Category: Science & Technology
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New Sea Level Prediction Less Dire, Still Unlikely
by Steve Haner The latest projection from the ever-trustworthy federal authorities sweating out the climate crisis is that the sea level will rise one foot along Virginia’s coast by 2050, rising the same amount in 30 years as it rose in the previous 100. The news quickly swept across the Commonwealth. Here is the Richmond…
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Our Media Trusts “The Smart Ones”
by Steve Haner Not every policy imposed by government is subject to public hearings or votes. That’s one reason to vote for smart candidates who have the country’s best interests at heart and not for those who rant about personal liberty without accepting any social responsibility for individual decisions. That was part of a response…
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Climate Rationality Preached in a UVA Pulpit
by Steve Haner Efforts to rapidly expand our reliance on wind and solar generation for electricity, while at the same time closing baseload natural gas generation with similar haste, makes no sense economically. “The only explanation for that policy is you want to shut down the economy.” Another voice of reason has emerged to challenge…
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Covid Benefits – Yet Another Massive Government Program Gone Awry
Stolen without a gun. NBC News is reporting that hackers and scammers have pulled off “an epic theft” of COVID benefits. Foreign and domestic criminals have looted tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars. As reported, “The federal government cannot say for sure how much of the more than $900 billion in pandemic-related unemployment…
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Herd Immunity from the Delta Variant – “Mythical”
To vax or not to vax? I’m vaccinated. I think everybody who is eligible to be vaccinated should get vaccinated. Jim Bacon makes the excellent point that people who are vaccinated may still get COVID but are far less likely to die from the virus. Others believe that vaccinations will confer herd immunity to the population…
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Print Me a House
By Dick Hall-Sizemore For someone who stays away from housing issues, I now have my second one in two days. Yesterday, I expressed dismay at the price tag on new “affordable” homes. Today’s topic is 3D printed homes. As strange as that may sound, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported yesterday that work has begun in Richmond…
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Yes, Virginia, There May Be Alien UFOs — Off Your Coast!
by Bruce Majors If you spend any time on the internet, you will almost daily see geographical rankings: the best colleges, the best small towns, the best places to retire, the cities with the worst drivers, the states with the worst tippers or the rudest residents. Apparently whoever or whatever is behind the UAPs (the…
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Paul Marik: COVID Quack or Pandemic Hero?
by James A. Bacon Across the state of Virginia, the fatality rate for COVID-19 patients entering hospitals has been 37.7%. Put another way, nearly two of every five patients died, according to Virginia Department of Health data. But in Norfolk, only 25.8% died. What accounts for that disparity? One possibility is that the dominant hospital…
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Tech Prof Corrected WHO, CDC on COVID Spread
by Steve Haner Wired has chronicled a one-year struggle by a Virginia Tech teacher and researcher, working mainly with other non-physicians, to convince the Centers for Disease Control and World Health Organization they were dead wrong on COVID. The kind of dead wrong that made more people dead. The battle was quietly won when on…
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Brood X is Coming!
By Dick Hall-Sizemore It was spring, 2004, several months after our first grandchild had been born. My wife and I were visiting our daughter and family in Fairfax County. There was a loud, incessant buzzing, almost roar, in the air. Big bugs were everywhere; you could not walk without crunching on them. They were dropping…
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End the Emergency Orders. Now. Every One.
by Steve Haner There is no more COVID emergency. Every single emergency order issued by Virginia’s Governor Ralph Northam should be lifted immediately. Not relaxed or revised, ended. For the millions of Virginians now vaccinated, this is all just virtue signaling, “pandemic theater.” For the millions of Virginians who have made conscious decisions not to…
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The New Normal
by Dick Hall-Sizemore We are used to hearing and seeing weather temperatures reported as being some number of degrees above or below normal. The definition of “normal” has changed this year. The National Weather Service defines “normal” climate conditions as a 30-year average. New Climate Normals are calculated every 10 years. Before this year, the…
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Big Brother Has Been Curtailed
By Dick Hall-Sizemore A recent TV series, Person of Interest, centered on the ability to use large databases of personal information coupled with extensive audio and video surveillance to identify any individual and pull up extensive data on that individual. A small team of good guys used this capability to identify threats to individuals and…
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Centuries of Energy Already Sitting in Cans
by Steve Haner First published this morning by the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy. If you are serious about making electricity without carbon emissions and also serious about making enough electricity to run a real economy 24-7-365, the discussion keeps coming back to nuclear energy. It is the obvious choice if you believe we…
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What Texas’s Crisis Means for Virginia
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in Blogs and Blog Administration, Business and Economy, Consumer Protection, Corruption and Scandals, Culture wars, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Energy, Environment, Government Finance, Insurance, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Money in politics, Political Influence, Politics, Property rights, Public safety & health, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Science & Technologyby Peter Galuszka The Texas freeze and ensuing energy disaster has clear lessons for Virginia as it sorts out its energy future. Yet much of the media coverage in Virginia and certainly on Bacon’s Rebellion conveniently leaves out pertinent observations. The statewide freeze in Texas completely fouled up the entire energy infrastructure as natural gas…