Jennifer Leigh "Jen" Selter (born August 8, 1993) is an American Internet
celebrity and fitness model. She attracted significant media attention for
her debut at a young age, initially on the photo-sharing app
Instagram. As of May 2020, Jen Selter had 12.8 million followers
on Instagram. Selter grew up Jewish.
Virginia regulators have proposed allowing nearly 300 data centers in Northern Virginia to use backup generators over a five-month period during which energy “transmission problems” are anticipated.
Many of these backup generators produce power by burning diesel or natural gas, which releases pollutants that pose risks to human and environmental health. To protect regional air quality, Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality regulates when and how frequently data centers can run their emergency on-site generators to ensure they are working while limiting their cumulative impact.
As opposed to the coal and gas fired plants that provide much of the region's power?
During normal operations, data centers can be powered by a variety of sources, ranging from the municipal electric grid to their own solar panels. In Virginia, natural gas and nuclear power were the top sources of electricity in 2021, but that is changing, fueled partly by data centers. Google and Amazon, which operate many of the region’s centers or contract with them, have each committed to source energy entirely from renewable sources by 2030 and 2025, respectively.
During past interviews with the Bay Journal, state regulators said they imagined multiple data center generators running at the same time only in the case of a major emergency impacting the regional power grid. Environmental groups, meanwhile, have been increasingly concerned about the rapid and regionally concentrated growth of an industry that uses massive amounts of energy to satisfy the world’s appetite for electronic data.
The Northern Virginia counties of Loudoun, Fairfax and Prince William are home to nearly 300 data centers that are crucial to moving about 70% of the world’s internet traffic. Those centers, and the reliability of the internet, by extension, could be impacted by upcoming power transmission issues that are anticipated from March to July of this year, DEQ Director Mike Rolband said in a statement explaining why the agency was proposing a temporary variance from its own regulations. Responding to questions by email, DEQ Spokesman Aaron Proctor said demand for electricity from data centers in that region "could potentially exceed the capacity of the area's electric transmission system" during that time period.
I can hardly wait for the rolling blackouts to start. But at least you'll still be able to do a search on Google and order from Amazon.
Jed Babbin at Am Spec speculates
SCOTUS Defeated: The Leaker Gets Away With It "A major, unacceptable defeat for our constitutional freedoms." I don't
think they really want to know.
“It’s a prescient and very well-informed email, unlike anything else Hunter
wrote in the nine years covered in the laptop, and it has the distinct flavor
of an official briefing, perhaps even a classified one,” Devine
observed. Devine
appeared on Fox News on Tuesday
and noted that the email “reads like a classified document.” “You have to
remember that this is at a time — a month before he joined the Burisma board.
He needed money desperately, to feed his drug habit, and they were going to
pay him $83,000 a month to do not very much,” Devine added.
A few easy steps: The new Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal
Government must subpoena critical documents from the FBI, to include the 302s
(summary reports) and Electronic Communications (origination reports) so the
world can see the actions of all the government gangsters involved in this
cover-up.
Subpoena the United States Secret Service to find out who
covered for Bidens the past six years. Having been in and around a President
when they move about the country, this
statement
from the Biden White House that there were no visitor logs is a red
herring. . . . Lastly, we need to subpoena every single document
relating to this scandal to reveal the truth and expose those who covered for
Biden. Every financial document, every transactional receipt, subpoena it all.
And when these “government gangsters” scream the truth and tradition of an
‘ongoing investigation,’ you take their money. Congress must seize select
funds through the fence process until they obey. We did during Russia Gate and
they bent the knee.
The subcommittee will be led by Rep.
Jim Jordan (R-Ohio),
who was a close supporter of McCarthy during his Speaker bid and who serves
as the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. McCarthy said earlier this
month that Jordan would chair the subcommittee.
The other GOP
members of the committee will be Reps. Darrell Issa (Calif.), Thomas Massie
(Ky.), Chris Stewart (Utah), Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), Mike Johnson (La.),
Chip Roy (Texas), Kelly
Armstrong (N.D.),
Greg Steube (Fla.),
Dan Bishop (N.C.), Kat Cammack (Fla.) and Harriet Hageman (Wyo.).
It’s
a real chef’s kiss adding Hageman to the subcommittee, given that she’s in
Congress because Liz Cheney sold her soul as part of the House J6 Soviet
Select Committee on Daddy Issues. As I wrote in my
Wednesday Morning Briefing, I like this new McCarthy and I hope he sticks around for a while.
Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services says it will no longer use the words "field worker" in agency communications, citing the term's "implication for descendants of enslaved Black and Brown individuals."
The department said "staff and stakeholders have raised concerns" about the term’s allegedly racist connotations, according to a January 4 memo obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
"While the widespread use of this term is not intended to be harmful, we cannot ignore the impact its use has on our employees," the memo reads. "Establishing shared language is essential to our collective progress."
The memo came from Demetrius Starling, the director of the department’s Children’s Services Agency, and Dwayne Haywood, the director of the department’s Economic Stability Administration, neither of whom responded to requests for comment. Its letterhead includes Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer (D.), who in 2021 mandated "implicit bias training" for all health professionals in the state.
The government of Michigan is not the only progressive body to put "field" out to pasture. On Monday, the University of Southern California’s school of social work announced that it had removed the term from its curriculum, citing the need to "reject white supremacy."
"This change supports anti-racist social work practice by replacing language that could be considered anti-Black or anti-immigrant," an email from the university’s education department said. "Phrases such as ‘going into the field’ or ‘field work’ may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign."
Formerly known as the "field education department," the school’s education program will now be called the "practicum education department."
Sheer lunacy. Back when I was an active scientist, "field work" was the best part.
A British woman who boasts of having “the world’s most heavily tattooed
vagina” is clapping back at critics after going public with her bawdy body
art. NSFW
Holt has been attacked online, but the blonde blasted back
in an interview with The Post on Monday, defiantly stating: “It’s my vagina,
not theirs.”
The mom-of-one has spent $42,000 adorning almost every
inch of her body with tattoos — and realized that her vagina was one of the
last places left without ink.
“It didn’t really occur to me to have
it [my vagina] tattooed,” Holt told The Post. “I had everything tattooed right
down to where my [labia] starts, and around my thighs and groin and my little
vagina would stick out like a sore thumb.”
“You could see this
little pink vagina with colored tattoos all around it, so I thought ‘I’m going
to have to get it done,'” she further explained.
A smorgasbord of articles on science I've been hoarding for a while. First, a
conversation between Dr. Jordan B Peterson and Dr. Bjørn Lomborg. Generally, I
see them talk past each other, both coming from fields with heavy jargon. I'm
more of a Lomborg guy myself, as much as I admire Peterson's bravery in the
face of the woke mob: The World is Not Ending | Bjørn Lomborg and Jordan Peterson
A new report alleges the Associated Press took millions of dollars in
donations and used it to fund its
“climate crisis” coverage.
The Associated Press took $8 million in donations to fund
climate coverage in 2022, with the news cooperative and several other major
media publications engaged in dubious claims about climate change, according
to a new, exclusive year-end report.
The “Climate Fact Check 2022”
report, presented by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), the Heartland
Institute, the Energy & Environmental Legal Institute, the Committee for a
Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), and the International Climate Science Coalition
(ICSC), stated that “climate alarmists” and members of the media engaged in
claims about the relationship between manmade emissions and natural disasters,
claims that clashed with “reality and science.”
In February, the
Associated Press admitted that they would assign more than 24 journalists
across the globe to cover “climate issues” after receiving more than $8
million over three years from various organizations.
Over the past few months, I have been exploring the ideological capture of our
scientific institutions.
I have reviewed the mainstream media’s
roll is strangling
rigorous scientific debate. I have explored how
government agencies block access
to important taxpayer-funded databases if they assert a scientist’s research
may enter “forbidden” territory.
I, along with many others, have
warned that the commandeering of science to push social, environmental, and
corporate agendas would have a tsunami of unintended consequences. The
scientific journal Nature has noted one of the most significant repercussions
of ideological capture: The death of scientific innovation.
The
journal recently published an analysis of a report that showed the proportion
of publications that send a field in a new direction (i.e., innovation) has
plummeted over the past half-century.
Data from millions of manuscripts show that, compared with the
mid-twentieth century, research done in the 2000s was much more likely to
incrementally push science forward than to veer off in a new direction and
render previous work obsolete. Analysis of patents from 1976 to 2010 showed
the same trend.
“The data suggest something is changing,” says
Russell Funk, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and
a co-author of the analysis, which was published on 4 January in Nature. “You
don’t have quite the same intensity of breakthrough discoveries you once
had.”
I have degrees in geology and chemistry. My son is getting a
degree in physics. So, for me, the graph charting the absolute plunge in
physical science “disruption” is chilling.
Adam Mastroianni,
The rise and fall of peer review
"Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a
great thing" Been there done that, both at the reviewer and the reviewee, and
the system is flawed. But advancement in science pretty much depends on
getting papers (and grant proposals) through peer review. It's going to be a
tough system to change.
For the last 60 years or so, science has been running an experiment on itself.
The experimental design wasn’t great; there was no randomization and no
control group. Nobody was in charge, exactly, and nobody was really taking
consistent measurements. And yet it was the most massive experiment ever run,
and it included every scientist on Earth.
Most of those folks
didn’t even realize they were in an experiment. Many of them, including me,
weren’t born when the experiment started. If we had noticed what was going on,
maybe we would have demanded a basic level of scientific rigor. Maybe nobody
objected because the hypothesis seemed so obviously true: science will be
better off if we have someone check every paper and reject the ones that don’t
pass muster. They called it “peer review.”
The
Great Barrier Reef
is one of the planet’s natural jewels, stretching for more than 2,300km
along Australia’s north-east.
But as well as being a bucket-list
favourite and a heaving mass of biodiversity across 3,000 individual reefs,
the world heritage-listed organism is at the coalface of the climate
crisis.
We all know that math is racist. It is used to enforce Whiteness on people
by emphasing universalism (there is a truth) and requiring precision
(apparently your ability to be precise is highly dependent upon melanin
content in the skin). It is a construct that is inherently anti-radical as
it assumes some inherent structure to the universe, and that there are
“right” answers and wrong ones.
That, at least, is
the contention of some mathematics educators, including
Dr. Rochelle Gutierrez of the University of Illinois at Urbana. Dr Gutierrez teaches not only Latina/Latino studies, but is also a
professor at the School of Education, focusing on curriculum and
instruction.
In other words, she is one of the people who trains
students to become teachers.
One might be tempted to think that there is a benign intention
behind Dr. Gutierrez’ attempts to reform the way that math is taught to
students of color. After all, statistics indicate that many such students
are having difficulty in math classes and have fallen behind their white
compatriots. To the extent that is the case it obviously behooves us to
understand why that is and find ways to remedy it.
But no, that
is not Rochelle’s approach to the issue at all. The inability of students of
color to perform well in math indeed is connected to the way that math is
being taught, but that is because math itself is White. So trying to get
students up to standard in White math is White Supremacist, and should be
stopped.
I subjected myself to a loooooonnnnnnggggggg video of
Gutierrez discussing her approach with mathematics educators, and needless
to say it is not only filled with buzzwords appropriate to the genre, but
vile ideas about racial differences between students. She doesn’t quite come
out and say it, but apparently students of color can’t do math because they
are not White and are resisting Whiteness. And this is a good thing,
apparently.
Baltimore’s waterways watchdog group, Blue Water Baltimore, has announced it plans to sue Fleischmann’s Vinegar Company, alleging it has repeatedly leaked “acidic discharges” into the Jones Falls, the stream that leads to the Inner Harbor, the Patapsco River and, ultimately, the Bay.
Blue Water Baltimore and the Chesapeake Legal Alliance, who is representing the organization, issued a Notice of Intent against Fleischmann’s, whose North Baltimore plant sits just upstream of the Jones Falls Trail.
Blue Water Baltimore says acidic discharges, which can damage aquatic life in waterways, are continuously entering the stream from fissures in the facility’s concrete building. A fish kill in the Jones Falls in September 2021 happened “in the immediate vicinity” of Fleischmann’s, and the Maryland Department of the Environment found the facility’s de-chlorination system was out of order.
Just over a year later, in October 2022, neighbors reported more dead fish and a strong vinegar smell near the Fleischmann’s plant. That’s when Blue Water Baltimore says it documented the acidic liquid flowing through cracks directly into the Jones Falls.
“This action puts the power of enforcement in the hands of the people,” said Alice Volpitta, Baltimore Harbor Waterkeeper with Blue Water Baltimore. “Local residents first alerted us to these problems, and we gathered the data to back up those observations. Now, we are exercising our rights under the Clean Water Act to hold this company accountable and protect the Jones Falls on behalf of our members.”
In its Notice of Intent, Blue Water Baltimore calls for Fleischmann’s to “take immediate action to bring its Baltimore facility into compliance with all federal and state environmental pollution prevention laws including ceasing the acidic discharges seeping out of this building which are causing environmental harm.”
Fleischmann’s has 60 days to address their demands before Chesapeake Legal Alliance moves ahead with the lawsuit on behalf of Blue Water Baltimore.
Capt. Ed at Haut Hare, Classified material found in Pence's home -- after
denials; UPDATE: Remember when? "Oh, goody. It turns out that the classified-material virus is spreading, and it’s
still a bipartisan disease — at least among politicos."
The classified documents were discovered at Pence’s new home in Carmel,
Indiana, by a lawyer for Pence in the wake of the revelations about classified
material discovered in President Joe Biden’s private office and residence, the
sources said. The discovery comes after Pence has repeatedly said he did not
have any classified documents in his possession.
Merrick Garland's orders regarding Trump's special counsel allow that
prosecutor to investigate any matter and then use an all-but-unlimited budget
to pursue investigations against him and bring any charges he likes.
The
special counsel he authorized for Biden very strictly limits the prosecutor to
only look into the matter of the hoarded classified documents. He's not
allowed to look into Lunchbox Joe's China connection or any of his other
crimes of influence-peddling and possible tax fraud.
Tucker Carlson: "There's no question that Hunter Biden used classified
materials to assemble this email ... So what are we looking at here? What
we're looking at is a crime."
pic.twitter.com/uQrHAKSUJ7
“We received just a few weeks ago, January of 2023, the system log files
from the tabulators that were used in Maricopa County on Election Day, along
with the redacted CVR records. Through an analysis, we were able to
determine that a quarter of a million ballot feeds [were] misread by those
tabulators,” Busch explained. “There are approximately two tabulators in
every polling Center, which means there were 446 tabulators with a quarter
of a million voter attempt failures.”
So a quarter million same-day ballots were thrown out, while every effort
was made to keep mail-in ballots with mismatching signatures and other
problems in. Seems significant.
🚨 BOMBSHELL DISCOVERY 🚨
Today’s Senate Testimony CONFIRMS
nearly 40,000 ballots illegally counted (10% of the signatures reviewed).
Speaker McCarthy has the power to unilaterally block Schiff and Swalwell
from serving on the House Intelligence Committee. It is a select committee
and he seats members on the committee. However, the Foreign Affairs
Committee members are chosen by each party and ratified by the full House.
We know Democrats will oppose McCarthy because they haven’t been bothered
enough by Omar’s antisemitism to hold her accountable.
The recent deaths of seven whales off New Jersey, mostly humpbacks, got a lot of attention. The federal NOAA Fisheries agency is responsible for whales. An outrageous statement by their spokesperson got me to do some research on humpback whale deaths.
The results are appalling. The evidence seems clear that offshore wind development is killing whales by the hundreds.
Here is the statement as reported in the press:
“NOAA said it has been studying what it calls “unusual mortality events” involving 174 humpback whales along the East Coast since January 2016. Agency spokesperson Lauren Gaches said that period pre-dates offshore wind preparation activities in the region.” Gaches is NOAA Fisheries press chief.
The “unusual mortality” data is astounding. Basically the humpback death rate roughly tripled starting in 2016 and continued high thereafter. You can see it here:
But the claim that this huge jump in mortality predates offshore wind preparation activities is wildly false. In fact it coincides with the large scale onset of these activities. This strong correlation is strong evidence of causation, especially since no other possible cause has appeared.
To begin with, offshore lease sales really geared up 2015-16, with nine big sales off New Jersey, New York, Delaware and Massachusetts. These sales must have generated a lot of activity, likely including potentially damaging sonar.
In fact 2016 also saw the beginning of what are called geotechnical and site characterization surveys. These surveys are actually licensed by NOAA Fisheries, under what are called Incidental Harassment Authorizations or IHA’s.
There is some seriously misleading jargon here. IHA’s are incidental to some other activity, in this case offshore wind development. They are not incidental to the whales. In fact the term “harassment” specifically includes injuring the whales. That is called “level A harassment”.
To date NOAA has issued an astounding 46 one-year IHA’s for offshore wind sites. Site characterization typically includes the protracted use of what I call “machine gun sonar”. This shipboard device emits an incredibly loud noise several times a second, often for hours at a time, as the ship slowly maps the sea floor.
Mapping often takes many days to complete. A blaster can log hundreds of miles surveying a 10-by-10 mile site. Each IHA is typically for an entire year.
Here is a list of the IHA’s issued to date and those applied for:
There are lots of ways this sonar blasting might cause whales to die. Simply fleeing the incredible noise could cause ship strikes or fish gear entanglements, the two leading causes of whale deaths. Of the whales could be deafened, increasing their chances of being struck by a ship later on. Direct bleeding injury, like getting their ears damaged, is another known risk, possibly leading to death from infection. So there can be a big time difference between blasting and death.
Note also that these deaths need not be in the immediate vicinity of the sonar blasting, so spatial correlation is unlikely. Humpbacks in particular are prodigious travelers. One group was tracked traveling 3,000 miles in just 28 days, over 100 miles a day on average. Another group routinely migrates 5,000 miles. Both are winter-summer migrations which can happen twice a year.
Thus a sonar blasting, site characterization in one place could easily lead to multiple whale deaths hundreds of miles away. If one of these blasters suddenly goes off near a group of whales they might go off in different directions, then slowly die.
The point is that the huge 2016 jump in annual humpback mortality coincides with the huge jump in NOAA Incidental Harassment Authorizations. It is that simple and surely NOAA Fisheries knows this.
Nor is this just about humpbacks. Some of the dead whales off New Jersey are endangered sperm whales. And of course there are the severely endangered North Atlantic Right Whales, on the verge of extinction.
Even worse, the IHA’s are about to make a much bigger jump. There are eleven pending IHA applications and eight of these are for actually constructing 8 different monster wind “farms”.
Driving the hundreds of enormous monopiles that hold up the turbine towers and blades will be far louder than the sonic blasters approved to date, especially with eight sites going at once. These construction sites range from Virginia to Massachusetts, with a concentration off New Jersey and New York.
I'm not convinced that sonar blasts are causing whales to become disoriented and struck by ships or tangled in nets, or even get stranded, but it's certainly a reasonable hypothesis. We've seen sillier notions be used to stop projects before, and I kind of enjoy seeing environmentalists getting hoist on their own petards. On the other hand, whale populations are still generally rising, and whales don't live forever either, so it may just be a function of that.
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