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August 2023

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Are Greens Overplaying Their Hand? Craig Rucker

By on August 8th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/08/08/are-greens-overplaying-their-hand/

The Green movement has a long history of rubbing people the wrong way.  In some cases, it was perhaps for the public good, like starting campaigns to stop littering and save whales.  In other cases, it was just plain patronizing, like telling parents to ditch disposable diapers and keep their thermostats set to 65 degrees in winter.

These days, however, the eco-crowd has taken everything to a whole new level of busybody.

The “climate crisis” is the purported justification cited as to why we all need to change our behaviors – and there can be no deviation. Citizens are expected to acquiesce to their whims simply because they shout “the world will end in five years”, as Greta Thunberg did in 2018. In many respects, Green extremists feel the public should submit to the same way they bowed to two-year COVID masking and lockdown diktats.

But their list of demands has gotten overbearing.  So much so, in fact, that one must believe they will soon overplay their hand and face considerable public backlash. Indeed, they already have in many instances, but it’s worth taking a look at just a few of their recent irksome moves that have made news. 

Ditch gas stoves, water heaters and furnaces – In some cases, like gas stoves, Greens want them banned outright. In other cases, like water heaters and furnaces, they want the appliances regulated under new federal rules for nearly impossible 95% efficiency. Many electric replacements will require expensive rewiring of homes and neighborhoods, and heat pumps that don’t work well in frigid weather.

Ban wood-burning pizza ovens – Politicians in the Big Apple want to force popular restaurants and pizzerias to install outrageously expensive “pollution” controls systems to reduce their “excessive carbon footprint” and reduce air pollution. Environmentalists don’t seem to care this is enormously unpopular with average New Yorkers. They seem intent to push their agenda or the common Joe, even if data suggests each oven would have to bake pizzas 24/7 for nearly 850 years to equal the annual carbon dioxide emissions from the private jets that Biden Climate Emissary John Kerry uses to avoid commercial airlines.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

EV Owners Suddenly Realize They’re Being Conned

By on August 8th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/08/08/why-is-tesla-the-only-ev-maker-getting-sued-for-false-advertising/

Three California residents last week filed a lawsuit against Tesla for what they claim is false advertising over the car’s range. But why stop at Tesla? And why just sue over false claims about range when every other claim about EVs is also a lie?

The lawsuit comes in the wake of a Reuters report contending that Tesla had been goosing the range displayed on its dashboard and created a “diversion team” to deal with all the customer complaints about faulty batteries.

The filing claims that “Had Tesla honestly advertised its electric vehicle ranges, consumers either would not have purchased Tesla model vehicles, or else would have paid substantially less for them.”

But this isn’t new news. There have been several reports over the years about the wildly inflated EV range claims.

A little over a year ago, Forbes published an article detailing how the advertised range of EVs was often way off.

“I’ve been road testing electric cars regularly for more than two years now, and not once has a battery-only vehicle met the claimed capacity for its battery,” wrote senior contributor Neil Winton. “The average shortfall is close to 20%.”

Tesla actually did better in his tests than some of the other EVs.

A report from Car & Driver last August found that only three cars it tested did better than the official EPA range estimate. Tesla’s Model S is supposed to go 348 miles on a charge but only made it 280 miles. Ford’s electric F-150 came up 70 miles short of its reported 300-mile range.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Anthony Fauci’s Deceptions A trove of emails, Slack messages, and other documents reveal Fauci’s behind-the-scenes involvement. ‘Tony doesn’t want his fingerprints on origin stories.’ By David Zweig

By on August 8th, 2023

https://www.thefp.com/p/anthony-faucis-deceptions?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

On April 17, 2020, with much of the country still in some form of lockdown and news of overwhelmed hospitals dominating the headlines, Dr. Anthony Fauci, then a member of the President’s Coronavirus Task Force, was asked a question toward the end of a White House press briefing: Was there a possibility that this novel virus came from a lab in Wuhan, China?

“There was a study recently,” Fauci said confidently, “where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as they evolve, and the mutations that it took to get to where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.” In other words, it wasn’t from the lab.

This moment set the template for much that would follow from Fauci over the next three years. That is, evasion, deception, and misdirection about his support of high-risk virology research and its connection to the possibility that a lab leak in Wuhan caused a worldwide catastrophe.

Fauci, who was the face of the public health community during the crisis, pushed the idea that the evidence strongly indicated that the virus was just a tragic, natural occurrence. He insisted, repeatedly, that an epidemic that started in Wuhan was unlikely to have been the result of an escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). 

But Fauci had an incentive to arrive at his conclusion about the deadly pandemic that started in Wuhan. The WIV was known for doing high-risk virology research studying and manipulating coronaviruses. Fauci, as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for almost 40 years, had funded such research at the WIV.

Fauci’s posture—dismissive toward the theory of the lab leak, and later, condescending toward those who entertained it—set what became the accepted narrative about the origins of the pandemic. It was a narrative that was parroted by the government, public health officials, and the media, and even enforced by social media platforms at the request of the Biden White House.

But last month, a trove of explosive emails and other documents were released by the U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. These revealed evidence of Fauci’s and other officials’ behind-the-scenes involvement with scientists and journalists, demonstrating their efforts to quash the lab leak theory.

The recently disclosed private communications, first reported by Public and Racket, lay bare that the “highly qualified” authors of the paper that Fauci had asserted in April 2020 likely disproved a lab leak—what became known informally as the “Proximal Origin” paper—actually had extensive uncertainty about the virus being the result of a natural event. This was grossly at odds with what became their published position.

The paper that Fauci recommended was published on March 17, 2020. But in February, just the month before, Kristian Andersen, one of the paper’s authors, wrote a Slack message to his colleagues saying: “[T]he lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.” 

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Alexei Navalny Gets Another 19 Years The Russian opposition figure is a reminder of the price of freedom.

By on August 8th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/alexei-navalny-gets-another-19-years-dfc7e4db?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The world hardly needs another reminder of the true nature of Vladimir Putin’s Russian state, but last week brought one anyway: On Friday the opposition figure Alexei Navalny was sentenced to 19 years in prison on charges of extremism, after a trial that took place in the penal colony where he is already imprisoned.

Mr. Navalny, age 47, has galvanized protests and publicized criticisms of Mr. Putin’s personal wealth. In 2020 he survived a poisoning by what investigators later said was the Russian nerve agent Novichok. He was arrested in 2021, and his anti-corruption foundation was shut down as a purported “extremist” organization.

In comments posted to social media after the 19-year sentence came down, Mr. Navalny made clear that he has no illusions about what he’s up against. “The number doesn’t matter,” he said. “I understand very well that, like many political prisoners, I am serving a life sentence—where life is measured by the duration of my life or the life of this regime.” He added that Mr. Putin’s goal in persecuting him is to frighten and intimidate everyone else who might be tempted to resist: “You are being forced to surrender your Russia without a fight to a gang of traitors, thieves and scoundrels who have seized power.”

What a thing to say from the confines of a Russian prison. Bravery, Mr. Navalny has it. So does Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong, who could easily be living a billionaire’s life in exile instead of sitting in a prison cell, and so do countless others who defy autocratic regimes, as far away as Iran and Afghanistan, and as close to home as Cuba, only 90 miles off Florida.

The U.S. has its share of problems, but it remains, as much as ever, a beacon of freedom and democracy, and if Americans ever take that for granted, they should take a look around.

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