After the two major, one of them deadly, chemical tank incidents of last week, the drumbeats continue to sound for increased regulation.  On Monday I covered the cultural differences between the two regions of the country.  On Tuesday I covered how one cry related to regulation was, at best, specious.  I have resisted to date speculating on the cause of these incidents.  There is simply not enough information publicly available for such comments to be other than pure speculation – at least on a technical level.  But given these drumbeats there is one aspect of causation that I think should be discussed.. . .

Back in 2020, when they endorsed Joe Biden for president, I wrote an epitaph for the magazine Scientific American.  Sure, it is still being published, but it is now just another Trump bashing bit of media and no longer worth the effort necessary to pick it up.  I haven’t looked back, but just to prove my point they published an op-ed last Friday concerning the two tank incidents I looked at yesterday.  (A friend sent it to me, I did not go looking.  It may or may not be behind a paywall for you.  I was able to read it for a couple of days before the paywall notice started to appear.)  It is not science – it is

Best as I can tell, everybody has heard about the near disaster related to a tank in Garden Grove, CA.  The emergency is subsided, the evacuation over.  The predicted explosion or major release never occurred.  Yes a lot of people were inconvenienced in the related evacuation, but that is the only consequence.  Litigation now flies around like a swarm of locusts and the company owning the tank will have a major clean-up on their hands.  Meanwhile, at roughly the same time, a tank in a Longview, WA paper plant mill imploded, killing 9 people and producing a fish kill in the water bodies that feed directly into the Columbia

Jill Biden’s contention, that she worried her husband was having a stroke during the 2024 debate is one of the most obvious lies n political history.  Lies so audacious are not born of simple attempts to “change the narrative,” cover up wrongdoing or some other self-serving reason.  Such obvious falsehoods, spoken with such apparent sincerity, are a sign of self-delusion. Jill Biden was not lying to us, she was lying to herself.  That makes it difficult to know how to react.. . .

How do you explain where things are today?  Said Michael Barone recently, “Even as California-based tech companies have reached market capitalization of $1 trillion, its state and local governments have sunk to levels of incompetence associated with underdeveloped countries.”  There is an effectiveness gap and it should trouble us.  Something is deeply fractured in our politics when people can get elected without competence.. . .

Let’s start here.  It is an exposé on just how bad of a failure Gavin Newsom’s “Solar on Multifamily Affordable Housing” program actually is.  It is a toxic stew of incapability, bureaucratic entanglement and corruption.  Like most “bright” ideas in California, it is impractical to begin with and only grows worse in the execution.  When I moved to California in the 1980’s it was because of the opportunities available to anyone.  Now the only opportunity lies at sucking on the government teat in a corrupt and decidedly Democrat manner.  But Governor Hair-gel’s latest bright

So, Jill Biden thought hubby Joe, then POTUS, was stroking out when he debated current POTUS Trump in 2024.  Raises a thousand question does it not?  Like, why didn’t she stop the proceeding and have a doctor check him out?  Why was he allowed to continue in office?…. . .

So, the Pope has issued an encyclical on A.I.  Here’s a link – I have scanned, but not read thoroughly.  John Ellis’ newsletter this morning contains a link to an NYTimes piece that notes the makers of A.I. are greeting the Pope’s input with, at best, a yawn.  I think that both sides of this forming debate are missing the point to some extent.. . .