Myths Abound

 

 

The picture above, of course, shows my wonderful wife’s Corvette. On our 13.7 mile, 22 minute drive to breakfast this morning what gas mileage did the car make?

 

A. 21.7

B. 24.7

C. 27.7

 

The real answer is none of the above. Her Corvette made 34.7 MPG on our drive to the deli. Yes, we were lucky in that all of the lights were green (we also don’t have a lot of lights on this route) and traffic was light. However, it is a myth that all performance cars are gas guzzlers all the time. By the way, my wife drove at or slightly above the posted speed limit, like 53 MPH in a 50 MPH zone.

How often a person has to stop at red lights and stop signs plays a major role in fuel economy. At idle a car gets 0 MPG. I am NOT advocating running red lights and stop signs. Still, when one lives in a place without a lot of red lights and stop signs, like where we live, fuel economy can be surprisingly good and easily exceed EPA estimates. The “official” EPA estimate for gas mileage for her 2018 Corvette is 18 MPG combined, 15 city and 25 highway. Since she has owned the car, my wonderful wife’s Corvette’s overall gas mileage is more than 22 MPG and that’s in about 24,000 miles of driving.

I made about 19 MPG in my 2016 Z06 and for part of that time the engine was tuned to produce more power than stock. Its “official” EPA estimate was 16 MPG combined. My 2022 Mustang GT is “rated” at 19 MPG combined, but I am getting 22 MPG. Tomorrow will be six months I have had the car (!) and I have driven it a little more than 3,000 miles.

I would not be surprised if a systematic bias exists against performance cars in EPA testing. The government is trying to push us to electric vehicles. Underestimating fuel economy for performance cars is one way to force the transition. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. #DeathBeforeEV

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My brilliant high school classmate, TI, sent me the link to this piece titled, “Sense prevails. We’re giving censors the boot.” Here is an excerpt from Hadley Freeman’s article:

 

“New York Magazine defined a vibe shift as when “a once-dominant social wavelength starts to feel dated”, and the hyper-vigilant, hyper-right-on social wavelength that has dominated progressive culture spheres for the past six or so years is feeling tapped out. Where once suppressing views considered by some to be objectionable — censorship, in other words — was accepted as a moral obligation, now it looks infantile, absurd and deranged.”

 

I’m not sure I agree, woke seems as prevalent to me as ever if not more, but we can only hope.

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Philip Maynard sent me this link to a piece about the role of Earth’s orbit in Ice Ages. It is worth reading.

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I am going to “re-print” the beginning of this Why Evolution Is True post titled, “The sex binary in animals: a defense by Colin Wright.”

 

“It is a constant uphill battle for biologists to keep defending the truth that animals have but two sexes, defined by whether they have the reproductive apparatus to produce small, mobile gametes (the males) or large immobile gametes (the females). I’m not going to go into this again as you can read my explanation here. I have a longer and more popular explanation coming out in a big paper in June (stay tuned).

There are just two sexes in animals (and in nearly all vascular plants): male and female.  Clownfish are not a third sex (they change from male to female.) Seahorse males are not a third sex (they are males who produce sperm and carry the fertilized eggs of females around in a pouch). Hermaphrodites are not a third sex (they combine aspects of male and female sex), and I’m aware of only one case in which a human hermaphrodite, whose male parts produced sperm, fathered an offspring. Hermaphroditic plants are not a third sex; they are simply hermaphrodites that contain male tissue and female tissue (producing small sperm and big eggs, respectively). There is no individual in animals or vascular plants that produce a third type of gamete. Ergo, sex is binary.

This assertion, accepted for decades by biologists, is offensive to ideological Pecksniffs because they want sex to be a spectrum, as gender is. (Gender and sex are different, and gender really isn’t a spectrum, but bimodal, with the distribution looking like the back of a two-humped camel, with one hump being those identifying as the male gender and the other identifying as the female.)

Under woke ideology, what you think is good in society must be seen as true in nature, an inversion of the “appeal to nature” that argues that something that’s natural is perceived to be good. In this new fallacy, which is still a fallacy, something that’s good is perceived to be natural.”

 

This is one of the most cogent criticisms of the absurdly false Pecksniff/woke agenda. Once again, Jerry Coyne–the author of Why Evolution Is True–self-identifies as a liberal, although I suspect the Lunatic Left would like to hang him for many of his writings.

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This recent Hagerty piece is notable, in my opinion, for two bits of news: NHTSA is opening a preliminary investigation into 120,000 2023 Tesla Model Y vehicles after two reports of steering wheels that fell off while driving and Porsche and Ferrari are fighting the adoption of a European Union ban on Internal Combustion Engines. They want to exempt engines that run on synthetic fuel. Porsche has declared that its iconic 911 model will never have an electric option.

I will still never own a Porsche, but I applaud their efforts at fighting the ill-conceived push to all electric vehicles. They have begun to manufacture synthetic fuels at a plant in Chile.

 

#MythsAbound

#DeathBeforeEV

#WokeIsACult

#somanyCARSjustonelife

#disaffectedmusings

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