Science

The Dumbest Thing You Will Read Today, from Unscientific American

Featured image I thought the New York Times had once again stolen the prize for the dumbest article of the last few days with this entry: Exxon Mobil’s Pioneer Acquisition Is a Direct Threat to Democracy Even the cliches in the article are 20 years out of date, but I’m sure the author, Jeff Colgan, professor of political science and the director of the Climate Solutions Lab at Brown University, is already »

Global Warming Madness: New White House report considers blocking the sun to cool the planet

Featured image The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a report on Friday about a relatively new technology called solar radiation modification that could be used in the fight against climate change.  According to the report, SRM is a form of “geoengineering” that “offers the possibility of cooling the planet significantly on a timescale of a few years.” The University of Oxford defines “geoengineering” as “the deliberate large-scale intervention »

Liars, Damn Liars, Statisticians. . . and Pollsters

Featured image The old saying, “There are liars, damn liars, and statisticians,” should be amended to include pollsters. The latest exhibit in polling as a “pseudo-event” (an artificial event created by advocates solely to generate a news headline, pace Daniel Boorstin) is an AP-NORC poll just out which the AP advertises with this headline: Most in US say don’t ban race in college admissions but its role should be small: AP-NORC poll »

“The Science” Isn’t Scientific

Featured image One of the saddest aspects of the Left’s takeover of our institutions is what it has done to the scientific establishment. This is a big topic, but for now let’s stick to the Lancet, which once was one of the world’s most respected medical journals. Now, it is largely a joke, pushing hack politics–race, gender, climate change–instead of seriously advancing medical science. This degeneration long predates covid. In 2016, I »

Annals of Social Science, Chapter 12,186

Featured image Oh goody, something new for The View and other fanatical leftists to worry about. Fans of statistical fallacies and other quantitative flim-flam will know that it is possible to demonstrate a correlation between storks and the birth rate, but social science has moved on to much more significant questions, such as “anti-wolf sentiment.” And especially anti-wolf sentiment among—wait for it!—the “far right.” A recent study from the Proceedings of the »

The extinction next time

Featured image Paul Ehrlich is alive — I thought that was news — and he is still predicting doom. He was among the featured experts on last night’s 60 Minutes segment “Scientists say planet in midst of sixth mass extinction, Earth’s wildlife running out of places to live” (video below). CBS’s Scott Pelley tracked him down: At the age of 90, biologist Paul Ehrlich may have lived long enough to see some »

Friends in viral places

Featured image Nicholas Wade is the excellent former New York Times science reporter. I want to recommend his City Journal essay/review “Friends in viral places.” Wade takes up a new book on the origin of Covid-19 whose author he describes as “a well-regarded and widely published writer about viruses and natural history[.]” The review is educational and entertaining. Among other things, Wade indicts the author for shortchanging the lab-leak theory of the »

At the struggle session

Featured image Over at the University of Minnesota Medical School, one probably shouldn’t be seen with books such as Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon or Fan Shen’s memoir Gang of One: Memoirs of a Red Guard. It might reflect an inclination to think for yourself and other such bourgeois indulgences. I’m thinking that they missed a few strokes at this year’s white-coat ceremony for new students. The video below is a »

Beyond the Hippocratic oath

Featured image Last month Anthony Gockowski reported for Alpha News on the oath to “promote a culture of anti-racism” taken by incoming University of Minnesota Medical School students at their white-coat ceremony on August 19: White coats, the students said, are themselves a “symbol of power, prestige, and dominance.” Therefore, students will “strive to reclaim their identity as a symbol of responsibility, humility, and loving kindness.” “We commit to uprooting the legacy »

On Hurricane Ian

Featured image Hurricane Ian is moving up the Atlantic seaboard and apparently passing into history. It was tremendously destructive as it hit the Gulf coast of Florida, and Democrats didn’t even wait for the hurricane to make landfall before politicizing it. Democrats hope Ian will bring down, or at least put a chink in the armor of, the heretofore invincible Ron DeSantis. But I am confused: didn’t we learn during Katrina that »

Are There Transgender Mice?

Featured image Apparently there could be. Herewith the opening of an article just out in Nature magazine: The fraught quest to account for sex in biology research In 2016, pharmacologist Susan Howlett wrote up a study on how hormone levels during pregnancy affect heart function and sent it off to a journal. When the reviewers’ comments came back, two of the three had asked an unexpected question: where were the tissues from male »

This Week in Social Science

Featured image Given how the cultural left dislikes manliness as “toxic masculinity,” maybe we shouldn’t be surprised to find some social science behind wimpy liberalism. Behold: Testosterone Administration Induces A Red Shift in Democrats Paul Zak, Claremont Graduate University Abstract: We tested the fixity of political preferences of 136 healthy males during the 2011 U.S. presidential election season by administering synthetic testosterone or placebo to participants who had identified the strength of »

Guest Post: Emina Melonic on False Wombs, Real Wounds

Featured image Emina Melonic joins us again to amplify a number of key issues dilated recently by another friend of Power Line, Daniel McCarthy, writing in The Spectator: In a recent article in The Spectator, Daniel McCarthy reflects on some of the bioethical problems of our age: surrogacy and the frightening possibility of artificial wombs. He writes that “The technology [for artificial wombs] doesn’t exist yet, but there is already a market »

Re-Imagine Actual Policing

Featured image Nothing so fully exposes the dream world of the left, in which good intentions and sentiments are thought sufficient to make reality bend to their will, than the enthusiasm for “re-imagining policing” that went along with the “Defund the Police” mania post-George Floyd. If we just “re-imagine” something, it will happen! We don’t even need to close our eyes and click our heels! And one of the leading ideas was »

Trust “The Science” They Say

Featured image I think I have posted this chart before in a Geek in Pictures gallery, but it is worth breaking out on its own for a spotlight: Notice that back in the 1980s and early 1990s, “trust in science” was higher among Republicans than Democrats, but what accounts for the explosion in Democratic Party trust in science in the last two years? I suspect if Donald Trump had been re-elected, and »

Crisis for the Climate Models?

Featured image One of my heterodox positions on climate change is that many of our scientific efforts to improve our grasp of the earth’s climate system since it became a hot topic (no pun intended) back in the 1970s have actually moved our knowledge backwards. That is, we actually understand it less well than we did 40 years ago. This is especially true of the heart of the matter: the computer climate »

Why Do Democrats Hate Children?

Featured image When Democrats aren’t trying to keep children out of school and (not) learning online, or requiring them to wear masks when they’re (not) learning in crappy union-run public schools, they’re trying to warehouse them in government-run universal child care programs. Universal child care is one of the centerpieces of the Democrats’ BBB Bill (better known as “Biden’s Big Blunder”). Yet the people who scream “follow the science” never seem to »