level course in Biology; a podiatrist won’t perform open heart surgery and a botanist has minimal insight on quantum computing.  How many of these 11,000 scientists possess germane degrees in meteorology, climatology or atmospheric science?  Lo and behold,  BioScience actually published a list of these scientific signatories in the attached link — so I looked.

In keyword searches across 324 pages of signing signatories, spanning 11,224 scientists, I found 240 (2%) individuals with professions that can be construed as bona fide meteorologists, climatologists, or atmospheric scientists.  As a frame of reference, the Department of Labor reports there are 10,000 atmospheric scientists in the U.S.  Conversely, this list contains plenty of “experts” who have zero credibility on the topic of climate change, coming from fields such as:  infectious diseases, paleontology, ecology, zoology, epidemiology and nutrition, insect ecology, anthropology, computer science, OB-GYN and linguistics.  Bluntly, and no offense intended, I could care less what a French professor or a zookeeper thinks about climate change — let alone allow them to tell me how to live my life.

Source: Who are these ‘11,000 Concerned Scientists’?

Sahara Desert, Wobbly Basketballs, And Annoying Politics

Roughly a thousand years before the Sahara became incompatible with humans, an area the size of England sank beneath the waves. Humans lived there. We have evidence of that (as we do of pre-desert Sahara). Another big chunk of fertile human habitat that was there in the past and gone in the present. It sure as hell ‘aint a sunk just few millimeters in depth.

…I think of this sometime when people are publicly emoting over changes in a glacier…

How much CO2 was humanity responsible for then?

Source: Sahara Desert, Wobbly Basketballs, And Annoying Politics