Weekly News Roundup – 23 February 2024
Three approaches to the world’s problems: scientific, political, and artificial
This Week’s News
This is a little old but it’s important so I’m including it this week. Nuclear fusion: new record brings dream of clean energy closer. The Joint European Torus (JET) facility, located in Culham, England produced more energy using nuclear fusion than has ever before. While this is viewed by many scientists as “very exciting,” the 69 megajoules of energy produced over five seconds would only be “enough energy for four to five hot baths,” so nuclear fusion plants are still a ways off. Still, if the world is ever to successfully deal with climate change it’ll be through technical innovations and private industry rather than government directives.
Environment minister Steven Guilbeault says no more federal funds for building roads – Speaking of government directives and the environment, Steven Guilbeault, former Greenpeace spokesman, current Minister of Environment and Climate Change, and all-around loon is at it again, this time stating during a public transit conference in Montreal that “our government has made the decision to stop investing in new road infrastructure.” It’s unclear how the Liberal Government can plan to welcome 500,000 immigrants annually by 2025 and claim that the current infrastructure “is perfectly adequate to respond to the needs we have” but as long-term thinking isn’t exactly the strong suit of this government, I doubt much thought has been put into it.
Largest Covid Vaccine Study Yet Finds Links to Health Conditions – A recent study has found links between the COVID vaccines and “small increases in neurological, blood, and heart-related conditions.” Per Allsides.com: “Center- and right-rated sources covered the study prominently. Other than Bloomberg (Lean Left bias), AllSides didn't find any left-rated sources that covered the story.”
State Department Threatens Congress Over Censorship Programs – The government is up to its old tricks again. Or more accurately, it never stopped. A year after its censorship activities were exposed as part of “the Twitter Files,” the Global engagement Center, a State Department entity is under Congressional scrutiny once again. However, the State Department has threatened to only show the House Small Business Committee “its records in camera until it gets a ‘better understanding of how the Committee will utilize this sensitive information.’” Apparently how taxpayer money is spent should not be shared with taxpayers.
Trump ordered to pay $355M in New York fraud case – Last week a NY Judged order former President Donald Trump to pay $355M in penalties for falsely altering his net worth in key documents in order to receive tax and insurance benefits. Opinions in both CNN (Left bias) and The Wall Street Journal (Lean Right bias) found the decision problematic arguing that a large percentage of Americans view some of the indictments as politically motivated and accus NY Attorney General Letitia James of “choosing a target and then hunting for something to charge him with, which is an abuse of the law.”
Finally, in lighter news, Google is pausing the image generation feature of their new AI tool Gemini after reports that it prioritizes diversity over historic accuracy when generating images (examples below). Further evidence that the AI apocalypse may not be as close as some think.
What I’m Reading
Quibbling with Cofnas: I - by Helen Dale and Lorenzo Warby (notonyourteam.co.uk) - Lorenzo Warby over at “Not On Your Team, But Always Fair” presents his first piece responding to Nathan Cofnas’ Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem. The issue in question is the equalitarian/equality thesis, the hereditarian thesis, and “race realism:”
The equalitarian thesis: there are no inherent differences between human groups. Therefore, absence of equal outcomes between groups in any society implies the persistence of social injustice that correctly applied social action can eliminate.
The hereditarian thesis: key traits are differently distributed across human groups, including key genetic traits. Therefore, average differences between groups in cultural and social outcomes are inevitable. Policies based on the denial of differences in the distribution of traits between human groups require a level of realism denial in discourse and action that degrades social functioning.
We are different from all other humans in history – Over at The Garden of Forking Paths, Brian Klass looks at how different we are today compared to those who lived in the recent past and points out, among other things, that “the average citizen lives more comfortably now than kings did a few centuries ago.”
My Podcast Recommendation(s) of the Week
My recommendation in this section on the 16th of December was an episode of The Glenn Show entitled “The Truth about George Floyd’s Death.” In that episode Glenn Loury, Professor of Economics at Brown University and Paulson Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and John McWhorter, an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University and frequent contributor to the New York Times, discussed the documentary, The Fall of Minneapolis, which claimed to bring “to light some startling evidence about the circumstances surrounding Floyd’s death and Derek Chauvin’s conviction on murder charges.”
In a recent episode (below) the two returned to the documentary, discuss Radley Balko’s response to The Fall of Minneapolis, ask if the makers were dishonest and if Glenn and John were “too credulous.”
The Glenn Show – John McWhorter – "The Fall of Minneapolis" Reconsidered