RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/22/biden-again-releasing-millions-of-barrels-from-oil-reserves-in-attempt-to-lower-gas-prices/

On Tuesday, the Biden Administration announced that it will be releasing another 1 million barrels of oil from a reserve in the Northeast, in yet another effort to lower gas prices ahead of the November election.

ABC News reports that the reserve in question, located in New Jersey and Maine, was established in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in 2013. The sale by the Biden Administration will take place in increments of 100,000 barrels, with the hope that there will be a competitive bidding process that will guarantee the flow of gasoline to local retailers throughout the summer.

The Energy Department said that the move aims to help “lower costs for American families and consumers,″ after a congressional mandate called for the executive branch to sell off the nearly 11-year-old Northeast reserve before its closure. This mandate was part of the spending deal that was passed in March to avoid a government shutdown.

The sale of 1 million barrels – which amounts to about 42 million gallons – comes as the average price of gas nationwide currently sits at about $3.60, according to data from AAA. This is not the first time that the Biden Administration has resorted to tapping into emergency reserves just to lower gasoline prices for political expediency, as he previously did so ahead of the 2022 midterm elections; this move was credited as one of several reasons why the Democratic Party did not face landslide losses as most polls projected.

“The Biden-Harris administration is laser-focused on lowering prices at the pump for American families, especially as drivers hit the road for summer driving season,” said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm in a statement. “By strategically releasing this reserve in between Memorial Day and July 4th, we are ensuring sufficient supply flows to the tri-state and Northeast at a time hardworking Americans need it the most.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/unscientific-american

Michael Shermer got his first clue that things were changing at Scientific American in late 2018. The author had been writing his “Skeptic” column for the magazine since 2001. His monthly essays, aimed at an audience of both scientists and laymen, championed the scientific method, defended the need for evidence-based debate, and explored how cognitive and ideological biases can derail the search for truth. Shermer’s role models included two twentieth-century thinkers who, like him, relished explaining science to the public: Carl Sagan, the ebullient astronomer and TV commentator; and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who wrote a popular monthly column in Natural History magazine for 25 years. Shermer hoped someday to match Gould’s record of producing 300 consecutive columns. That goal would elude him.

In continuous publication since 1845, Scientific American is the country’s leading mainstream science magazine. Authors published in its pages have included Albert Einstein, Francis Crick, Jonas Salk, and J. Robert Oppenheimer—some 200 Nobel Prize winners in all. SciAm, as many readers call it, had long encouraged its authors to challenge established viewpoints. In the mid-twentieth century, for example, the magazine published a series of articles building the case for the then-radical concept of plate tectonics. In the twenty-first century, however, American scientific media, including Scientific American, began to slip into lockstep with progressive beliefs. Suddenly, certain orthodoxies—especially concerning race, gender, or climate—couldn’t be questioned.

“I started to see the writing on the wall toward the end of my run there,” Shermer told me. “I saw I was being slowly nudged away from certain topics.” One month, he submitted a column about the “fallacy of excluded exceptions,” a common logical error in which people perceive a pattern of causal links between factors but ignore counterexamples that don’t fit the pattern. In the story, Shermer debunked the myth of the “horror-film curse,” which asserts that bad luck tends to haunt actors who appear in scary movies. (The actors in most horror films survive unscathed, he noted, while bad luck sometimes strikes the casts of non-scary movies as well.) Shermer also wanted to include a serious example: the common belief that sexually abused children grow up to become abusers in turn. He cited evidence that “most sexually abused children do not grow up to abuse their own children” and that “most abusive parents were not abused as children.” And he observed how damaging this stereotype could be to abuse survivors; statistical clarity is all the more vital in such delicate cases, he argued. But Shermer’s editor at the magazine wasn’t having it. To the editor, Shermer’s effort to correct a common misconception might be read as downplaying the seriousness of abuse. Even raising the topic might be too traumatic for victims.

The following month, Shermer submitted a column discussing ways that discrimination against racial minorities, gays, and other groups has diminished (while acknowledging the need for continued progress). Here, Shermer ran into the same wall that Better Angels of Our Nature author Steven Pinker and other scientific optimists have faced. For progressives, admitting that any problem—racism, pollution, poverty—has improved means surrendering the rhetorical high ground.