Is There Any "Science" Behind Covid Mask Mandates?

/

  • I spend a lot of time at this site ridiculing the unfalsifiable hyperbole and altered data that pass for “science” in the field of climate change. But climate change is just one of many areas where people who have little idea what real science consists of nevertheless claim the mantle of science to order others around.

  • Right now the response to Covid-19, the Chinese Virus, competes with the response to climate change for the most egregious misuse of the imprimatur of “science” to justify political goals.

  • As background for this post, I refer to the Manhattan Contrarian definition of “science,” which appeared, among other places, in this post of September 12, 2020: “Science is a process for understanding reality through using experiment or data to attempt to falsify falsifiable hypotheses.” Under this definition, the classic example of real science at work is the randomized controlled drug trial, best understood as an attempt to falsify the falsifiable hypothesis that the drug at issue is effective, through proving that a placebo works just as well. When the attempt at falsification fails, then the drug has been shown, at least provisionally, to be effective.

  • The Manhattan Contrarian definition of “science” is what I seem to remember learning on the subject back in junior high school, and that I have since confirmed by reading up on the work of philosopher Karl Popper and others.

Read More

More News On The Progress Toward Eliminating Fossil Fuels

/
More News On The Progress Toward Eliminating Fossil Fuels

  • The bureaucrats of the world, particularly in the UN and developed countries, have the idea that they are going to eliminate all use of fossil fuels by somewhere around 2040-50. They have no conception of how to accomplish that, other than to order from on high that it shall occur and assume that somebody else will figure out the details.

  • This gives the opportunity for the rest of us to sit on the sidelines and observe how bureaucratic fantasy gradually runs into the brick wall of physical reality.

  • Back in June I covered the Report just out from Ren21 Renewables Now wherein we learned that in the ten years from 2009 to 2019, despite hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies for intermittent wind and solar power, the percent of world final energy consumption coming from fossil fuels had dropped all the way from 80.3% to 80.2%. Oh, but world final energy consumption was substantially up over that decade from about 320 to 385 exajoules, so despite all the strenuous efforts to reduce their use, in fact annual fossil fuel consumption had increased from about 260 to 310 exajoules.

  • And there is plenty more news coming out on the same subject.

Read More

An Example Of The Destruction In The "Reconciliation" Bill: Public Housing Bailout

/
An Example Of The Destruction In The "Reconciliation" Bill: Public Housing Bailout

  • Even this late in the process, it’s still impossible for a mere member of the public to find out in much detail what all may be buried in the massive “budget reconciliation” bill now making its way through Congress. And the whole thing may yet get stopped, or substantially reduced, by the unexpected good sense of a couple of Democratic Senators (or even just one).

  • Nevertheless, there is enough general information about what is planned by the bill’s proponents to give us some insights into the economic wreckage that could be coming if these people get their way.

  • Among things included within the bruited $3.5 trillion price tag (undoubtedly way understated), you likely are aware of at least some of the largest components. Included are things like large expansions of child tax credits, pre-K education subsidies, childcare subsidies, Obamacare expansion, Medicare expansion, subsidies and tax credits for useless “green” energy projects, and on and on and on.

  • But for today I’m going to focus on just one of the many vast spending expansions, namely the proposed $80 billion for bailing out public housing.

Read More

Can There Be Any Doubt That Hillary Was Behind The Trump/Russia Collusion Hoax?

/
Can There Be Any Doubt That Hillary Was Behind The Trump/Russia Collusion Hoax?

  • I feel that I should comment on the indictment of lawyer Michael Sussman by Special Counsel John Durham while the issue is still current. Very likely you have already read extensively about Durham’s indictment of Sussman, which came down on September 16. Sussman was one of the lawyers, although not the head lawyer, at the firm of Perkins Coie, who worked for the DNC and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign in 2016.

  • This indictment is another instance by which we are learning step by step how the Democratic powers and their press side-kicks, through strict control of a “narrative,” think that they can get a critical mass of the American people to believe literally anything, no matter how preposterous. And to a remarkable extent, they are right.

  • From mid-2016 to mid-2019, we had about three years of non-stop Russia! Russia! Russia! obsession from the Democratic Party and its media adjunct. The stories advancing the narrative numbered in the thousands, and ultimately turned into nothing when Special Counsel Robert Mueller finally issued his report at the end of that period.

  • But how did this whole thing get going and continued for such a long period of time?

Read More

The "Safety Net": The Goal Should Be To Minimize The Number Of People Depending On It

/

  • This post is about a situation where the correct public policy approach should be obvious to everyone, but the perverse incentives of government as usual push in exactly the wrong direction.

  • The issue is how many people should receive benefits, and in what amounts, from government “safety net” programs. From all I can find, there appears to be near-universal support for at least some level of government “safety net” for the poor. After all, no one wants to see fellow citizens starving for lack of food, or dying for lack of medical attention to a curable health condition, and so forth. And can we really count on private charity to fully provide for all the situations of genuine need among the population?

  • Thus the result: Although the details vary greatly, every country with an advanced economy has an extensive system of “need”-based distributions of benefits to those designated as needy. But how many and which people should receive benefits, and how much?

  • In practice, the number of beneficiaries and level of generosity of a social safety net are inherently unstable.

Read More

China Seems Determined To Destroy The Things That Have Made It Relatively Successful

/

  • Is China in the process of “winning” the battle for the future of the world? Certainly, Xi Jinping thinks so. So does everyone else in China if you believe what they say. (But then, nobody in China is allowed to dissent on this point, so in truth you don’t really know what they think and you have no way to find out.).

  • Zillions of statism-loving American journalists and pundits also think that China, through its tightly-state-and-party-controlled crony capitalist model, represents the wave of the future. As a prominent example, there was the unforgettable Tom Friedman of the New York Times back in 2009:

  • “[W]hen [a country] is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can . . . have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.”

  • Or, to consider something from a pundit on the right, there was David Goldman of PJ Media writing in March 2021 in a piece titled “Why China Is Winning.” Goldman’s answer, in a word, was “meritocracy.”

  • But in several pieces over the years, I have offered a different perspective

Read More