Category: Climate Change and Environmentalism

Second Thoughts

I read here that Angus Deaton, a Nobel laureate in economics, and eminent economist at Princeton University, has changed his mind about a few hot topics. One of them is globalization:

I am much more skeptical of the benefits of free trade to American workers and am even skeptical of the claim, which I and others have made in the past, that globalization was responsible for the vast reduction in global poverty over the past 30 years. I also no longer defend the idea that the harm done to working Americans by globalization was a reasonable price to pay for global poverty reduction because workers in America are so much better off than the global poor. I believe that the reduction in poverty in India had little to do with world trade. And poverty reduction in China could have happened with less damage to workers in rich countries if Chinese policies caused it to save less of its national income, allowing more of its manufacturing growth to be absorbed at home. I had also seriously underthought my ethical judgments about trade-offs between domestic and foreign workers. We certainly have a duty to aid those in distress, but we have additional obligations to our fellow citizens that we do not have to others.

Another is immigration:

I used to subscribe to the near consensus among economists that immigration to the US was a good thing, with great benefits to the migrants and little or no cost to domestic low-skilled workers. I no longer think so. Economists’ beliefs are not unanimous on this but are shaped by econometric designs that may be credible but often rest on short-term outcomes. Longer-term analysis over the past century and a half tells a different story. Inequality was high when America was open, was much lower when the borders were closed, and rose again post Hart-Celler (the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965) as the fraction of foreign-born people rose back to its levels in the Gilded Age. It has also been plausibly argued that the Great Migration of millions of African Americans from the rural South to the factories in the North would not have happened if factory owners had been able to hire the European migrants they preferred.

I hope that Professor Deaton’s example will be emulated by many more academics. Not just with respect to the issues that he addresses in his essay but also with respect to the many other issues where academics — and so-called intellectuals — have abetted dangerous and/or costly errors (to which I will come).

There was a time when it was considered sound thinking to gather evidence — facts, not opinions or talking points — and to base judgments and policy recommendations on the evidence. That time is past, though not irretrievably. Professor Deaton’s epiphanies are proof of the possibility that science, in all its forms, might once again become evidence-based. That’s not to say that there is never room for disagreements. There always is. But science, properly done, advances because of disagreement. It stagnates and regresses when dogma replaces debate.

But that is what has happened in so many fields of inquiry. Science, in too many fields, has become captive to “scientists” who put their preconceptions ahead of the evidence and who howl for the heads of heretics. It is dispiriting to know how many so-called scientists have become willing and eager handmaidens of wokeness. (Prostitution takes many forms.)

Thus the dangerous and/or costly errors, of which these are leading examples:

  • The “war” on “climate change” is making Americans and Europeans generally poorer and less comfortable.
  • The unnecessarily draconian response to Covid-19 made billions of people poorer, less well educated, and uncomfortable in their daily lives. It also had a lot to do with the rampant inflation of recent years, which will never be rolled back.
  • The LGBTQ/non-binary craze is causing parents and young adults to do things to their children and themselves that will cause them much misery for years to come, if not forever.
  • The anti-racism craze has been endorsed by “scientists” and “scientific organization” (as well as elites, pundits, and politicians). The main result is that “persons of color” get “bonus points” which enable them to commit crimes with impunity; acquire jobs for which they aren’t qualified, and gain entrance to colleges and graduate schools despite their lower intelligence than whites and Asians with whom they are competing. The cost in social comity and inferior products and services (e.g., surgery) may be subtle, but it is real and long-lasting. And it will get worse as long as wokeness prevails in high places.

Needless to say, the politicians and wealthy elites who favor such things are well insulated from the dire effects. Among the wealthy elites are tens of thousands of academics at top-tier and even second-rate universities who rake in money and dispense lunacy.

What Do I See in My Crystal Ball?

Nothing good:

The Biden administration overcomes the resistance of Texas and other GOP-led States and continues to allow illegal aliens (potential Democrat voters) to inundate the nation.

Perversely, in response to the resistance from Texas and other GOP-led States, the Biden administration declares a “national emergency” and effectively seizes control of GOP-controlled States. All policies that affirm life and liberty are suppressed (e.g., abortion bans and limits, school choice, effective law-enforcement, and — course — the freedoms of religion and speech).

If the immigration crisis doesn’t result in a “national emergency”, a different predicate will be found. The left’s need for control has is obsessive.

One result of the “national emergency” is the cancellation of the 2024 presidential election and the installation of a “provisional” government, led nominally by Biden (with Obama pulling the strings).

Even if there’s no national emergency or a provisional government, the left will remain in control through electoral chicanery.

Among many things, Biden administration’s egregious policies continue; for example, privileges for violent criminals, blacks, queers, and other “identity groups” (despite their known anti-social predilections and lack of accomplishments and abilities); the impoverishing war on fossil fuels and their efficient use (e.g., in gasoline-powered automobiles, gas furnaces, and gas cooktops); and the aforementioned flood of illegal aliens whose are supported the tax-paying citizens who are also the victims of the criminals among said aliens.

The regime finds a way around the GOP’s efforts to block aid to Ukraine and persists in a war that spreads to Western Europe and thus (via NATO) to the United States — perhaps involving exchanges of nuclear weapons.

The regime fails to take decisive action in the Middle East (and against Iran, specifically), with the result that critical resources and a critical trade route are throttled — re-igniting inflation and imposing real burdens (e.g., soaring energy prices) on working-class Americans.

Israel stands alone and eventually succumbs to the Muslim hordes, which leads to a second Holocaust. The provisional government tut-tuts and does nothing.

Iran, North Korea, and China — having observed the regime’s fecklessness — attack allied nations and international-trade routes, thereby exacerbating the effects of the conflagration in the Middle East. Diminished U.S. armed forces will only stand by as South Korea and Japan are assailed by missile attacks, Taiwan is subjugated to China, and the South China Sea and its bordering nations become China’s possessions.

The regime — under heavy pressure from Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea — enters into an alliance of “peace and prosperity” with those nations. The effect of the alliance is the subjugation of working Americans (i.e., the people who produce things, not ideas) to the regulatory state and the gradual reduction of working people’s living standards to the those of the 1940s (at best).

Further emulating Soviet-style “democracy” the labor of the masses (including the illegal hordes) enables the ruling classes and their favorite to live high on the hog.

Continuing the lawfare conducted against Donald Trump and the J6 protestors, Soviet-style “justice” is exacted upon those who openly dissent from the new dispensation. True justice dies with the effective revocation of the Constitution and the emasculation of those courts that might have resisted the new dispensation.

These are my worst fears. I hope that I’m badly wrong.

Related reading:

Brandon Smith, “Cultural Replacement: Why the Immigration Crisis Is Being Deliberately Engineered“, Alt-Market.us, January 25, 2024

Graham McAleer, “Is Conservatism’s Future Strauss or Vogelin?“, Law & Liberty, January 26, 2024

Hans von Spakovsky, “Biden Doesn’t Have Any Legal Authority to Seize Control of the Texas National Guard“, The Daily Signal, January 27, 2024

CO2 Fail (Revisited)

ADDENDUM BELOW

I observed, in November 2020, that there is no connection between CO2 emissions and the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. This suggests that emissions have little or no effect on the concentration of CO2. A recent post at WUWT notes that emissions hit a record high in 2021. What the post doesn’t address is the relationship between emissions and the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.

See for yourself. Here’s the WUWT graph of emissions from energy combustion and industrial processes:

Here’s the record of atmospheric CO2:

It’s obvious that CO2 has been rising monotonically, with regular seasonal variations, while emissions have been rising irregularly — even declining and holding steady at times. This relationship (or lack thereof) supports the thesis that the rise in atmospheric CO2 is the result of warming, not its cause.

ADDENDUM (04/09/22):

Dr. Roy Spencer, in a post at his eponymous blog, writes:

[T]he greatest correlations are found with global (or tropical) surface temperature changes and estimated yearly anthropogenic emissions. Curiously, reversing the direction of causation between surface temperature and CO2 (yearly changes in SST [dSST/dt] being caused by increasing CO2) yields a very low correlation.

That is to say, temperature changes seem to drive CO2 levels, not the other way around (which is the conventional view).

Sources for CO2 levels:

https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/gl_data.html

https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/data.html

Related reading: Clyde Spencer, “Anthropogenic CO2 and the Expected Results from Eliminating It” [zero, zilch, zip, nada], Watts Up With That?, March 22, 2022

Old News Incites a Rant

A correspondent sent me a link to a video about Greenland ice core records. He called the video an eye opener, which is rather surprising to me because the man is a trained scientist and an experienced analyst of quantitative data. The video wasn’t at all an eye-opener for me. Here is my reply to the correspondent:

I began to look seriously at global warming ~2005, and used to write extensively about it. The info provided in the video is consistent with other observations, including icc-core measurements taken at Vostok, Antarctica. Here’s a related post, which includes the Vostok readings and much more: http://libertycorner.blogspot.com/2007/08/more-climate-stuff.html. Some of the other evidence that I have accrued is summarized here: https://politicsandprosperity.com/climate-change/.

Findings like those presented in the video seem to have no effect on the politics of “climate change”. It is a chimera, concocted by “scientists” who manipulate complex models (which have almost no predictive power) and, on the basis of those models, constantly adjust historical temperature readings to comport with what should have happened according to the models. (Thus “proving” the correctness of the models.) This kind of manipulation is widely known and well documented, as is the predictive failure of the models. But there is a “climate change” industry — a government-academic-media complex if you will — that has a life of its own, and it has transformed what should be a scientific issue into a secular religion. Due in no small part to the leftist leanings of public-school and university educators, tens of millions of American children and young adults have been brainwashed into believing that Earth is headed for a fiery denouement if “evil” things like fossil fuels aren’t banned. Being impressionable — not to mention scientifically and economically illiterate — they don’t question the pseudo-science that underlies “climate change” or the consider the economic consequences of drastic anti-warming measures, which would yield (at best) a lowering of Earth’s average temperature by ~0.1 degree by 2100 in exchange for a return to the horse-and-buggy age.

Here’s what I left unsaid:

The only possible way to defeat the “climate change” industry is to elect politicians who firmly reject its “intellectual” foundations and its draconian prescriptions. There was one such politician who managed to claw his way to the top in the U.S., but he was turned out of office, due in large part to the efforts a powerful cabal (https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/) which is heavily invested in an all-powerful central government that can shape the U.S. to its liking. It didn’t help that the politician was rude and crude, which turned off fastidious voters (like you) who didn’t think about or care about the consequences of a Democrat return to power.

End of rant.

What Do Wokesters Want?

I am using “wokesters” as a convenient handle for persons who subscribe to a range of closely related movements, which include but are not limited to wokeness, racial justice, equity, gender equality, transgenderism, social justice, cancel culture, environmental justice, and climate-change activism. It is fair to say that the following views, which might be associated with one or another of the movements, are held widely by members of all the movements (despite the truths noted parenthetically):

Race is a social construct. (Despite strong scientific evidence to the contrary.)

Racism is a foundational and systemic aspect of American history. (Which is a convenient excuse for much of what follows.)

Racism explains every bad thing that has befallen people of color in America. (Ditto.)

America’s history must be repudiated by eradicating all vestiges of it that glorify straight white males of European descent. (Because wokesters are intolerant of brilliance and success of it comes from straight white males of European descent.)

The central government (when it is run by wokesters and their political pawns) should be the sole arbiter of human relations. (Replacing smaller units of government, voluntary contractual arrangements, families, churches, clubs, and other elements of civil society through which essential services are provided, economic wants are satisfied efficiently, and civilizing norms are inculcated and enforced), except for those institutions that are dominated by wokesters or their proteges, of course.)

[You name it] is a human right. (Which — unlike true rights, which all can enjoy without cost to others — must be provided at cost to others.)

Economics is a zero-sum game; the rich get rich at the expense of the poor. (Though the economic history of the United States — and the Western world — says otherwise. The rich get rich — often rising from poverty and middling circumstances — by dint of effort risk-taking, and in the process produce things of value for others while also enabling them to advance economically.)

Profit is a dirty word. (But I — the elite lefty who makes seven figures a year, thank you, deserve every penny of my hard-earned income.)

Sex gender is assigned arbitrarily at birth. (Ludicrous).

Men can bear children. (Ditto.)

Women can have penises. (Ditto.)

Gender dysphoria in some children proves the preceding poiXXXX

Children can have two mommies, two daddies, or any combination of parents in any number and any gender. And, no, they won’t grow up anti-social for lack of traditional father (male) and mother (female) parents. (Just ask blacks who are unemployed for lack of education and serving prison time after having been raised without bread-winning fathers.)

Blacks, on average, are at the bottom of income and wealth distributions and at the top of the incarceration distribution — despite affirmative action, subsidized housing, welfare payments, etc. — because of racism. (Not because blacks, on average, are at the bottom of the intelligence distribution and have in many black communities adopted and enforced a culture the promotes violence and denigrates education?)

Black lives matter. (More than other lives? Despite the facts adduced above?)

Police are racist Nazis and ought to be de-funded. (So that law abiding blacks and other Americans can become easier targets for rape, murder, and theft.)

Grades, advanced placement courses, aptitude tests, and intelligence tests are racist devices. (Which happen to enable the best and brightest — regardless of race, sex, or socioeconomic class — to lead the country forward scientifically and economically, to the benefit of all.)

The warming of the planet by a couple of degrees in the past half-century (for reasons that aren’t well understood but which are attributed by latter-day Puritans to human activity) is a sign of things to come: Earth will warm to the point that it becomes almost uninhabitable. (Which is a case of undue extrapolation from demonstrably erroneous models and a failure to credit the ability of capitalism — gasp! — to adapt successfully to truly significant climatic changes.)

Science is real. (Though we don’t know what science is, and believe things that are labeled scientific if we agree with them. We don’t understand, or care, that science is a process that sometimes yields useful knowledge, or that the “knowledge” is always provisional, always in doubt, and sometimes wrong. We support the movement of recent decades to label some things as scientific that are really driven by a puritanical, anti-humanistic agenda, and which don’t hold up against rigorous, scientific examination, such as the debunked “science” of “climate change”; the essential equality of the races and sexes, despite their scientifically demonstrable differences; and the belief that a man can become a woman, and vice versa.)

Illegal immigrants migrants are just seeking a better life and should be allowed free entry into the United States. (Because borders are arbitrary — except when it comes to my property — and it doesn’t matter if the unfettered enty ro illegal immigrants burdens tax-paying Americans and takes jobs from working-class Americans.)

The United States spends too much on national defense because (a) borders are arbitrary (except when they delineate my property), (b) there’s no real threat to this country (except for cyberattacks and terrorism sponsored by other states, and growing Chinese and Russian aggression that imperils the economic interests of Americans), (c) America is the aggressor (except in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Gulf War I, the terrorist attacks on 9/11, and in the future if America significantly reduces its defense forces), and (d) peace is preferable to war (except that it is preparedness for war that ensures peace, either through deterrence or victory).

What wokesters want is to see that these views, and many others of their ilk, are enforced by the central government. To that end, steps will be taken to ensure that the Democrat Party is permanently in control of the central government and is able to control most State governments. Accordingly, voting laws will be “reformed” to enable everyone, regardless of citizenship status or other qualification (perhaps excepting age, or perhaps not) to receive a mail-in ballot that will be harvested and cast for Democrat candidates; the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico (with their iron-clad Democrat super-majorities) will be added to the Union; the filibuster will be abolished; the Supreme Court and lower courts will be expanded and new seats will be filled by Democrat nominees; and on, and on.

Why do wokesters want what they want? Here’s my take:

  • They reject personal responsibility.
  • They don’t like the sense of real community that is represented in the traditional institutions of civil society.
  • They don’t like the truth if it contradicts their view of what the world should be like.
  • They are devoid of true compassion.
  • They are — in sum — alienated, hate-filled nihilists, the produce of decades of left-wing indoctrination by public schools, universities, and the media.

What will wokesters (and all of us) get?

At best, what they will get is a European Union on steroids, a Kafka-esque existence in a world run by bureaucratic whims from which entrepreneurial initiative and deeply rooted, socially binding cultures have been erased.

Somewhere between best and worst, they will get an impoverished, violent, drug-addled dystopia which is effectively a police state run for the benefit of cosseted political-media-corprate-academic elites.

At worst (as if it could get worse), what they will get is life under the hob-nailed boots of Russia and China:; for example:

Russians are building a military focused on killing people and breaking things. We’re apparently building a military focused on being capable of explaining microaggressions and critical race theory to Afghan Tribesmen.

A country whose political leaders oppose the execution of murderers, support riots and looting by BLM, will not back Israel in it’s life-or-death struggle with Islamic terrorists, and use the military to advance “wokeism” isn’t a country that you can count on to face down Russia and China.

Wokesters are nothing but useful idiots to the Russians and Chinese. And if wokesterst succeed in weakening the U.S. to the point that it becomes a Sino-Soviet vassal, they will be among the first to learn what life under an all-powerful central government is really like. Though, useful idiots that they are, they won’t survive long enough to savor the biter fruits of their labors.

The 96-Year Pause

Much has been written (pro and con) about the “pause” in global warming climate change the synthetic reconstruction of Earth’s “average” temperature from 1997 to 2012. That pause was followed fairly quickly by a new one, which began in 2014 and is still in progress (if a pause can be said to exhibit progress).

Well, I have a better one for you, drawn from the official temperature records for Austin, Texas — the festering Blue wound in the otherwise healthy Red core of Texas. (Borrowing Winston Churchill’s formulation, Austin is the place up with which I have put for 18 years — and will soon quit, to my everlasting joy.)

There is a continuous record of temperatures in central Austin from January 1903 to the present. The following graph is derived from that record:

A brief inspection of the graph reveals the obvious fact that there was a pause in Austin’s average temperature from (at least) 1903 until sometime in 1999. Something happened in 1999 to break the pause. What was it? It couldn’t have been “global warming”, the advocates of which trace back to the late 1800s (despite some prolonged cooling periods after that).

Austin’s weather station was relocated in 1999, which might have had something to do with it. More likely, the illusory jump in Austin’s temperature was caused by the urban heat-island effect induced by the growth of Austin’s population, which increased markedly from 1999 to 2000, and has been rising rapidly ever since.

Related reading:

Paul Homewood, “Washington’s New Climate ‘Normals’ Are Hotter“, Not a Lot of People Know That, May 6, 2021 (wherein the writer shows that the rise in D.C.’s new “normal” temperatures is due to the urban heat-island effect)

H. Sterling Burnett, “Sorry, CBS, NOAA’s ‘U.S. Climate Normals’ Report Misrepresents the Science“, Climate Realism, May 7, 2021 (just what the title says)

A 100-Day Scorecard

On January 6, 2021, in “Here We Go … “, I essayed 17 predictions about changes Democrats would attempt to consolidate their grip on America and make it over into a European-style “social democracy” with the added feature of subservience to China and Russia. As I said in the original post, not every item on the list will be adopted, but it won’t be for want of trying.

How are my predictions panning out? Quite well, sadly.

Judge for yourself. Here they are:

1. Abolition of the Senate filibuster.

2. An increase of at least two seats on the U.S. Supreme Court (USSC), though there may be some vacancies to be filled.

3. Adoption of an interstate compact by states controlling a total of at least 270 electoral votes, committing each member state’s electoral votes to the presidential candidate who compiles the most popular votes nationwide, regardless of the outcome of the popular vote in each state that is a party to the compact. (This may seem unnecessary if Biden wins, but it will be a bit of insurance against the possibility of a Republican victor in a future election.)

4. Statehood for either the District of Columbia or Puerto Rico, or for both of them. (Each would then have two senators and a requisite number of representatives with full voting privileges in their respective bodies. All of them will be Democrats, of course.)

5. Empowerment of the executive branch to do at least three of the following things:

a. Regulate personal and business activity (in new ways) with the expressed aim of reducing CO2 emissions.

b. Commit at least $500 billion in new obligational authority for research into and/or funding of methods of reducing and mitigating CO2 emissions.

c. Issue new kinds of tax rebates and credits to persons/households and businesses that spend money on any item on a list of programs/technologies that are supposed to reduce CO2 emissions.

d. Impose tax penalties on persons/households and businesses for their failure to spend money on any item in the list mentioned above (shades of the Obamacare tax penalty).

e. Impose penalties on persons/households and businesses for failing to adhere to prescribed caps on CO2 emissions.

f. Establish a cap-and-trade program for CO2 emissions (to soften the blow of the previous item). (Needless to say, the overall effect of such initiatives would deal a devastating blow to economic activity – meaning massive job losses and lower real incomes for large swaths of the populace.)

6. Authorization for an agency or agencies of the federal government to define and penalize written or spoken utterances that the agency or agencies declare “unprotected” by the First Amendment, and to require media enforcement of bans on “unprotected” utterances and prosecution of violators (e.g., here). (This can be accomplished by cynically adopting the supportable position that the First Amendment protects only political speech. The purported aim would be to curb so-called hate speech, but when censorship is in full swing — which would take only a few years — it will be illegal to criticize or question, even by implication, such things as illegal immigration, same-sex marriage, transgenderism, anthropogenic global warming, the confiscation of firearms, or the policies of the federal government. Violations will be enforced by fines and prison sentences — the latter sometimes called “sensitivity training”, “citizenship education”, or some other euphemistic term. Candidates for public office will be prime targets of the enforcers, which will suppress open discussion of such matters.)

7. Imposition of requirements for organizations of all kinds — businesses, universities, charitable organizations, clubs, and even churches — to favor anyone who isn’t a straight, white male of European descent. (The “protections” will be enacted, upheld, and enforced vigorously by federal agencies, regardless of their adverse economic and social effects.)

8. Effective nullification of the Second Amendment through orders/regulations/legislation, to enable gun confiscation (though there will be exemptions for private security services used by favored elites).

9. Use of law-enforcement agencies to enforce “hate speech” bans, mandates for reverse discrimination, and gun-confiscation edicts. (These things will happen regardless of the consequences; e.g., a rising crime rate, greater violence against whites and Asians, and flight from the cities and near-in suburbs. The latter will be futile, anyway, because suburban and exurban police departments will also be co-opted.)

10. Criminalization of “sexual misconduct”, as it is defined by the alleged victim, de facto if not de jure. (Investigations and prosecutions will be selective, and aimed mainly at straight, white males of European descent and dissidents who openly criticize this and other measures listed here.)

11. Parallel treatment for the “crimes” of racism, anti-Islamism, nativism, and genderism. (This will be in addition to the measures discussed in #7.)

12. Centralization in the federal government of complete control of all health care and health-care related products and services, such as drug research, accompanied by “Medicare and Medicaid for All” mandates. (Private health care will be forbidden or strictly limited, though — Soviet-style — there will be exceptions for high officials and other favored persons. Drug research – and medical research, generally – will dwindle in quality and quantity. There will be fewer doctors and nurses who are willing to work in a regimented system. The resulting health-care catastrophe that befalls most of the populace will be shrugged off as necessary to ensure equality of treatment, while ignoring the special treatment accorded favored elites.)

13. Revitalization of the regulatory regime (which already imposes a deadweight loss of 10 percent of GDP). A quantitative measure of revitalization is an increase in the number of new rules published annually in the Federal Register by at least 10 percent above the average for 2017-2020.

14. Proposals for at least least two of the following tax-related initiatives:

a. Reversal of the tax-rate cuts enacted during Trump’s administration.

b. Increases in marginal tax rates for the top 2 or 3 income brackets.

c. Imposition of new taxes on wealth.

15. Dramatic enlargement of domestic welfare programs. Specifically, in addition to the creation of “Medicare and Medicaid for All” programs, there would be a “fix” for Social Security that mandates the payment of full benefits in the future, regardless of the status of the Social Security Trust Fund (which will probably be abolished). (Initiatives discussed in #5, #7, #9, #10, #11, #12, #13, #14, and #15 would suppress investment in business formation and expansion, and would disincentivize professional education and training, not to mention work itself. All of that would combine to push the real rate of economic growth toward a negative value.)

16. Reduction of the defense budget by at least 25 percent, in constant dollars, by 2031 or sooner. (Eventually, the armed forces will be maintained mainly for the purpose of suppressing domestic uprisings. Russia and China will emerge as superpowers, but won’t threaten the U.S. militarily as long as the U.S. government acquiesces in their increasing dominance and plays by their economic rules.)

17. Legalization of all immigration from south of the border, and the granting of citizenship to new immigrants and the illegals who came before them. (The right to vote, of course, is the right that Democrats most dearly want to bestow because most of the newly-minted citizens can be counted on to vote for Democrats. The permanent Democrat majority will ensure permanent Democrat control of the White House and both houses of Congress.)

If you’re keeping up with the news, you will know that almost all of those actions are underway or clearly telegraphed by official statements. It’s hard to chosse the most chilling of those statements, but the one that clearly reveals Biden’s totalitarian urge is his campaign against “white supremacy as domestic terrorism”. This will morph into the suppression of anyone who dares question the doctrine that blacks are where they are because of white racism, and not because of their generally inferior intelligence and cultural traits, or anyone who questions the justice of racial discrimination when it favors blacks. Stay tuned.

The Second Coming of Who?

William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming” is quoted often these days, especially the line “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”. And with good reason, given the maelstrom of strife and lunacy in which the nation and the world seem to be swirling.

Science and mathematics are in the grip of irrational forces; that is to say, sadly, the academic-media-information technology-corporate élites who have swallowed “wokeness” hook, line, and sinker. The same élites are responsible for the wholesale violation of immigration laws; the advancement of shiftless, violent, and less-intelligent citizens (and non-citizens) at the expense of blameless others; the risible belief that one’s sex is “assigned at birth”, to justify self-destructive and child-destructive gender-shifting; the repudiation of America’s past (the good with the bad); the destruction of the religious, social, and economic freedoms that have served all Americans well; the blatant theft of a presidential election; and much more that is equally distressing to contemplate.

Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” in 1919, in the aftermath of what was then the world’s most destructive war and in the midst of the pandemic known as the Spanish flu, which was far more lethal than the one from which the world is now emerging. It was a time of moral and physical exhaustion.

What is most remarkable about Yeats’s poem is its prescient second stanza:

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming!

Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

And thus did those “rough beasts” Lenin, Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese warlords — all “men on horseback” — emerge to take advantage of the moral and physical exhaustion of the time.

No such person is now on the horizon in America (though the élites feared that Trump might be that man). But if the maelstrom continues to swirl, a man on horseback will emerge, either from within or from without. In the latter case, given the feckless leadership in America, the man on horseback is likely to ride out of China, perhaps accompanied by a Russian.

And given a choice between a man or horseback and the élites who have corrupted America and who pamper the rabble, the man on horseback will be welcomed with open arms by those who are suffering at the hands of the élites.

The “Pause” Redux: The View from Austin

Christopher Monckton of Brenchley — who, contrary to Wikipedia, is not a denier of “climate change” but a learned critic of its scale and relationship to CO2 — posits a new “pause” in global warming:

At long last, following the warming effect of the El Niño of 2016, there are signs of a reasonably significant La Niña, which may well usher in another Pause in global temperature, which may even prove similar to the Great Pause that endured for 224 months from January 1997 to August 2015, during which a third of our entire industrial-era influence on global temperature drove a zero trend in global warming:

As we come close to entering the la Niña, the trend in global mean surface temperature has already been zero for 5 years 4 months:

There is not only a global pause, but a local one in a place that I know well: Austin, Texas. I have compiled the National Weather Service’s monthly records for Austin, which go back to the 1890s. More to the point here, I have also compiled daily weather records since October 1, 2014, for the NWS station at Camp Mabry, in the middle of Austin’s urban heat island. Based on those records, I have derived a regression equation that adjusts the official high-temperature readings for three significant variables: precipitation (which strongly correlates with cloud cover), wind speed, and wind direction (the combination of wind from the south has a marked, positive effect on Austin’s temperature).

Taking October 1, 2014, as a starting point, I constructed cumulative plots of the average actual and adjusted  deviations from normal:

Both averages have remained almost constant since April 2017, that is, almost four years ago. The adjusted deviation is especially significant because the hypothesized effect of CO2 on temperature doesn’t depend on other factors, such as precipitation, wind speed, or wind direction. Therefore, there has been no warming in Austin — despite some very hot spells — since April 2017.

Moreover, Austin’s population grew by about 5 percent from 2017 to 2020. According to the relationship between population and temperature presented here, that increase would have induced an temperature increase of 0.1 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s an insignificant number in the context of this analysis — though one that would have climate alarmists crying doom — but it reinforces my contention that Austin’s “real” temperature hasn’t risen for the past 3.75 years.

Related page and posts:

Climate Change
AGW in Austin?
AGW in Austin? (II)
UHI in Austin Revisited

The White House Brochures on Climate Change

You will find working links to them later in this post. Also, I have created a page to memorialize the links and the back story about the preparation of the ten brochures and the attempt to send them down the memory hole.

Here is the page, reproduced in its entirety:

Post by Dr. Roy W. Spencer at Roy Spencer, Ph.D. on January 8 2021:

White House Brochures on Climate (There is no climate crisis)

January 8th, 2021 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

Late last year, several of us were asked by David Legates (White House Office of Science and Technology Policy) to write short, easily understandable brochures that supported the general view that there is no climate crisis or climate emergency, and pointing out the widespread misinformation being promoted by alarmists through the media.

Below are the resulting 9 brochures, and an introduction by David. Mine is entitled, “The Faith-Based Nature of Human Caused Global Warming”.

David hopes to be able to get these posted on the White House website by January 20 (I presume so they will become a part of the outgoing Administration’s record) but there is no guarantee given recent events.

He said we are free to disseminate them widely. I list them in no particular order. We all thank David for taking on a difficult job in more hostile territory that you might imagine.

Introduction(Dr. David Legates)

The Sun Climate Connection(Drs. Michael Connolly, Ronan Connolly, Willie Soon)

Systematic Problems in the Four National Assessments of Climate Change Impacts on the US(Dr. Patrick Michaels)

Record Temperatures in the United States(Dr. John Christy)

Radiation Transfer(Dr. William Happer)

Is There a Climate Emergency(Dr. Ross McKitrick)

Hurricanes and Climate Change(Dr. Ryan Maue)

Climate, Climate Change, and the General Circulation(Dr. Anthony Lupo)

Can Computer Models Predict Climate(Dr. Christopher Essex)

The Faith-Based Nature of Human-Caused Global Warming(Dr. Roy Spencer)

Post by Dr. Roy W. Spencer at Roy Spencer, Ph.D. on January 12, 2021:

At the White House, the Purge of Skeptics Has Started

January 12th, 2021 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

Dr. David Legates has been Fired by White House OSTP Director and Trump Science Advisor, Kelvin Droegemeier

[Image of the seal of the Executive Office of the President]

President Donald Trump has been sympathetic with the climate skeptics’ position, which is that there is no climate crisis, and that all currently proposed solutions to the “crisis” are economically harmful to the U.S. specifically, and to humanity in general.

Today I have learned that Dr. David Legates, who had been brought to the Office of Science and Technology Policy to represent the skeptical position in the Trump Administration, has been fired by OSTP Director and Trump Science Advisor, Dr. Kelvin Droegemeier.

The event that likely precipitated this is the invitation by Dr. Legates for about a dozen of us to write brochures that we all had hoped would become part of the official records of the Trump White House. We produced those brochures (no funding was involved), and they were formatted and published by OSTP, but not placed on the WH website. My understanding is that David Legates followed protocols during this process.

So What Happened?

What follows is my opinion. I believe that Droegemeier (like many in the administration with hopes of maintaining a bureaucratic career in the new Biden Administration) has turned against the President for political purposes and professional gain. If Kelvin Droegemeier wishes to dispute this, let him… and let’s see who the new Science Advisor/OSTP Director is in the new (Biden) Administration.

I would also like to know if President Trump approved of his decision to fire Legates.

In the meantime, we have been told to remove links to the brochures, which is the prerogative of the OSTP Director since they have the White House seal on them.

But their content will live on elsewhere, as will Dr. Droegemeier’s decision

I have saved the ten brochures in their original (.pdf) format. The following links to the files are listed in the order in which Dr. Spencer listed them in his post of January 8, 2021:

Introduction

The Sun Climate Connection

Systematic Problems in the Four National Assessments of Climate Change Impacts on the US

Record Temperatures in the United States

Radiation Transfer

Is There a Climate Emergency?

Hurricanes and Climate Change

Climate, Climate Change, and the General Circulation

Can Computer Models Predict Climate?

The Faith-Based Nature of Human-Caused Global Warming

Here We Go …

Down the tubes. It is almost certain that the Democrat candidates will be declared the winners of Georgia two Senate seats. The Senate will then be divided 50-50, and control will pass to the Democrats because VP Harris will cast deciding votes in the case of ties.

This won’t be the first time that Democrats have controlled Congress and the White House, but this Democrat Party isn’t your grandfather’s party, or your father’s party. It isn’t even the party that was led by Barack Obama, who was (and is) an ardent advocate of government control. Today’s party is filled with Obamas and politicians who make the Obamas seem moderate.

What, exactly, happens now (or as soon as Democrats get organized)? The follow list is borrowed from an earlier post. Not every item on the list will be adopted, but it won’t be for want of trying.

1. Abolition of the Senate filibuster.

2. An increase of at least two seats on the U.S. Supreme Court (USSC), though there may be some vacancies to be filled.

3. Adoption of an interstate compact by states controlling a total of at least 270 electoral votes, committing each member state’s electoral votes to the presidential candidate who compiles the most popular votes nationwide, regardless of the outcome of the popular vote in each state that is a party to the compact. (This may seem unnecessary if Biden wins, but it will be a bit of insurance against the possibility of a Republican victor in a future election.)

4. Statehood for either the District of Columbia or Puerto Rico, or for both of them. (Each would then have two senators and a requisite number of representatives with full voting privileges in their respective bodies. All of them will be Democrats, of course.)

5. Empowerment of the executive branch to do at least three of the following things:

a. Regulate personal and business activity (in new ways) with the expressed aim of reducing CO2 emissions.

b. Commit at least $500 billion in new obligational authority for research into and/or funding of methods of reducing and mitigating CO2 emissions.

c. Issue new kinds of tax rebates and credits to persons/households and businesses that spend money on any item on a list of programs/technologies that are supposed to reduce CO2 emissions.

d. Impose tax penalties on persons/households and businesses for their failure to spend money on any item in the list mentioned above (shades of the Obamacare tax penalty).

e. Impose penalties on persons/households and businesses for failing to adhere to prescribed caps on CO2 emissions.

f. Establishment of a cap-and-trade program for CO2 emissions (to soften the blow of the previous item). (Needless to say, the overall effect of such initiatives would deal a devastating blow to economic activity – meaning massive job losses and lower real incomes for large swaths of the populace.)

6. Authorization for an agency or agencies of the federal government to define and penalize written or spoken utterances that the agency or agencies declare “unprotected” by the First Amendment, and to require media enforcement of bans on “unprotected” utterances and prosecution of violators (e.g., here). (This can be accomplished by cynically adopting the supportable position that the First Amendment protects only political speech. The purported aim would be to curb so-called hate speech, but when censorship is in full swing — which would take only a few years — it will be illegal to criticize or question, even by implication, such things as illegal immigration, same-sex marriage, transgenderism, anthropogenic global warming, the confiscation of firearms, or the policies of the federal government. Violations will be enforced by fines and prison sentences — the latter sometimes called “sensitivity training”, “citizenship education”, or some other euphemistic term. Candidates for public office will be prime targets of the enforcers, which will suppress open discussion of such matters.)

7. Imposition of requirements for organizations of all kinds — businesses, universities, charitable organizations, clubs, and even churches — to favor anyone who isn’t a straight, white male of European descent. (The “protections” will be enacted, upheld, and enforced vigorously by federal agencies, regardless of their adverse economic and social effects.)

8. Effective nullification of the Second Amendment through orders/regulations/legislation, to enable gun confiscation (though there will be exemptions for private security services used by favored elites).

9. Use of law-enforcement agencies to enforce “hate speech” bans, mandates for reverse discrimination, and gun-confiscation edicts. (These things will happen regardless of the consequences; e.g., a rising crime rate, greater violence against whites and Asians, and flight from the cities and near-in suburbs. The latter will be futile, anyway, because suburban and exurban police departments will also be co-opted.)

10. Criminalization of “sexual misconduct”, as it is defined by the alleged victim, de facto if not de jure. (Investigations and prosecutions will be selective, and aimed mainly at straight, white males of European descent and dissidents who openly criticize this and other measures listed here.)

11. Parallel treatment for the “crimes” of racism, anti-Islamism, nativism, and genderism. (This will be in addition to the measures discussed in #7.)

12. Centralization in the federal government of complete control of all health care and health-care related products and services, such as drug research, accompanied by “Medicare and Medicaid for All” mandates. (Private health care will be forbidden or strictly limited, though — Soviet-style — there will be exceptions for high officials and other favored persons. Drug research – and medical research, generally – will dwindle in quality and quantity. There will be fewer doctors and nurses who are willing to work in a regimented system. The resulting health-care catastrophe that befalls most of the populace will be shrugged off as necessary to ensure equality of treatment, while ignoring the special treatment accorded favored elites.)

13. Revitalization of the regulatory regime (which already imposes a deadweight loss of 10 percent of GDP). A quantitative measure of revitalization is an increase in the number of new rules published annually in the Federal Register by at least 10 percent above the average for 2017-2020.

14. Proposals for at least least two of the following tax-related initiatives:

a. Reversal of the tax-rate cuts enacted during Trump’s administration.

b. Increases in marginal tax rates for the top 2 or 3 income brackets.

c. Imposition of new taxes on wealth.

15. Dramatic enlargement of domestic welfare programs. Specifically, in addition to the creation of “Medicare and Medicaid for All” programs, there would be a “fix” for Social Security that mandates the payment of full benefits in the future, regardless of the status of the Social Security Trust Fund (which will probably be abolished). (Initiatives discussed in #5, #7, #9, #10, #11, #12, #13, #14, and #15 would suppress investment in business formation and expansion, and would disincentivize professional education and training, not to mention work itself. All of that would combine to push the real rate of economic growth toward a negative value.)

16. Reduction of the defense budget by at least 25 percent, in constant dollars, by 2031 or sooner. (Eventually, the armed forces will be maintained mainly for the purpose of suppressing domestic uprisings. Russia and China will emerge as superpowers, but won’t threaten the U.S. militarily as long as the U.S. government acquiesces in their increasing dominance and plays by their economic rules.)

17. Legalization of all immigration from south of the border, and the granting of citizenship to new immigrants and the illegals who came before them. (The right to vote, of course, is the right that Democrats most dearly want to bestow because most of the newly-minted citizens can be counted on to vote for Democrats. The permanent Democrat majority will ensure permanent Democrat control of the White House and both houses of Congress.)

*      *     *

The list is in keeping with the direction in which the country is headed and, in many cases, has been headed since the 1930s — despite Reagan and Trump, and with the connivance of Ike, Nixon, the Bushes, and (in some crucial cases) the USSC.

The Constitution’s horizontal and vertical separation of powers, system of checks and balances, and limitations on the power of the federal government have been eroded almost to the point of irrelevance. The next few years will put an end to the pretense (or false hope) of governance in accordance with the Constitution as it was written. The next few years will see the destruction of liberty, the bankruptcy of America, and the onset of obeisance to Russia and China.

CO2 Fail

Anthony Watts of Watts Up With That? catches the U.N. in a moment of candor:

From a World Meteorological Organization (WMO) press release titled “Carbon dioxide levels continue at record levels, despite COVID-19 lockdown,” comes this statement about the effects of carbon dioxide (CO2) reductions during the COVID-19 lockdown:

“Preliminary estimates indicate a reduction in the annual global emission between 4.2% and 7.5%. At the global scale, an emissions reduction this scale will not cause atmospheric CO2 to go down. CO2 will continue to go up, though at a slightly reduced pace (0.08-0.23 ppm per year lower). This falls well within the 1 ppm natural inter-annual variability. This means that on the short-term the impact [of CO2 reduction] of the COVID-19 confinements cannot be distinguished from natural variability…”

Let this sink in: The WMO admits reduce carbon dioxide emissions are having no effect on climate that is distinguishable from natural variability.

The WMO acknowledges that after our global economic lockdown, where CO2 emissions from travel, industry, and power generation were all curtailed, there wasn’t any measurable difference in global atmospheric CO2 levels. Zero, zilch, none, nada.

Of course, we already knew this and wrote about it on Climate at a Glance: Coronavirus Impact on CO2 Levels. An analysis by climate scientist Dr. Roy Spencer showed that despite crashing economies and large cutbacks in travel, industry, and energy generation, climate scientists have yet to find any hint of a drop in atmospheric CO2 levels.

The graph in Watts’s post depicts CO2 readings only for Mauna Loa, and only through April 2020. The following graph covers CO2 readings for Mauna Loa (through October 2020) and for a global average of marine surface sites (through August 2020):

The bottom line remains the same: There’s nothing to see here, folks, just an uninterrupted pattern of seasonal variations.

Climate-change fanatics will have to look elsewhere than human activity for the rise in atmospheric CO2.

Data definitions and source:

https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/mlo.html

ftp://aftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/products/trends/co2/co2_mm_mlo.txt

https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/global.html

ftp://aftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/products/trends/co2/co2_mm_gl.txt

UHI in Austin Revisited

See “Climate Hysteria: An Update” for the background of this post.

The average annual temperature in the city of Austin, Texas, rose by 3.7 degrees F between 1960 and 2019, that is, from 67.2 degrees to 70.9 degrees. The increase in Austin’s population from 187,000 in 1960 to 930,000 in 2019 accounts for all of the increase. (The population estimate for 2019 reflects a downward adjustment to compensate for an annexation in 1998 that significantly enlarged Austin’s territory and population.)

My estimate of the effect of Austin’s population increase on temperature is based on the equation for North American cities in T.R. Oke’s “City Size and the Urban Heat Island”. The equation (simplified for ease of reproduction) is

T’ = 2.96 log P – 6.41

Where,

T’ = change in temperature, degrees C

P = population, holding area constant

The author reports r-squared = 0.92 and SE = 0.7 degrees C (1.26 degrees F).

I plugged the values for Austin’s population in 1960 and 2019 into the equation, took the difference between the results, and converted that difference to degrees Fahrenheit, with this result: The effect of Austin’s population growth from 1960 to 2019 was to increase Austin’s temperature by 3.7 degrees F. What an amazing non-coincidence.

Austin’s soup weather nazi should now shut up about the purported effect of “climate change” on Austin’s temperature.

Climate Hysteria: An Update

I won’t repeat all of “Climate Hysteria“, which is long but worth a look if you haven’t read it. A key part of it is a bit out of date, specifically, the part about the weather in Austin, Texas.

Last fall’s heat wave in Austin threw our local soup weather nazi into a tizzy. Of course it did; he proclaims it “nice” when daytime high temperatures are in the 60s and 70s, and complains about anything above 80. I wonder why he stays in Austin.

The weather nazi is also a warmist. He was in “climate change” heaven when, on several days in September and October, the official weather station in Austin reported new record highs for the relevant dates. To top it off, tropical storm Imelda suddenly formed in mid-September near the gulf coast of Texas and inundated Houston. According to the weather nazi, both events were due to “climate change”. Or were they just weather? My money’s on the latter.

Let’s take Imelda, which the weather nazi proclaimed to be an example of the kind of “extreme” weather event that will occur more often as “climate change” takes us in the direction of catastrophe. Those “extreme” weather events, when viewed globally (which is the only correct way to view them) aren’t occurring more often, as I document in “Hurricane Hysteria“.

Here, I want to focus on Austin’s temperature record.

There are some problems with the weather nazi’s reaction to the heat wave. First, the global circulation models (GCMs) that forecast ever-rising temperatures have been falsified. (See the discussion of GCMs here.) Second, the heat wave and the dry spell should be viewed in perspective. Here, for example are annualized temperature and rainfall averages for Austin, going back to the decade in which “global warming” began to register on the consciousnesses of climate hysterics:

What do you see? I see a recent decline in Austin’s average temperature from the El Nino effect of 2015-2016. I also see a decline in rainfall that doesn’t come close to being as severe the a dozen or so declines that have occurred since 1970.

Here’s a plot of the relationship between monthly average temperature and monthly rainfall during the same period. The 1-month lag in temperature gives the best fit. The equation is statistically significant, despite the low correlation coefficient (r = 0.24) because of the large number of observations.

Abnormal heat is to be expected when there is little rain and a lot of sunshine. In other words, temperature data, standing by themselves, are of little use in explaining a region’s climate.

Drawing on daily weather reports for the past five-and-a-half years in Austin, I find that Austin’s daily high temperature is significantly affected by rainfall, wind speed, wind direction, and cloud cover. For example (everything else being the same):

  • An additional inch of rainfall induces an temperature drop of 1.4 degrees F.
  • A wind of 10 miles an hour from the north induces a temperature drop of about 5.9 degrees F relative to a 10-mph wind from the south.
  • Going from 100-percent sunshine to 100-percent cloud cover induces a temperature drop of 0.3 degrees F.
  • The combined effect of an inch of rain and complete loss of sunshine is therefore 1.7 degrees F, even before other factors come into play (e.g., rain accompanied by wind from the north or northwest, as is often the case in Austin).

The combined effects of variations in rainfall, wind speed, wind direction, and cloud cover are far more than enough to account for the molehill temperature anomalies that “climate change” hysterics magnify into mountains of doom.

Further, there is no systematic bias in the estimates, as shown by the following plot of regression residuals:


Meteorological seasons: tan = fall (September, October, November); blue = winter (December, January, February); green = spring (March, April, May); ochre = summer (June July, August). Values greater than zero = underestimates; values less than zero = overestimates.

Summer is the most predictable of the seasons; winter, the least predicable; spring and fall are in between. However, the fall of 2019 (which included both the hot spell and cold snap discussed above) was dominated by overestimated (below-normal) temperatures, not above-normal ones, despite the weather-nazi’s hysteria to the contrary. In fact, the below-normal temperatures were the most below-normal of those recorded during the five-and-a-half year period.

The winter of 2019-2020 was on the warm side, but not abnormally so (cf. the winter of 2016-2017). Further, the warming in the winter of 2019-2020 can be attributed in part to weak El Nino conditions.

Lurking behind all of this, and swamping all other causes of the (slightly upward) temperature trend is a pronounced urban-heat-island (UHI) effect (discussed here). What the weather nazi really sees (but doesn’t understand or won’t admit) is that Austin is getting warmer mainly because of rapid population growth (50 percent since 2000) and all that has ensued — more buildings, more roads, more vehicles on the move, and less green space.

The moral of the story: If you really want to do something about the weather, move to a climate that you find more congenial (hint, hint).

What Is Natural?

Back-to-nature types, worriers about what “humans are doing to the planet”, and neurotics (leftists) generally take a dim view of the artifacts of human existence. There’s a lot of hypocrisy in that view, of course, mixed with goodly doses of envy and virtue-signalling.

A lot of the complaints heard from back-to-nature types, etc., are really esthetic. They just don’t like to envision a pipeline running across some open far away and well out of sight, ditto a distant and relatively small cluster of oil rigs. Such objections would seem to conflict with their preference for ugly bird-killing highway straddling, skyline cluttering wind farms. Chalk it up economically ignorant indoctrination in the “evils” of fossil fuels.

At any rate, what makes a pipeline, an oil rig, or even a wind farm any less natural than the artifacts constructed by lower animals to promote their survival? The main difference between the artifacts of the lower animals — bird’s nests, bee hives, beaver dams, underground burrows, etc. — and those of human beings is that human artifacts are far more ingenious and complex. Moreover, because humans are far more ingenious than the lower animals, the number of different human artifacts is far greater than the number arising from any other species, or even all of them taken together.

Granted, there are artifacts that aren’t necessary to the survival of human beings (e.g., movies, TV, and electric guitars), but those aren’t the ones that the back-to-nature crowd and its allies find objectionable. No, they object to the artifacts that enable the back-to-earthers, etc., to live in comfort.

In sum, a pipeline is just as natural as a bird’s nest. Remember that the next time you encounter an aging “flower child”. And ask her if a wind farm is more natural than a pipeline, and how she would like it if she had to forage for firewood to stay warm and cook her meals.

Not-So-Random Thoughts (XXV)

“Not-So-Random Thoughts” is an occasional series in which I highlight writings by other commentators on varied subjects that I have addressed in the past. Other entries in the series can be found at these links: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII, and XXIV. For more in the same style, see “The Tenor of the Times” and “Roundup: Civil War, Solitude, Transgenderism, Academic Enemies, and Immigration“.

CONTENTS

The Real Unemployment Rate and Labor-Force Participation

Is Partition Possible?

Still More Evidence for Why I Don’t Believe in “Climate Change”

Transgenderism, Once More

Big, Bad Oligopoly?

Why I Am Bunkered in My Half-Acre of Austin

“Government Worker” Is (Usually) an Oxymoron

The Real Unemployment Rate and Labor-Force Participation

There was much celebration (on the right, at least) when it was announced that the official unemployment rate, as of November, is only 3.5 percent, and that 266,000 jobs were added to the employment rolls (see here, for example). The exultation is somewhat overdone. Yes, things would be much worse if Obama’s anti-business rhetoric and policies still prevailed, but Trump is pushing a big boulder of deregulation uphill.

In fact, the real unemployment rate is a lot higher than official figure I refer you to “Employment vs. Big Government and Disincentives to Work“. It begins with this:

The real unemployment rate is several percentage points above the nominal rate. Officially, the unemployment rate stood at 3.5 percent as of November 2019. Unofficially — but in reality — the unemployment rate was 9.4 percent.

The explanation is that the labor-force participation rate has declined drastically since peaking in January 2000. When the official unemployment rate is adjusted to account for that decline (and for a shift toward part-time employment), the result is a considerably higher real unemployment rate.

Arnold Kling recently discussed the labor-force participation rate:

[The] decline in male labor force participation among those without a college degree is a significant issue. Note that even though the unemployment rate has come down for those workers, their rate of labor force participation is still way down.

Economists on the left tend to assume that this is due to a drop in demand for workers at the low end of the skill distribution. Binder’s claim is that instead one factor in declining participation is an increase in the ability of women to participate in the labor market, which in turn lowers the advantage of marrying a man. The reduced interest in marriage on the part of women attenuates the incentive for men to work.

Could be. I await further analysis.

Is Partition Possible?

Angelo Codevilla peers into his crystal ball:

Since 2016, the ruling class has left no doubt that it is not merely enacting chosen policies: It is expressing its identity, an identity that has grown and solidified over more than a half century, and that it is not capable of changing.

That really does mean that restoring anything like the Founders’ United States of America is out of the question. Constitutional conservatism on behalf of a country a large part of which is absorbed in revolutionary identity; that rejects the dictionary definition of words; that rejects common citizenship, is impossible. Not even winning a bloody civil war against the ruling class could accomplish such a thing.

The logical recourse is to conserve what can be conserved, and for it to be done by, of, and for those who wish to conserve it. However much force of what kind may be required to accomplish that, the objective has to be conservation of the people and ways that wish to be conserved.

That means some kind of separation.

As I argued in “The Cold Civil War,” the natural, least stressful course of events is for all sides to tolerate the others going their own ways. The ruling class has not been shy about using the powers of the state and local governments it controls to do things at variance with national policy, effectively nullifying national laws. And they get away with it.

For example, the Trump Administration has not sent federal troops to enforce national marijuana laws in Colorado and California, nor has it punished persons and governments who have defied national laws on immigration. There is no reason why the conservative states, counties, and localities should not enforce their own view of the good.

Not even President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would order troops to shoot to re-open abortion clinics were Missouri or North Dakota, or any city, to shut them down. As Francis Buckley argues in American Secession: The Looming Breakup of the United States, some kind of separation is inevitable, and the options regarding it are many.

I would like to believe Mr. Codevilla, but I cannot. My money is on a national campaign of suppression, which will begin the instant that the left controls the White House and Congress. Shooting won’t be necessary, given the massive displays of force that will be ordered from the White House, ostensibly to enforce various laws, including but far from limited to “a woman’s right to an abortion”. Leftists must control everything because they cannot tolerate dissent.

As I say in “Leftism“,

Violence is a good thing if your heart is in the “left” place. And violence is in the hearts of leftists, along with hatred and the irresistible urge to suppress that which is hated because it challenges leftist orthodoxy — from climate skepticism and the negative effect of gun ownership on crime to the negative effect of the minimum wage and the causal relationship between Islam and terrorism.

There’s more in “The Subtle Authoritarianism of the ‘Liberal Order’“; for example:

[Quoting Sumantra Maitra] Domestically, liberalism divides a nation into good and bad people, and leads to a clash of cultures.

The clash of cultures was started and sustained by so-called liberals, the smug people described above. It is they who — firmly believing themselves to be smarter, on the the side of science, and on the side of history — have chosen to be the aggressors in the culture war.

Hillary Clinton’s remark about Trump’s “deplorables” ripped the mask from the “liberal” pretension to tolerance and reason. Clinton’s remark was tantamount to a declaration of war against the self-appointed champion of the “deplorables”: Donald Trump. And war it has been. much of it waged by deep-state “liberals” who cannot entertain the possibility that they are on the wrong side of history, and who will do anything — anything — to make history conform to their smug expectations of it.

Still More Evidence for Why I Don’t Believe in “Climate Change”

This is a sequel to an item in the previous edition of this series: “More Evidence for Why I Don’t Believe in Climate Change“.

Dave Middleton debunks the claim that 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted the susequent (but not steady) rise in the globe’s temperature (whatever that is). He then quotes a talk by Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama-Huntsville Climate Research Center:

We have a change in temperature from the deep atmosphere over 37.5 years, we know how much forcing there was upon the atmosphere, so we can relate these two with this little ratio, and multiply it by the ratio of the 2x CO2 forcing. So the transient climate response is to say, what will the temperature be like if you double CO2– if you increase at 1% per year, which is roughly what the whole greenhouse effect is, and which is achieved in about 70 years. Our result is that the transient climate response in the troposphere is 1.1 °C. Not a very alarming number at all for a doubling of CO2. When we performed the same calculation using the climate models, the number was 2.31°C. Clearly, and significantly different. The models’ response to the forcing – their ∆t here, was over 2 times greater than what has happened in the real world….

There is one model that’s not too bad, it’s the Russian model. You don’t go to the White House today and say, “the Russian model works best”. You don’t say that at all! But the fact is they have a very low sensitivity to their climate model. When you look at the Russian model integrated out to 2100, you don’t see anything to get worried about. When you look at 120 years out from 1980, we already have 1/3 of the period done – if you’re looking out to 2100. These models are already falsified [emphasis added], you can’t trust them out to 2100, no way in the world would a legitimate scientist do that. If an engineer built an aeroplane and said it could fly 600 miles and the thing ran out of fuel at 200 and crashed, he might say: “I was only off by a factor of three”. No, we don’t do that in engineering and real science! A factor of three is huge in the energy balance system. Yet that’s what we see in the climate models….

Theoretical climate modelling is deficient for describing past variations. Climate models fail for past variations, where we already know the answer. They’ve failed hypothesis tests and that means they’re highly questionable for giving us accurate information about how the relatively tiny forcing … will affect the climate of the future.

For a lot more in this vein, see my pages “Climate Change” and “Modeling and Science“.

Transgenderism, Once More

Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels, M.D.) is on the case:

The problem alluded to in [a paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics] is, of course, the consequence of a fiction, namely that a man who claims to have changed sex actually has changed sex, and is now what used to be called the opposite sex. But when a man who claims to have become a woman competes in women’s athletic competitions, he often retains an advantage derived from the sex of his birth. Women competitors complain that this is unfair, and it is difficult not to agree with them….

Man being both a problem-creating and solving creature, there is, of course, a very simple way to resolve this situation: namely that men who change to simulacra of women should compete, if they must, with others who have done the same. The demand that they should suffer no consequences that they neither like nor want from the choices they have made is an unreasonable one, as unreasonable as it would be for me to demand that people should listen to me playing the piano though I have no musical ability. Thomas Sowell has drawn attention to the intellectual absurdity and deleterious practical consequences of the modern search for what he calls “cosmic justice.”…

We increasingly think that we live in an existential supermarket in which we pick from the shelf of limitless possibilities whatever we want to be. We forget that limitation is not incompatible with infinity; for example, that our language has a grammar that excludes certain forms of words, without in any way limiting the infinite number of meanings that we can express. Indeed, such limitation is a precondition of our freedom, for otherwise nothing that we said would be comprehensible to anybody else.

That is a tour de force typical of the good doctor. In the span of three paragraphs, he addresses matters that I have treated at length in “The Transgender Fad and Its Consequences” (and later in the previous edition of this series), “Positive Rights and Cosmic Justice“, and “Writing: A Guide” (among other entries at this blog).

Big, Bad Oligopoly?

Big Tech is giving capitalism a bad name, as I discuss in “Why Is Capitalism Under Attack from the Right?“, but it’s still the best game in town. Even oligopoly and its big brother, monopoly, aren’t necessarily bad. See, for example, my posts, “Putting in Some Good Words for Monopoly” and “Monopoly: Private Is Better than Public“. Arnold Kling makes the essential point here:

Do indicators of consolidation show us that the economy is getting less competitive or more competitive? The answer depends on which explanation(s) you believe to be most important. For example, if network effects or weak resistance to mergers are the main factors, then the winners from consolidation are quasi-monopolists that may be overly insulated from competition. On the other hand, if the winners are firms that have figured out how to develop and deploy software more effectively than their rivals, then the growth of those firms at the expense of rivals just shows us that the force of competition is doing its work.

Why I Am Bunkered in My Half-Acre of Austin

Randal O’Toole takes aim at the planners of Austin, Texas, and hits the bullseye:

Austin is one of the fastest-growing cities in America, and the city of Austin and Austin’s transit agency, Capital Metro, have a plan for dealing with all of the traffic that will be generated by that growth: assume that a third of the people who now drive alone to work will switch to transit, bicycling, walking, or telecommuting by 2039. That’s right up there with planning for dinner by assuming that food will magically appear on the table the same way it does in Hogwarts….

[W]hile Austin planners are assuming they can reduce driving alone from 74 to 50 percent, it is actually moving in the other direction….

Planners also claim that 11 percent of Austin workers carpool to work, an amount they hope to maintain through 2039. They are going to have trouble doing that as carpooling, in fact, only accounted for 8.0 percent of Austin workers in 2018.

Planners hope to increase telecommuting from its current 8 percent (which is accurate) to 14 percent. That could be difficult as they have no policy tools that can influence telecommuting.

Planners also hope to increase walking and bicycling from their current 2 and 1 percent to 4 and 5 percent. Walking to work is almost always greater than cycling to work, so it’s difficult to see how they plan to magic cycling to be greater than walking. This is important because cycling trips are longer than walking trips and so have more of a potential impact on driving.

Finally, planners want to increase transit from 4 to 16 percent. In fact, transit carried just 3.24 percent of workers to their jobs in 2018, down from 3.62 percent in 2016. Changing from 4 to 16 percent is a an almost impossible 300 percent increase; changing from 3.24 to 16 is an even more formidable 394 percent increase. Again, reality is moving in the opposite direction from planners’ goals….

Planners have developed two main approaches to transportation. One is to estimate how people will travel and then provide and maintain the infrastructure to allow them to do so as efficiently and safely as possible. The other is to imagine how you wish people would travel and then provide the infrastructure assuming that to happen. The latter method is likely to lead to misallocation of capital resources, increased congestion, and increased costs to travelers.

Austin’s plan is firmly based on this second approach. The city’s targets of reducing driving alone by a third, maintaining carpooling at an already too-high number, and increasing transit by 394 percent are completely unrealistic. No American city has achieved similar results in the past two decades and none are likely to come close in the next two decades.

Well, that’s the prevailing mentality of Austin’s political leaders and various bureaucracies: magical thinking. Failure is piled upon failure (e.g., more bike lanes crowding out traffic lanes, a hugely wasteful curbside composting plan) because to admit failure would be to admit that the emperor has no clothes.

You want to learn more about Austin? You’ve got it:

Driving and Politics (1)
Life in Austin (1)
Life in Austin (2)
Life in Austin (3)
Driving and Politics (2)
AGW in Austin?
Democracy in Austin
AGW in Austin? (II)
The Hypocrisy of “Local Control”
Amazon and Austin

“Government Worker” Is (Usually) an Oxymoron

In “Good News from the Federal Government” I sarcastically endorse the move to grant all federal workers 12 weeks of paid parental leave:

The good news is that there will be a lot fewer civilian federal workers on the job, which means that the federal bureaucracy will grind a bit more slowly when it does the things that it does to screw up the economy.

The next day, Audacious Epigone put some rhetorical and statistical meat on the bones of my informed prejudice in “Join the Crooks and Liars: Get a Government Job!“:

That [the title of the post] used to be a frequent refrain on Radio Derb. Though the gag has been made emeritus, the advice is even better today than it was when the Derb introduced it. As he explains:

The percentage breakdown is private-sector 76 percent, government 16 percent, self-employed 8 percent.

So one in six of us works for a government, federal, state, or local.

Which group does best on salary? Go on: see if you can guess. It’s government workers, of course. Median earnings 52½ thousand. That’s six percent higher than the self-employed and fourteen percent higher than the poor shlubs toiling away in the private sector.

If you break down government workers into two further categories, state and local workers in category one, federal workers in category two, which does better?

Again, which did you think? Federal workers are way out ahead, median earnings 66 thousand. Even state and local government workers are ahead of us private-sector and self-employed losers, though.

Moral of the story: Get a government job! — federal for strong preference.

….

Though it is well known that a government gig is a gravy train, opinions of the people with said gigs is embarrassingly low as the results from several additional survey questions show.

First, how frequently the government can be trusted “to do what’s right”? [“Just about always” and “most of the time” badly trail “some of the time”.]

….

Why can’t the government be trusted to do what’s right? Because the people who populate it are crooks and liars. Asked whether “hardly any”, “not many” or “quite a few” people in the federal government are crooked, the following percentages answered with “quite a few” (“not sure” responses, constituting 12% of the total, are excluded). [Responses of “quite a few” range from 59 percent to 77 percent across an array of demographic categories.]

….

Accompanying a strong sense of corruption is the perception of widespread incompetence. Presented with a binary choice between “the people running the government are smart” and “quite a few of them don’t seem to know what they are doing”, a solid majority chose the latter (“not sure”, at 21% of all responses, is again excluded). [The “don’t know what they’re doing” responses ranged from 55 percent to 78 percent across the same demographic categories.]

Are the skeptics right? Well, most citizens have had dealings with government employees of one kind and another. The “wisdom of crowds” certainly applies in this case.

“Hurricane Hysteria” and “Climate Hysteria”, Updated

In view of the persistent claims about the role of “climate change” as the cause of tropical cyclone activity (i.e, tropical storms and hurricanes) I have updated “Hurricane Hysteria“. The bottom line remains the same: Global measures of accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) do not support the view that there is a correlation between “climate change” and tropical cyclone activity.

I have also updated “Climate Hysteria“, which borrows from “Hurricane Hysteria” but also examines climate patterns in Austin, Texas, where our local weather nazi peddles his “climate change” balderdash.

Climate Hysteria

UPDATED 01/23/20

Recent weather events have served to reinforce climate hysteria. There are the (usual) wildfires in California, which have nothing to do with “climate change” (e.g., this, this, and this), but you wouldn’t know it if you watch the evening news (which I don’t but impressionable millions do).

Closer to home, viewers have been treated to more of the same old propaganda from our local weather nazi, who proclaims it “nice” when daytime high temperatures are in the 60s and 70s, and who bemoans higher temperatures. (Why does he stay in Austin, then?) We watch him because when he isn’t proselytizing “climate change” he delivers the most detailed weather report available on Austin’s TV stations.

He was in “climate change” heaven when in September and part of October (2019) Austin endured a heat wave that saw many new high temperatures for the relevant dates. To top it off, tropical storm Imelda suddenly formed in mid-September near the gulf coast of Texas and inundated Houston. According to him, both events were due to “climate change”. Or were they just weather? My money’s on the latter.

Let’s take Imelda, which the weather nazi proclaimed to be an example of the kind of “extreme” weather event that will occur more often as “climate change” takes us in the direction of catastrophe. Those “extreme” weather events, when viewed globally (which is the only correct way to view them) aren’t occurring more often. This is from “Hurricane Hysteria“, which I have just updated to include statistics compiled as of today (11/19/19):

[T]he data sets for tropical cyclone activity that are maintained by the Tropical Meteorology Project at Colorado State University cover all six of the relevant ocean basins as far back as 1972. The coverage goes back to 1961 (and beyond) for all but the North Indian Ocean basin — which is by far the least active.

Here is NOAA’s reconstruction of ACE in the North Atlantic basin through November 19, 2019, which, if anything, probably understates ACE before the early 1960s:

The recent spikes in ACE are not unprecedented. And there are many prominent spikes that predate the late-20th-century temperature rise on which “warmism” is predicated. The trend from the late 1800s to the present is essentially flat. And, again, the numbers before the early 1960s must understate ACE.

Moreover, the metric of real interest is global cyclone activity; the North Atlantic basin is just a sideshow. Consider this graph of the annual values for each basin from 1972 through November 19, 2019:

Here’s a graph of stacked (cumulative) totals for the same period:

The red line is the sum of ACE for all six basins, including the Northwest Pacific basin; the yellow line in the sum of ACE for the next five basins, including the Northeast Pacific basin; etc.

I have these observations about the numbers represented in the preceding graphs:

  • If one is a believer in CAGW (the G stands for global), it is a lie (by glaring omission) to focus on random, land-falling hurricanes hitting the U.S. or other parts of the Western Hemisphere.
  • The overall level of activity is practically flat between 1972 and 2019, with the exception of spikes that coincide with strong El Niño events.
  • There is nothing in the long-term record for the North Atlantic basin, which is probably understated before the early 1960s, to suggest that global activity in recent decades is unusually high.

Imelda was an outlier — an unusual event that shouldn’t be treated as a typical one. Imelda happened along in the middle of a heat wave and accompanying dry spell in central Texas. This random juxtaposition caused the weather nazi to drool in anticipation of climate catastrophe.

There are some problems with the weather nazi’s reaction to the heat wave. First, the global circulation models (GCMs) that forecast ever-rising temperatures have been falsified. (See the discussion of GCMs here.) Second, the heat wave and the dry spell should be viewed in perspective. Here, for example are annualized temperature and rainfall averages for Austin, going back to the decade in which “global warming” began to register on the consciousnesses of climate hysterics:

 

What do you see? I see a recent decline in Austin’s average temperature from the El Nino effect of 2015-2016. I also see a decline in rainfall that doesn’t come close to being as severe the a dozen or so declines that have occurred since 1970.

In fact, abnormal heat is to be expected when there is little rain and a lot of sunshine. Temperature data, standing by themselves, are of little use because of the pronounced urban-heat-island (UHI) effect (discussed here). Drawing on daily weather reports for Austin for the past five years, I find that Austin’s daily high temperature is significantly affected by rainfall, wind speed, wind direction, and cloud cover. For example (everything else being the same):

  • An additional inch of rainfall induces an temperature drop of 1.4 degrees F.
  • A wind of 10 miles an hour from the north induces a temperature drop of about 5.8 degrees F relative to a 10-mph wind from the south.
  • Going from 100-percent sunshine to 100-percent cloud cover induces a temperature drop of 0.5 degrees F. (The combined effect of an inch of rain and complete loss of sunshine is therefore 1.9 degrees F, even before other factors come into play.)

The combined effects of variations in rainfall, wind speed, wind direction, and cloud cover are far more than enough to account for the molehill temperature anomalies that “climate change” hysterics magnify into mountains of doom.

Further, there is no systematic bias in the estimates, as shown by the following plot of regression residuals:

 

Summer is the most predictable of the seasons; winter, the least predicable. Over- and under-estimates seem to be evenly distributed across the seasons. In other words, the regression doesn’t mask changes in seasonal temperature patterns. Note, however, that this fall (which includes both the hot spell and cold snap discussed above) has been dominated by below-normal temperatures, not above-normal ones.

Anyway, during the spell of hot, dry weather in the first half of the meteorological fall of 2019, the maximum temperature went as high as 16 degrees F above the 30-year average for relevant date. Two days later, the maximum temperature was 12 degrees F below the 30-year average for the relevant date. Those extremes tell us a lot about the variability of weather in central Texas and nothing about “climate change”.

However, the 16-degree deviation above the 30-year average was far from the greatest during the period under analysis; above-normal deviations have ranged as high as 26 degrees F above 30-year averages. By contrast, during the subsequent cold snap, deviations reached their lowest levels for the period under analysis. The down-side deviations (latter half of meteorological fall, 2019) are obvious in the preceding graph. The pattern suggests that, if anything, fall 2019 in Austin was abnormally cold rather than abnormally hot.

Winter 2019-2020 has started on out the warm side, by not abnormally so. Further, the warming can be attributed in part to weak El Nino conditions.

Not-So-Random Thoughts (XXIV)

“Not-So-Random Thoughts” is an occasional series in which I highlight writings by other commentators on varied subjects that I have addressed in the past. Other entries in the series can be found at these links: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, and XXIII. For more in the same style, see “The Tenor of the Times” and “Roundup: Civil War, Solitude, Transgenderism, Academic Enemies, and Immigration“.

CONTENTS

The Transgender Trap: A Political Nightmare Becomes Reality

Spygate (a.k.a. Russiagate) Revisited

More Evidence for Why I Don’t Believe in “Climate Change”

Thoughts on Mortality

Assortative Mating, Income Inequality, and the Crocodile Tears of “Progressives”

The Transgender Trap: A Political Nightmare Becomes Reality

Begin here and here, then consider the latest outrage.

First, from Katy Faust (“Why It’s Probably Not A Coincidence That The Mother Transing Her 7-Year-Old Isn’t Biologically Related“, The Federalist, October 24, 2019):

The story of seven-year-old James, whom his mother has pressured to become “Luna,” has been all over my newsfeed. The messy custody battle deserves every second of our click-bait-prone attention: Jeffrey Younger, James’s father, wants to keep his son’s body intact, while Anne Georgulas, James’s mother, wants to allow for “treatment” that would physically and chemically castrate him.

The havoc that divorce wreaks in a child’s life is mainstage in this tragic case. Most of us children of divorce quickly learn to act one way with mom and another way with dad. We can switch to a different set of rules, diet, family members, bedtime, screen time limits, and political convictions in that 20-minute ride from mom’s house to dad’s.

Unfortunately for little James, the adaptation he had to make went far beyond meat-lover’s pizza at dad’s house and cauliflower crusts at mom’s: it meant losing one of the most sacred aspects of his identity—his maleness. His dad loved him as a boy, so he got to be himself when he was at dad’s house. But mom showered love on the version of James she preferred, the one with the imaginary vagina.

So, as kids are so apt to do, when James was at her house, he conformed to the person his mother loved. This week a jury ruled that James must live like he’s at mom’s permanently, where he can “transition” fully, regardless of the cost to his mental and physical health….

Beyond the “tale of two households” that set up this court battle, and the ideological madness on display in the proceedings, something else about this case deserves our attention: one of the two parents engaged in this custodial tug-of-war isn’t biologically related to little James. Care to guess which one? Do you think it’s the parent who wants to keep him physically whole? It’s not.

During her testimony Georgulas stated she is not the biological mother of James or his twin brother Jude. She purchased eggs from a biological stranger. This illuminates a well-known truth in the world of family and parenthood: biological parents are the most connected to, invested in, and protective of their children.

Despite the jury’s unfathomable decision to award custody of James to his demented mother, there is hope for James. Walt Hyer picks up the story (“Texas Court Gives 7-Year-Old Boy A Reprieve From Transgender Treatments“, The Federalist, October 25, 2019):

Judge Kim Cooks put aside the disappointing jury’s verdict of Monday against the father and ruled Thursday that Jeffrey Younger now has equal joint conservatorship with the mother, Dr. Anne Georgulas, of their twin boys.

The mother no longer has unfettered authority to manipulate her 7-year old boy into gender transition. Instead both mother and father will share equally in medical, psychological, and other decision-making for the boys. Additionally, the judge changed the custody terms to give Younger an equal amount of visitation time with his sons, something that had been severely limited….

For those who need a little background, here’s a recap. “Six-year-old James is caught in a gender identity nightmare. Under his mom’s care in Dallas, Texas, James obediently lives as a trans girl named ‘Luna.’ But given the choice when he’s with dad, he’s all boy—his sex from conception.

“In their divorce proceedings, the mother has charged the father with child abuse for not affirming James as transgender, has sought restraining orders against him, and is seeking to terminate his parental rights. She is also seeking to require him to pay for the child’s visits to a transgender-affirming therapist and transgender medical alterations, which may include hormonal sterilization starting at age eight.”

All the evidence points to a boy torn between pleasing two parents, not an overwhelming preference to be a girl….

Younger said at the trial he was painted as paranoid and in need of several years of psychotherapy because he doesn’t believe his young son wants to be a girl. But many experts agree that transgendering young children is hazardous.

At the trial, Younger’s expert witnesses testified about these dangers and provided supporting evidence. Dr. Stephen Levine, a psychiatrist renowned for his work on human sexuality, testified that social transition—treating them as the opposite sex—increases the chance that a child will remain gender dysphoric. Dr. Paul W. Hruz, a pediatric endocrinologist and professor of pediatrics and cellular biology at Washington University School of Medicine in Saint Louis, testified that the risks of social transition are so great that the “treatment” cannot be recommended at all.

Are these doctors paranoid, too? Disagreement based on scientific evidence is now considered paranoia requiring “thought reprogramming.” That’s scary stuff when enforced by the courts….

The jury’s 11-1 vote to keep sole managing conservatorship from the father shows how invasive and acceptable this idea of confusing children and transitioning them has become. It’s like we are watching a bad movie where scientific evidence is ignored and believing the natural truth of male and female biology is considered paranoia. I can testify from my life experience the trans-life movie ends in unhappiness, regret, detransitions, or sadly, suicide.

The moral of the story is that the brainwashing of the American public by the media may have advanced to the tipping point. The glory that was America may soon vanish with a whimper.

Spygate (a.k.a. Russiagate) Revisited

I posted my analysis of “Spygate” well over a year ago, and have continually updated the appended list of supporting reference. The list continues to grow as evidence mounts to support the thesis that the Trump-Russia collusion story was part of a plot hatched at the highest levels of the Obama administration and executed within the White House, the CIA, and the Department of Justice (including especially the FBI).

Margot Cleveland addresses the case of Michael Flynn (“Sidney Powell Drops Bombshell Showing How The FBI Trapped Michael Flynn“, The Federalist, October 25, 2019):

Earlier this week, Michael Flynn’s star attorney, Sidney Powell, filed under seal a brief in reply to federal prosecutors’ claims that they have already given Flynn’s defense team all the evidence they are required by law to provide. A minimally redacted copy of the reply brief has just been made public, and with it shocking details of the deep state’s plot to destroy Flynn….

What is most striking, though, is the timeline Powell pieced together from publicly reported text messages withheld from the defense team and excerpts from documents still sealed from public view. The sequence Powell lays out shows that a team of “high-ranking FBI officials orchestrated an ambush-interview of the new president’s National Security Advisor, not for the purpose of discovering any evidence of criminal activity—they already had tapes of all the relevant conversations about which they questioned Mr. Flynn—but for the purpose of trapping him into making statements they could allege as false” [in an attempt to “flip” Flynn in the Spygate affair]….

The timeline continued to May 10 when McCabe opened an “obstruction” investigation into President Trump. That same day, Powell writes, “in an important but still wrongly redacted text, Strzok says: ‘We need to lock in [redacted]. In a formal chargeable way. Soon.’” Page replies: “I agree. I’ve been pushing and I’ll reemphasize with Bill [Priestap].”

Powell argues that “both from the space of the redaction, its timing, and other events, the defense strongly suspects the redacted name is Flynn.” That timing includes Robert Mueller’s appointment as special counsel on May 17, and then the reentering of Flynn’s 302 on May 31, 2017, “for Special Counsel Mueller to use.”

The only surprise (to me) is evidence cited by Cleveland that Comey was deeply embroiled in the plot. I have heretofore written off Comey as an opportunist who was out to get Trump for his own reasons.

In any event, Cleveland reinforces my expressed view of former CIA director John Brennan’s central role in the plot (“All The Russia Collusion Clues Are Beginning To Point Back To John Brennan“, The Federalist, October 25, 2019):

[I]f the media reports are true, and [Attorney General William] Barr and [U.S. attorney John] Durham have turned their focus to Brennan and the intelligence community, it is not a matter of vengeance; it is a matter of connecting the dots in congressional testimony and reports, leaks, and media spin, and facts exposed during the three years of panting about supposed Russia collusion. And it all started with Brennan.

That’s not how the story went, of course. The company story ran that the FBI launched its Crossfire Hurricane surveillance of the Trump campaign on July 31, 2016, after learning that a young Trump advisor, George Papadopoulos, had bragged to an Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton….

But as the Special Counsel Robert Mueller report made clear, it wasn’t merely Papadopoulos’ bar-room boast at issue: It was “a series of contacts between Trump Campaign officials and individuals with ties to the Russian government,” that the DOJ and FBI, and later the Special Counsel’s office investigated.

And who put the FBI on to those supposedly suspicious contacts? Former CIA Director John Brennan….

The evidence suggests … that Brennan’s CIA and the intelligence community did much more than merely pass on details about “contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign” to the FBI. The evidence suggests that the CIA and intelligence community—including potentially the intelligence communities of the UK, Italy, and Australia—created the contacts and interactions that they then reported to the FBI as suspicious.

The Deep State in action.

More Evidence for Why I Don’t Believe in “Climate Change”

I’ve already adduced a lot of evidence in “Why I Don’t Believe in Climate Change” and “Climate Change“. One of the scientists to whom I give credence is Dr. Roy Spencer of the Climate Research Center at the University of Alabama-Huntsville. Spencer agrees that CO2 emissions must have an effect on atmospheric temperatures, but is doubtful about the magnitude of the effect.

He revisits a point that he has made before, namely, that the there is no “preferred” state of the climate (“Does the Climate System Have a Preferred Average State? Chaos and the Forcing-Feedback Paradigm“, Roy Spencer, Ph.D., October 25, 2019):

If there is … a preferred average state, then the forcing-feedback paradigm of climate change is valid. In that system of thought, any departure of the global average temperature from the Nature-preferred state is resisted by radiative “feedback”, that is, changes in the radiative energy balance of the Earth in response to the too-warm or too-cool conditions. Those radiative changes would constantly be pushing the system back to its preferred temperature state…

[W]hat if the climate system undergoes its own, substantial chaotic changes on long time scales, say 100 to 1,000 years? The IPCC assumes this does not happen. But the ocean has inherently long time scales — decades to millennia. An unusually large amount of cold bottom water formed at the surface in the Arctic in one century might take hundreds or even thousands of years before it re-emerges at the surface, say in the tropics. This time lag can introduce a wide range of complex behaviors in the climate system, and is capable of producing climate change all by itself.

Even the sun, which we view as a constantly burning ball of gas, produces an 11-year cycle in sunspot activity, and even that cycle changes in strength over hundreds of years. It would seem that every process in nature organizes itself on preferred time scales, with some amount of cyclic behavior.

This chaotic climate change behavior would impact the validity of the forcing-feedback paradigm as well as our ability to determine future climate states and the sensitivity of the climate system to increasing CO2. If the climate system has different, but stable and energy-balanced, states, it could mean that climate change is too complex to predict with any useful level of accuracy [emphasis added].

Which is exactly what I say in “Modeling and Science“.

Thoughts on Mortality

I ruminated about it in “The Unique ‘Me’“:

Children, at some age, will begin to understand that there is death, the end of a human life (in material form, at least). At about the same time, in my experience, they will begin to speculate about the possibility that they might have been someone else: a child born in China, for instance.

Death eventually loses its fascination, though it may come to mind from time to time as one grows old. (Will I wake up in the morning? Is this the day that my heart stops beating? Will I be able to break my fall when the heart attack happens, or will I just go down hard and die of a fractured skull?)

Bill Vallicella (Maverick Philosopher) has been ruminating about it in recent posts. This is from his “Six Types of Death Fear” (October 24, 2019):

1. There is the fear of nonbeing, of annihilation….

2. There is the fear of surviving one’s bodily death as a ghost, unable to cut earthly attachments and enter nonbeing and oblivion….

3. There is the fear of post-mortem horrors….

4. There is the fear of the unknown….

5. There is the fear of the Lord and his judgment….

6. Fear of one’s own judgment or the judgment of posterity.

There is also — if one is in good health and enjoying life — the fear of losing what seems to be a good thing, namely, the enjoyment of life itself.

Assortative Mating, Income Inequality, and the Crocodile Tears of “Progressives”

Mating among human beings has long been assortative in various ways, in that the selection of a mate has been circumscribed or determined by geographic proximity, religious affiliation, clan rivalries or alliances, social relationships or enmities, etc. The results have sometimes been propitious, as Gregory Cochran points out in “An American Dilemma” (West Hunter, October 24, 2019):

Today we’re seeing clear evidence of genetic differences between classes: causal differences.  People with higher socioeconomic status have ( on average) higher EA polygenic scores. Higher scores for cognitive ability, as well. This is of course what every IQ test has shown for many decades….

Let’s look at Ashkenazi Jews in the United States. They’re very successful, averaging upper-middle-class.   So you’d think that they must have high polygenic scores for EA  (and they do).

Were they a highly selected group?  No: most were from Eastern Europe. “Immigration of Eastern Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews, in 1880–1914, brought a large, poor, traditional element to New York City. They were Orthodox or Conservative in religion. They founded the Zionist movement in the United States, and were active supporters of the Socialist party and labor unions. Economically, they concentrated in the garment industry.”

And there were a lot of them: it’s harder for a sample to be very unrepresentative when it makes up a big fraction of the entire population.

But that can’t be: that would mean that Europeans Jews were just smarter than average.  And that would be racist.

Could it be result of some kind of favoritism?  Obviously not, because that would be anti-Semitic.

Cochran obviously intends sarcasm in the final two paragraphs. The evidence for the heritability of intelligence is, as he says, quite strong. (See, for example, my “Race and Reason: The Achievement Gap — Causes and Implications” and “Intelligence“.) Were it not for assortative mating among Ashkenazi Jews, they wouldn’t be the most intelligent ethnic-racial group.

Branko Milanovic specifically addresses the “hot” issue in “Rich Like Me: How Assortative Mating Is Driving Income Inequality“, Quillette, October 18, 2019):

Recent research has documented a clear increase in the prevalence of homogamy, or assortative mating (people of the same or similar education status and income level marrying each other). A study based on a literature review combined with decennial data from the American Community Survey showed that the association between partners’ level of education was close to zero in 1970; in every other decade through 2010, the coefficient was positive, and it kept on rising….

At the same time, the top decile of young male earners have been much less likely to marry young women who are in the bottom decile of female earners. The rate has declined steadily from 13.4 percent to under 11 percent. In other words, high-earning young American men who in the 1970s were just as likely to marry high-earning as low-earning young women now display an almost three-to- one preference in favor of high-earning women. An even more dramatic change happened for women: the percentage of young high-earning women marrying young high-earning men increased from just under 13 percent to 26.4 percent, while the percentage of rich young women marrying poor young men halved. From having no preference between rich and poor men in the 1970s, women currently prefer rich men by a ratio of almost five to one….

High income and wealth inequality in the United States used to be justified by the claim that everyone had the opportunity to climb up the ladder of success, regardless of family background. This idea became known as the American Dream. The emphasis was on equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome….

The American Dream has remained powerful both in the popular imagination and among economists. But it has begun to be seriously questioned during the past ten years or so, when relevant data have become available for the first time. Looking at twenty-two countries around the world, Miles Corak showed in 2013 that there was a positive correlation between high inequality in any one year and a strong correlation between parents’ and children’s incomes (i.e., low income mobility). This result makes sense, because high inequality today implies that the children of the rich will have, compared to the children of the poor, much greater opportunities. Not only can they count on greater inheritance, but they will also benefit from better education, better social capital obtained through their parents, and many other intangible advantages of wealth. None of those things are available to the children of the poor. But while the American Dream thus was somewhat deflated by the realization that income mobility is greater in more egalitarian countries than in the United States, these results did not imply that intergenerational mobility had actually gotten any worse over time.

Yet recent research shows that intergenerational mobility has in fact been declining. Using a sample of parent-son and parent-daughter pairs, and comparing a cohort born between 1949 and 1953 to one born between 1961 and 1964, Jonathan Davis and Bhashkar Mazumder found significantly lower intergenerational mobility for the latter cohort.

Milanovic doesn’t mention the heritabiliity of intelligence, which is bound to be generally higher among children of high-IQ parents (like Ashkenzi Jews and East Asians), and the strong correlation between intelligence and income. Does this mean that assortative mating should be banned and “excess” wealth should be confiscated and redistributed? Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders certainly favor the second prescription, which would have a disastrous effect on the incentive to become rich and therefore on economic growth.

I addressed these matters in “Intelligence, Assortative Mating, and Social Engineering“:

So intelligence is real; it’s not confined to “book learning”; it has a strong influence on one’s education, work, and income (i.e., class); and because of those things it leads to assortative mating, which (on balance) reinforces class differences. Or so the story goes.

But assortative mating is nothing new. What might be new, or more prevalent than in the past, is a greater tendency for intermarriage within the smart-educated-professional class instead of across class lines, and for the smart-educated-professional class to live in “enclaves” with their like, and to produce (generally) bright children who’ll (mostly) follow the lead of their parents.

How great are those tendencies? And in any event, so what? Is there a potential social problem that will  have to be dealt with by government because it poses a severe threat to the nation’s political stability or economic well-being? Or is it just a step in the voluntary social evolution of the United States — perhaps even a beneficial one?…

[Lengthy quotations from statistical evidence and expert commentary.]

What does it all mean? For one thing, it means that the children of top-quintile parents reach the top quintile about 30 percent of the time. For another thing, it means that, unsurprisingly, the children of top-quintile parents reach the top quintile more often than children of second-quintile parents, who reach the top quintile more often than children of third-quintile parents, and so on.

There is nevertheless a growing, quasi-hereditary, smart-educated-professional-affluent class. It’s almost a sure thing, given the rise of the two-professional marriage, and given the correlation between the intelligence of parents and that of their children, which may be as high as 0.8. However, as a fraction of the total population, membership in the new class won’t grow as fast as membership in the “lower” classes because birth rates are inversely related to income.

And the new class probably will be isolated from the “lower” classes. Most members of the new class work and live where their interactions with persons of “lower” classes are restricted to boss-subordinate and employer-employee relationships. Professionals, for the most part, work in office buildings, isolated from the machinery and practitioners of “blue collar” trades.

But the segregation of housing on class lines is nothing new. People earn more, in part, so that they can live in nicer houses in nicer neighborhoods. And the general rise in the real incomes of Americans has made it possible for persons in the higher income brackets to afford more luxurious homes in more luxurious neighborhoods than were available to their parents and grandparents. (The mansions of yore, situated on “Mansion Row,” were occupied by the relatively small number of families whose income and wealth set them widely apart from the professional class of the day.) So economic segregation is, and should be, as unsurprising as a sunrise in the east.

None of this will assuage progressives, who like to claim that intelligence (like race) is a social construct (while also claiming that Republicans are stupid); who believe that incomes should be more equal (theirs excepted); who believe in “diversity,” except when it comes to where most of them choose to live and school their children; and who also believe that economic mobility should be greater than it is — just because. In their superior minds, there’s an optimum income distribution and an optimum degree of economic mobility — just as there is an optimum global temperature, which must be less than the ersatz one that’s estimated by combining temperatures measured under various conditions and with various degrees of error.

The irony of it is that the self-segregated, smart-educated-professional-affluent class is increasingly progressive….

So I ask progressives, given that you have met the new class and it is you, what do you want to do about it? Is there a social problem that might arise from greater segregation of socio-economic classes, and is it severe enough to warrant government action. Or is the real “problem” the possibility that some people — and their children and children’s children, etc. — might get ahead faster than other people — and their children and children’s children, etc.?

Do you want to apply the usual progressive remedies? Penalize success through progressive (pun intended) personal income-tax rates and the taxation of corporate income; force employers and universities to accept low-income candidates (whites included) ahead of better-qualified ones (e.g., your children) from higher-income brackets; push “diversity” in your neighborhood by expanding the kinds of low-income housing programs that helped to bring about the Great Recession; boost your local property and sales taxes by subsidizing “affordable housing,” mandating the payment of a “living wage” by the local government, and applying that mandate to contractors seeking to do business with the local government; and on and on down the list of progressive policies?

Of course you do, because you’re progressive. And you’ll support such things in the vain hope that they’ll make a difference. But not everyone shares your naive beliefs in blank slates, equal ability, and social homogenization (which you don’t believe either, but are too wedded to your progressive faith to admit). What will actually be accomplished — aside from tokenism — is social distrust and acrimony, which had a lot to do with the electoral victory of Donald J. Trump, and economic stagnation, which hurts the “little people” a lot more than it hurts the smart-educated-professional-affluent class….

The solution to the pseudo-problem of economic inequality is benign neglect, which isn’t a phrase that falls lightly from the lips of progressives. For more than 80 years, a lot of Americans — and too many pundits, professors, and politicians — have been led astray by that one-off phenomenon: the Great Depression. FDR and his sycophants and their successors created and perpetuated the myth that an activist government saved America from ruin and totalitarianism. The truth of the matter is that FDR’s policies prolonged the Great Depression by several years, and ushered in soft despotism, which is just “friendly” fascism. And all of that happened at the behest of people of above-average intelligence and above-average incomes.

Progressivism is the seed-bed of eugenics, and still promotes eugenics through abortion on demand (mainly to rid the world of black babies). My beneficial version of eugenics would be the sterilization of everyone with an IQ above 125 or top-40-percent income who claims to be progressive [emphasis added].

Enough said.