Gavin Newsom hates human advancement

 Oh, does the title seem a bit hyperbolic?

I'm not sure what else you'd call this:

Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a lawsuit Saturday against five major oil companies and their subsidiaries, seeking compensation for damages caused by climate change.

The suit, filed in San Francisco County Superior Court by Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta, accuses the companies of knowing about the link between fossil fuels and catastrophic climate change for decades but suppressing and spreading disinformation on the topic to delay climate action. The New York Times first reported the case Friday.

The suit also claims that Exxon, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and BP — as well as the American Petroleum Institute industry trade group — have continued their deception to today, promoting themselves as “green” with small investments in alternative fuels, while primarily investing in fossil fuel products.

It seeks to create a fund that oil companies would pay into to help the state recover from extreme weather events and prepare for further effects of climate change. It argues that California has already spent tens of billions of dollars on responding to climate change, with costs expected to rise significantly.

Talk about inflamed language:

“The companies that have polluted our air, choked our skies with smoke, wreaked havoc on our water cycle, and contaminated our lands must be made to mitigate the harms they have brought upon the State,” the suit says.

Villainizing those in the business of bestowing comfort, convenience and safety on American society, extracting the energy form that has raised living standards and life expectancies exponentially all over the world for over a century. 

Real smart.  

 

 

Tuesday roundup

 I don't know how politically feasible this would be, but from a procedural standpoint, it would do the trick, it seems to me. Steve Milloy, writing at the Wall Street Journal, outlines the way the Senate - as currently composed - could keep the incoming Biden administration from re-imposong the Paris climate accord:

To prevent the Paris Climate Accord from taking on . . .  undue power [due to a Supreme Court decision similar to the way the rescinding of the DACA program was undone], Mr. Trump should submit it to the Senate, and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell should schedule a quick vote. It would certainly be rejected—ratification requires a two-thirds vote—and it is unlikely any court could subsequently resurrect a legislatively tossed treaty. Without the help of judges, Mr. Biden would need a winning ratification vote to make the accord binding, which he likely couldn’t get no matter how well Democrats do in Georgia’s January runoffs and the 2022 midterm elections. 

Mr. McConnell could also call a ratification vote after Mr. Biden’s inauguration, even if Mr. Trump does nothing. This would similarly elevate the treaty’s status and make it difficult for Mr. Biden to bind his successors to his executive actions.

I think there would be enough Senators with thinking at least somewhat along the lines of Joe Manchin that a Senate vote would yield the result depicted by Milloy: 

West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat, hit back at Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after being the subject of a viral tweet by the Democratic socialist last month, telling The New York Times that she’s “more active on Twitter than anything else.”

At the time, Manchin vowed to stand up against the radicals in his party, particularly on the subject of defunding the police.

“Defund the police? Defund, my butt,” he tweeted. “I'm a proud West Virginia Democrat. We are the party of working men and women. We want to protect Americans' jobs & healthcare. We do not have some crazy socialist agenda, and we do not believe in defunding the police.”

He elaborated:

The senator continued: “We’re not going to defund the police, we’re not for the new green deal. That’s not going to happen. We’re not for Medicare for All — we can’t even pay for Medicare for some.”

Mary Townsend, writing at Plough, explores the influence of Louisa May Alcott on French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir: 

Born in 1908, Beauvoir grew up in the thick emotive haze of leftover nineteenth-century French Catholicism, carried into pre-war France. She was educated in the same sort of immersive religiosity that provided plenty of opportunities for spiritual heroism from very young girls in particular, the same sort of upbringing that produced Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Flower, who aspired to sainthood from her very early youth and in her death in 1897. Beauvoir, who for several years aspired to be a nun, writes of the exquisite transports of confessional tears, imagining herself swooning in the arms of angels; she prided herself on inventing mortifications in her very few moments alone. But unlike Thérèse, Beauvoir found no lasting comfort within or even distantly alongside Christianity.

It was not by cutting herself off from transports of emotion or by abandoning the metaphysical all-or-nothing that she eventually found an image of adulthood she could live with; nor could the attractions of philosophy, which she first came across through the Thomism of her girls’ school, or the Catholic social justice group she volunteered for, do the trick. It was rather literature, as a kind of Art, and herself as Author, that managed to hold the strongest and most sustainable appeal as vocation. If you can believe it, the first non-saintly individual Beauvoir found really attractive was the fictional American Protestant, Jo March, one of the heroines of Louisa May Alcott’s wildly popular 1868 novel, Little Women. Beauvoir couldn’t quite escape the nineteenth century after all.

Like so many readers, the young Simone was passionately invested in the persona of Jo as a writer, taking up the genre of the short story to imitate her. Inevitably, she also had extremely strong opinions on the Laurie question, the wealthy neighbor who proposes to one and then another of the March sisters. Opening the second volume Good Wives by accident, she came upon Laurie and Amy’s engagement (without the help of Jo’s refusal for context), and her response was immediate and absolute: “I hated Louisa M. Alcott for it.” But the similarities between the Marches’ style of family life (fictionalized from Alcott’s own experience) and her own gave her pleasure: “they were taught, as I was, that a cultivated mind and moral righteousness was better than money.” This was something to hold on to, the more so because like the Marches, and like Alcott herself, Beauvoir’s family dealt with straitened means, the memory of better times, and the all-too-visible wealth and comfort of neighbors and relations. The reward of their virtue was to be found in the causes they took up: for Alcott, abolitionism and suffrage, and for Beauvoir, existentialism, Marxism, and her own variety of existentialist Marxist feminism. The necessity for strict social circumspection in the behavior of daughters was lost on Simone, Louisa, and Jo alike.

How did de Beauvoir wind up with the philosophical stance that she did?

I think Beauvoir settled on atheism because she was unable to imagine an intellectual Christianity. This was not because intellectualism was lacking from the Thomism or Catholic existentialism that she had come across, but because what she wanted was the freedom of a Christian, the freedom to understand God, truth, the Absolute on her own terms, and she was told that there was no way to do this. There’s an irony in her captivation with Sartre’s vision, which she found novel, of the freedom to will one’s own future – all too strangely reminiscent of the argument Luther made in 1520. For Beauvoir, the blind nationalism of the French Catholic church, its triumphal support of colonization, its unwillingness to call private property into question, failed to answer her desire for understanding a world in thrall to capitalism. One must think of Beauvoir as a rebel angel.

 

Matthew Continetti, writing at the American Enterprise Institute website, reminds us what a remarkable human being Natan Sharansky is:

Sharansky was born in 1948 in the Ukrainian city of Stalino. His given name was Anatoly. His parents were educated professionals who downplayed their Jewish identity. They did not want to risk political and social reprisal. “The only real Jewish experience I had was facing anti-Semitism,” he writes. The precocious youth spent his early years playing chess. He learned to navigate a Soviet system that maintained its rule through fear. He became captive to doublethink. He repeated official lies and myths not because it was the right thing to do, but because it was the safe thing to do.

Sharansky enrolled in the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. “I dived into the republic of science,” he writes. “This world seemed insulated from the doublethink I had mastered at home.” Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War prompted him to discover his heritage. “Realizing how little I knew about this country that so many people were now asking about made me hungry to learn more.”

Sharansky studied representations of Biblical scenes hanging from the walls of Moscow’s galleries. He came across a samizdat copy of Leon Uris’s Exodus, a potboiler historical fiction that describes Israel’s founding. “It drew me into Jewish history, and Israel’s history, through my Russian roots. It helped me see myself as part of the story.”

The following year the Soviet nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov wrote his “Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom.” Sakharov argued for freedom of inquiry. He demanded the protection of human rights. “Sakharov was warning that life in a dictatorship offers two choices: either you overcome your fear and stand for truth, or you remain a slave to fear, no matter how fancy your titles, no matter how big your dacha,” Sharansky writes. “Ultimately, I couldn’t escape myself or my conscience.”

Inspired by Sakharov, Sharansky applied for a visa to immigrate to Israel in 1973. He was rejected. He was unable to leave the Soviet Union. That made him a refusenik. “My life as a doublethinker, which I had consciously begun at age five the day Stalin died, was over. The professional world I had built for myself, my castle of science, collapsed instantly. Now, I could say what I thought, do what I said, and say what I did.”

The twin concerns of Sharansky’s life—identity and freedom—became fused. “Democracy—a free life in a free society—is essential because it satisfies a human yearning to choose one’s path, to pursue one’s goals,” he wrote in Defending Identity. “It broadens possibilities and provides opportunity for self-advancement. Identity, a life of commitment, is essential because it satisfies a human longing to become part of something bigger than oneself. It adds layers of meaning to our lives and deepens the human experience.” Freedom offers choice. Identity provides direction.

It would be a while before Sharansky could enjoy his own freedom. By 1975, he was working with Sakharov. The next year he formed the Moscow Helsinki Group to pressure the Soviets to live up to the commitments they had made in basket three of the Helsinki Accords. The KGB arrested him in 1977. “I spent the next nine years in prison and labor camp,” he wrote in Fear No Evil, “mainly on a special disciplinary regime, including more than 400 days in punishment cells, and more than 200 days on hunger strikes.”

In prison he played chess games in his head. “I always won.” He would tease the guards with anti-Soviet jokes. He was not afraid. What could they do—put him in jail? He communicated with his fellow inmates through morse code. They would drain the toilets and speak to one another through pipes. He read Soviet propaganda esoterically, between the lines. He figured out what was actually going on by determining what the authorities had omitted.

Sharansky was in prison when he heard that President Ronald Reagan had called the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire.” The year was 1983. Reagan had uttered the famous—and controversial—words in a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals. “It was one of the most important, freedom-affirming declarations, and we all instantly knew it,” Sharansky said in a 2004 interview. “For us, that was the moment that really marked the end for them, and the beginning for us. The lie had been exposed and could never, ever be untold now. This was the end of Lenin’s ‘Great October Bolshevik Revolution’ and the beginning of a new revolution, a freedom revolution—Reagan’s Revolution.”

Sharansky and his wife Avital had been apart since her immigration to Israel the day after they married in 1974. Throughout his imprisonment she worked tirelessly on his behalf, and on behalf of other refuseniks and dissidents. She found an ally in Israel’s U.N. ambassador, Benjamin Netanyahu. She met with Reagan, who began asking Soviet leaders to release Sharansky. Gorbachev freed him on February 11, 1986. He was reunited with Avital in Frankfurt Airport. They flew to Israel. “‘It was just one long day,’ Avital sighed later that night, in our new home in Jerusalem. ‘I arrived in Israel in the morning. You arrived in the evening. It was just one very, very long day in between.’”

He became Natan. He entered Israeli politics. He helped resettle one million immigrants from the former Soviet Union. He opposed the Oslo peace accords. He resigned from Ariel Sharon’s government over the policy of unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. His work as an activist was devoted to building what Reagan had described as “the infrastructure of democracy.” Sharansky distinguished between free societies and fear societies. “The structural elements that enable democratic societies to respect human rights—independent courts, the rule of law, a free press, a freely elected government, meaningful opposition parties, not to mention human rights organizations—were all glaringly absent in fear societies,” he wrote in The Case for Democracy (2004).

This utterance from Joseph diGenova may be the most disturbing example of Trumpism denial of the election results yet:

On Monday President Trump’s campaign lawyer and former U.S. Attorney Joe diGenova said that fired Trump cybersecurity chief Chris Krebs should be executed for saying that the election was the “most secure in United States history.”

DiGenova, appearing on the Howie Carr show, which simulcasts on Newsmax, took aim at Krebs as an aside during a wheels-off segment full of false claims about how the United States election had been rigged.

“Anybody who thinks that this election went well, like that idiot Krebs who used to be the head of cybersecurity [for Trump]. That guy is a class A moron. He should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot,” diGenova said.

This is not just a random Parler troll trying to get attention. This is an attorney speaking on behalf of the President of the United States’ re-election campaign. And while it may read like a macabre joke, the direct nature of diGenova’s comments make it impossible to interpret as anything other than a real wish/threat against a public servant for offering truthful testimony.

Carr responded to the statement with an awkward pause and a laugh and then changed the subject. Some shit is so weird that it even makes Newsmax people uncomfortable.

Matt Walsh at Daily Wire on the absurdity of making Sarah Fuller's field goal attempt for Vanderbilt into a historic occasion:

 On Saturday, Sarah Fuller became the first woman to suit up and take the field for a Power-5 football team. The media has declared Fuller’s performance as Vanderbilt’s kicker a groundbreaking, glass ceiling shattering, historic moment. Many in media and the sports world echoed Hillary Clinton’s sentiment that Fuller proved “women and girls belong on every playing field—quite literally.” In a game of escalating hyperbole, ESPN eventually claimed victory by declaring that Fuller has achieved “immortality” through her play in Vanderbilt’s game against Missouri.

Admittedly, she was spectacular. Fuller went 5 for 5 on field goals, booted 3 touchbacks past the end zone, and even made a game saving tackle as the clock expired in regulation. Just kidding. Actually, she kicked one time, it went 30 yards, Vanderbilt lost 41 to zero, and the head coach was fired after the game. This is reality, not a movie. And in real life, women embarrass themselves when they try to play against male athletes.

Walsh says that a clear-eyed view of the situation reveals how insulting the adulation is for women:

All of this patronizing nonsense surrounding a bad kick from a woman whose ego perhaps exceeds her abilities on the football field is merely annoying for me as a man. For women, though, it is much worse than annoying. It is patronizing, degrading, and insulting.  Are women really so unimpressive and bereft of achievement that we have to treat them like we would a small child who draws a bunch of scribbles on a sheet of construction paper and claims that it’s a picture of a tree? We congratulate the small child for his bad drawing because we do not expect children to do any better than that, and because they are emotionally fragile and in need of constant positive affirmation. Is this the case for grown women? Must we stand and applaud and shout “great kick” when, in truth, it was a very bad kick? Are women so pathetic that we have to call even their failures achievements? Not just achievements — but historic achievements? Is that how sad and mediocre women are, that we must stoop to this?

Answer: no. That’s how sad and mediocre feminists think women are, and perhaps are themselves. But it’s not the reality, and it’s not what I think or what any rational person thinks. Women are capable of extraordinary things in many facets of life. They also are capable of extraordinary things in the realm of athletics. Simone Biles comes immediately to mind. But women cannot compete with men in sports designed by and for men. 

Samuel Goldman, writing at Law & Liberty, says that how we define liberty is going to determine how we can defend it:

 iberty is plural, not singular. Rather than a gross concept outside history, institutions, or social structures, it is a “relational claim involving agents, actions, legitimacy, and ends.” To speak coherently, we need to specify the freedom of whom, to do what, under which rules, and for what purposes. The freedom of Socrates to philosophize is not the same as the freedom of Atheniansto participate in ruling and being ruled. Neither bears much resemblance to the liberty of a Christian described by Martin Luther.

Which liberties require defense? In the spirit of unfashionable opinion, I want to suggest that the answer can be described as the liberties of the modern West.

Scott Atlas has resigned his position as special advisor to the president on the pandemic. 

 

 

 

 

Tuesday roundup

Hold on to your wigs, folks. Today's roundup is a thunderous Niagara Falls-level cascade of must-reads. "Doozy" and "humdinger" fall far short of being adequate depictions.

I gave some thought to breaking this into individual posts. There will be some fairly lengthy excerpting to the linked source material. But I think consolidation in one spot is going to work best.

Matt Taibbi comes at his journalism and opinion writing from a left-of-center perspective, but he's certainly not one who can be pigeonholed. The son of an NBC News reporter, he spent several years in Russia, Uzbekistan (where he played professional baseball) and Mongolia (where he played professional basketball). He's a freelance writer and podcaster, with stints along the way at Rolling Stone and The New York Press. He doesn't mince words, which is probably the source of his appeal for Bill Maher, who had him cover the 2008 presidential election cycle for Real Time.

Lately he's been less inclined to guard his lefty bona fides than ever.

His latest at his Substack site is a righteous takedown of the book White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo. Searing stuff:

A core principle of the academic movement that shot through elite schools in America since the early nineties was the view that individual rights, humanism, and the democratic process are all just stalking-horses for white supremacy. The concept, as articulated in books like former corporate consultant Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility(Amazon’s #1 seller!) reduces everything, even the smallest and most innocent human interactions, to racial power contests. 

It’s been mind-boggling to watch White Fragility celebrated in recent weeks. When it surged past a Hunger Games book on bestseller lists, USA Today cheered, “American readers are more interested in combatting racism than in literary escapism.” When DiAngelo appeared on The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon gushed, “I know… everyone wants to talk to you right now!” White Fragility has been pitched as an uncontroversial road-map for fighting racism, at a time when after the murder of George Floyd Americans are suddenly (and appropriately) interested in doing just that. Except this isn’t a straightforward book about examining one’s own prejudices. Have the people hyping this impressively crazy book actually read it?

DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category. 

If your category is “white,” bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy (“Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities… Whiteness has always been predicated on blackness”), which naturally means “a positive white identity is an impossible goal.” 

DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except “strive to be less white.” To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as “leaving the stress-inducing situation” – is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the “ordeal by water” (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.

DiAngelo’s writing style is pure pain. The lexicon favored by intersectional theorists of this type is built around the same principles as Orwell’s Newspeak: it banishes ambiguity, nuance, and feeling and structures itself around sterile word pairs, like racist and antiracist, platform and deplatform, center and silence, that reduce all thinking to a series of binary choices. Ironically, Donald Trump does something similar, only with words like “AMAZING!” and “SAD!” that are simultaneously more childish and livelier. 

Perhaps the most irritating thing about SCOTUS Chief Justice John Roberts's chiming in with the court's left-leaners in the June Medical Services v. Russo case is the fact that in a nearly identical case about a similar Texas law, he dissented when the majority upheld it. He was right to do so then, of course. His flimsy excuse for voting the other way this time is that, hey, a precedent was set. Stare decisis, you know. That's the kind of logic that would have kept Dredd Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson in place. A National Review editorial today points out that this fealty to precedent is not a consistent thing with him:

He has been perfectly willing to overrule precedents in the past. Some of them were of much longer standing. Janus v. AFSCME (2018), on public-sector unions, overruled Abood v. Detroit (1977). Some of them involved cases that presented nearly identical fact patterns. Gonzales v. Carhart(2007) upheld a ban on partial-birth abortion of a type that had been struck down in Stenberg v. Carhart (2000).

The piece says that Roberts "has reinforced the notion that he is the most politically calculating of the justices."

A die-hard lefty activist who started his path down that road going to Nicaragua in the 1980s to show solidarity with the Sandinistas and later went to Asia to expose working conditions in Nike factories has, at least on the subject of the global climate, had a conversion experience:

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem. 

I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30. 

But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.

Here are some facts few people know:

• Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction” 
• The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”
• Climate change is not making natural disasters worse
• Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003
• The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska
• The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California
• Carbon emissions are declining in most rich nations and have been declining in Britain, Germany, and France since the mid-1970s 
• Netherlands became rich not poor while adapting to life below sea level
• We produce 25% more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter
• Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change
• Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels
• Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture

I know that the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism. 

In reality, the above facts come from the best-available scientific studies, including those conducted by or accepted by the IPCC, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other leading scientific bodies. 

Brace yourself, buddy. Your former associates are going to try to make your life miserable.

I really, really gave consideration to devoting an entire post to this one. We've had the book from Bolton, the letter from Mattis, the remarks from John Kelly, but there's never been anything so comprehensively indicting about what a threat to national security the Very Stable Genius is as this expose by Carl Bernstein at CNN:

In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America's principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials -- including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff -- that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations. 

The calls caused former top Trump deputies -- including national security advisers H.R. McMaster and John Bolton, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and White House chief of staff John Kelly, as well as intelligence officials -- to conclude that the President was often "delusional," as two sources put it, in his dealings with foreign leaders. The sources said there was little evidence that the President became more skillful or competent in his telephone conversations with most heads of state over time. Rather, he continued to believe that he could either charm, jawbone or bully almost any foreign leader into capitulating to his will, and often pursued goals more attuned to his own agenda than what many of his senior advisers considered the national interest.

Does this surprise you?

Trump incessantly boasted to his fellow heads of state, including Saudi Arabia's autocratic royal heir Mohammed bin Salman and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, about his own wealth, genius, "great" accomplishments as President, and the "idiocy" of his Oval Office predecessors, according to the sources.

In his conversations with both Putin and Erdogan, Trump took special delight in trashing former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and suggested that dealing directly with him -- Trump -- would be far more fruitful than during previous administrations. "They didn't know BS," he said of Bush and Obama -- one of several derisive tropes the sources said he favored when discussing his predecessors with the Turkish and Russian leaders.

Then-DNI Dan Coats expressed his worry to subordinates that the VSG was "undermining the coherent conduct of foreign relations and American objectives around the globe."

Big-time damage to our most important alliances:

Next to Erdogan, no foreign leader initiated more calls with Trump than Macron, the sources said, with the French President often trying to convince Trump to change course on environmental and security policy matters -- including climate change and US withdrawal from the Iranian multilateral nuclear accord. 

Macron usually got "nowhere" on substantive matters, while Trump became irritated at the French President's stream of requests and subjected him to self-serving harangues and lectures that were described by one source as personalized verbal "whippings," especially about France and other countries not meeting NATO spending targets, their liberal immigration policies or their trade imbalances with the US.

But his most vicious attacks, said the sources, were aimed at women heads of state. In conversations with both May and Merkel, the President demeaned and denigrated them in diatribes described as "near-sadistic" by one of the sources and confirmed by others. "Some of the things he said to Angela Merkel are just unbelievable: he called her 'stupid,' and accused her of being in the pocket of the Russians ... He's toughest [in the phone calls] with those he looks at as weaklings and weakest with the ones he ought to be tough with." 

The calls "are so unusual," confirmed a German official, that special measures were taken in Berlin to ensure that their contents remained secret. The official described Trump's behavior with Merkel in the calls as "very aggressive" and said that the circle of German officials involved in monitoring Merkel's calls with Trump has shrunk: "It's just a small circle of people who are involved and the reason, the main reason, is that they are indeed problematic." 

He thought he was sucking up to adversaries by bragging about himself. Such is his weird assumption bout he way anybody else but himself thinks:

The calls with Putin and Erdogan were particularly egregious in terms of Trump almost never being prepared substantively and thus leaving him susceptible to being taken advantage of in various ways, according to the sources -- in part because those conversations (as with most heads of state), were almost certainly recorded by the security services and other agencies of their countries.

In his phone exchanges with Putin, the sources reported, the President talked mostly about himself, frequently in over-the-top, self-aggrandizing terms: touting his "unprecedented" success in building the US economy; asserting in derisive language how much smarter and "stronger" he is than "the imbeciles" and "weaklings" who came before him in the presidency (especially Obama); reveling in his experience running the Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow, and obsequiously courting Putin's admiration and approval. Putin "just outplays" him, said a high-level administration official -- comparing the Russian leader to a chess grandmaster and Trump to an occasional player of checkers. While Putin "destabilizes the West," said this source, the President of the United States "sits there and thinks he can build himself up enough as a businessman and tough guy that Putin will respect him." (At times, the Putin-Trump conversations sounded like "two guys in a steam bath," a source added.) 

The pullout of US troops from Syria can be directly traced to his phone conversations with Erdogan.

He was far more interested in how Jared and Ivanka thought his phone calls went than in the views of Fiona Hill, Rex Tillerson and H.R. McMaster. He never read briefing materials to prepare him for calls.

States such as Oregon, Kansas, Texas and Arizona are reversing course on their re-openings in face of COVID-19 case upticks. 

Some excellent and much-needed pushback against the utter fiction that the global climate is in a state of crisis

A declaration that needs wide dissemination:

The message was clear: “There is no climate emergency.”

With those five simple words, a global network of scientists and professionals attempted to inject reasonableness and decorum into what should be a robust discussion about a complex scientific and public policy issue, but has instead degenerated into an ever more intense mud-slinging contest over the years.

People on one side of the argument dismiss their opponents as wild-eyed socialists attempting to leverage public fear and ignorance to further their political agenda. On the opposite side, people dismiss those who disagree with their supposedly settled scientific conclusions as nothing more than knowing shills or ignorant dupes of evil energy interests.

In between those extremes that are so popular with armies of public relations professionals, who shape the messages of public interest groups and professional politicians to maximum effect, are a not-so-quiet silent majority of scientists and professionals who take a more measured, reasoned view of the science when considering the supposed climate emergency some say we’re facing.

A group of 500-some scientists and professionals signed on to the “European Climate Declaration” that was released last week. This simple, short, and understandable statement proposed how analysis of any public policy issue involving complex science should be approached from a reasoned, fact-based perspective.

Wait a minute, what about that 97 percent consensus?

 

Statements such as “97 percent of climatologists agree that anthropogenic climate change is occurring” isn’t a statement of fact, it’s an opinion twice removed. It’s an opinion that involves evaluation of the legitimacy of how the results of the poll in question were sorted to dismiss some answers and allow others, and it’s an opinion in terms of how representative the sample size is with respect to all climate professionals.

Statements such as “modeling shows that catastrophic climate change will occur in the next [pick a number] years unless drastic changes are made” is also an opinion. It’s an opinion because the results of any model, and in particular any model that purports to predict the future of anything as complex as the entire planet’s climate system, necessarily relies on a multitude of choices made by the model’s designer. The relative importance of the many, many factors that go into the model’s complex calculations are based on the judgments of the model designer, and those judgments are matters of opinion, not statements of fact.

The signatories have also sent a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guttierez. We shall see if he has any response.

Three big takeaways from the declaration:

One: “The world has warmed at less than half the originally predicted rate, and at less than half the rate to be expected on the basis of net anthropogenic forcing and radiative imbalance. It tells us that we are far from understanding climate change.”

Two: “Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as policy tools. Moreover, they most likely exaggerate the effect of greenhouse gases such as CO2. In addition, they ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial.”

Three: “There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050. If better approaches emerge, we will have ample time to reflect and adapt. The aim of international policy should be to provide reliable and affordable energy at all times, and throughout the world.”

Thank you, signatories.

 

The trolls are the good guys on this one

NBC News engages in some backhanded virtue signaling by asking people to puke all over themselves in confession of their moments of climate-caring failure, but they open the door for normal people to join in and have some fun.

First, the question the network posed, and the answers from the duly shamed:

NBC News is asking Americans to confess their climate change sins, though at least some people have taken the opportunity to troll the news company.

“Even those who care deeply about the planet’s future can slip up now and then. Tell us: Where do you fall short in preventing climate change?” reads the introduction to NBC’s “Climate Confessions” project.

Many of the responses appear to take the project seriously.  One person confessed taking flights to see their son across the country. “I fly to see my son on the west coast. I live on the east,” reads the confession.

“I drive to work even though the bus is almost as fast. I often feel I have good excuses,” another person confessed.
“I wish I had been born a vegan and then maybe it would be easier. I can’t seem to give up meat,” another confession stated.

One person apparently used the project to tout their virtuousness, rather than confess their climate sins. “I LOVE meat. But I love the earth more. Vegan for over 4 years now,” they wrote. 

And then the normal people chime in:

Others appear to have taken the opportunity to troll NBC over the project. One such entry reads: “I require at least half a roll of TP when wiping.”

“I like my house to be 85 in the winter and 55 in the summer. Deal with it, hippies,” one person wrote. “I live on Earth, where even if we achieve carbon neutrality in the first world, that’s only 19.1% of the population,” another stated.

“I don’t do anything for the environment. I don’t care,” reads another entry. “I am eating bacon with breakfast this morning and I’ll have it again tomorrow,” another declared.

One person submitted lyrics about loving plastic straws: “I LOVE plastic straws & I cannot lie. As many as I can get, before I die. Such straight soda with apple pie. Yessir, I’m the guy.” 

Good stuff!

By golly, there was a time when adverse weather had the sense of decorum to dress appropriately!

In a sense, Sandy from Westchester is the gift that keeps on giving, but she's also a sadness-inducing reminder that post-America now routinely venerates utterly unserious public figures.

Fresh off of her proclamation that planting cauliflower in community gardens has colonialist implications comes this. You see, there was a tornado warning in Washington, DC, which could not remain bereft of commentary imbuing it with ideological significance:

Ocasio-Cortez discussed how tornadoes were part of the threat of climate change. 

“The climate crisis is real y’all,” she said. “Guess we’re at casual tornadoes in growing regions of the country?” 

“Other regions deal with wildfires, tornadoes, droughts, etc. But ALL of these threats will be increasing in intensity as climate crisis grows and we fail to act appropriately,” she said.

I don't know how clever my retort actually is. It basically writes itself, doesn't it?

Within recent memory, tornadoes used to have enough sense of what was appropriate to give notice, confirmed by email, that it was coming to call, and would arrive attired in a tuxedo or evening gown!

Like a lot of opinion venues, I don't want LITD to become preoccupied with all the low-hanging fruit that Sandy provides, but this one was too good to pass up on.

A lefty piece of legislation that should get a House-floor vote

Why would Benjamin Zycher of the American Enterprise Institute want to see this bill get voted on? After all, it would return post-America to a footing of being on board with the Paris climate accord.

A sizable contingent of congressmen now have introduced H.R. 9 “to direct the President to develop a plan for the United States to meet its nationally determined contribution under the Paris Agreement, and for other purposes.”

For one thing, so we can have this discussion:

There is little trend in the number of “hot” days for the period 1895–2017; 11 of the 12 hottest years occurred before 1960. Global mean sea level has been increasing for thousands of years; it may or may not be accelerating. The Northern and Southern Hemisphere sea ice changes tell very different stories. US tornado activity shows either no trend or a downward trend since 1954. Tropical storms, hurricanes, and accumulated cyclone energy show little trend since satellite measurements began in the early 1970s. The number of US wildfires shows no trend since 1985. The Palmer Drought Severity Index shows no trend since 1895. US flooding over the past century is uncorrelated with increasing GHG concentrations. The available data do not support the ubiquitous assertions about the dire impacts of declining pH levels in the oceans.

And this discussion:

Note that the Paris agreement “requires” (again, there is no enforcement mechanism) each signatory to “update” its NDC every five years. This is an obvious acknowledgment that any given NDC might not be met; accordingly, the reasons to believe the updated promises, and the ones five years later, ad infinitum, are far from clear. What is clear is that this international UNFCCC/NDC game has little to do with GHG emissions or climate phenomena or environmental quality at all. It is instead a long-term full-employment program for the international climate bureaucracy, with endless COPs, meetings, financial support from governments and foundations, and conferences in upscale resorts and banquets at pricey restaurants. A solution to the purported problem of anthropogenic climate change is the last outcome actually preferred by this industry; only a permanent crisis can justify its existence.

It's a bit like letting Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All get a full hearing, so people can understand that it amounts to the government putting the health insurance industry out of business and that it's going to involve tax hikes like we've never seen.

Let's make the lefties talk consequences.

 

 

What these snot-nosed little urchins who confront government officials about the global climate need to be told

As LITD has discussed before, there's some anecdotal evidence out there that a trend is emerging by which school children confront legislators and basically extort them over the subject of the global climate. We all know about the gaggle of them that confronted Senator Feinstein in her office with the not-so-veiled message that they'd brand her as indifferent to this "crisis" in the public's mind if she didn't immediately get on board with their demands. And a couple of days earlier, I saw the same thing played out on the local level, with kids confronting the city council.

In that case, they cited the usual litany of fires, droughts, floods and hurricanes.

Okay, kiddies, here's what you need to know before you do any further spouting off:

Temperatures have risen by tenths or hundredths of a degree in recent years – less than the margin of error, and most of the “highest temperatures on record” have been in urban areas, where local manmade heat skews the data. We’re also experiencing record cold and snow in numerous locations.
The average prediction by 102 climate models is now a full degree Fahrenheit abovewhat satellites are measuring. Michael Mann’s climate model could concoct hockey sticks from telephone numbers and other random numbers. Are we supposed to trust these models on critical energy policy?

Violent tornadoes (F3 to F5) averaged 56 per year from 1950 to 1985. But from 1986 to 2018 only 34 per year touched down in the USA on average – and for the first time ever not one did in 2018. The March 3 Alabama tornado was tragic, and the 2-mile-wide 2013 Oklahoma City monster lasted 40 minutes. But the 1925 Tri-State Twister was a mile wide, traveled a record 220 miles, lasted a record 3.5 hours, and killed a record 695 people.

Hurricanes becoming more frequent and intense? From 1920 through 1940, ten Category 3-5 hurricanes made US landfall; from 1960 through 1980, eleven; 1980 through 2000, ten; 2001 through 2018, nine. There is no trend. Moreover, Harvey and Irma in 2017 were the first category 3-5 hurricanes to make U.S. landfall in a record twelve years. The previous record was nine years, set in the Civil War era.

A warmer Arctic? The Washington Post did report that “the Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer, and in some places seals are finding the water too hot.” But that was in 1922!
Polar bear populations are the highest on record: between 24,500 and 28,500 or more of them!
Oceans cannot become “more acidic,” because they are not and have never been acidic. Earth’s oceans are slightly alkaline. That slight alkalinity has decreased slightly (from 8.2 on the pH scale to 8.1) over the past few decades. But they are not getting acidic … and won’t anytime soon.
Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It is the miracle molecule without which most life on Earth would cease to exist. In fact, the more CO2 in the air, the faster and better crop, forest and grassland plants grow – and the better they can withstand droughts, diseases, and damage from insects and viruses.

In fact, a slightly warmer planet with more atmospheric CO2 would be tremendously beneficial for plants, wildlife and humanity. A colder planet with less carbon dioxide would greatly reduce arable land extent, growing seasons, wildlife habitats, crop production and our ability to feed humanity. 

And today's Exhibit A of an utterly worthless Republican:

Millions of Americans are exasperated and angry about Republicans like Congressman John Shimkus of Illinois, who recently whined that it’s “just not worth the fight anymore” to battle climate alarmism – and protect our nation’s and our children’s future. These elected officials badly need spinal implants. Or they should resign and turn their seats over to someone who will fight for us.

"Just not worth the fight anymore." How do you sleep at night, Representative Shimkus? If Western civilization does indeed crumble, the likes of you will be culpable.

If one has even a subatomic particle of integrity, one never gives up on insisting that the truth get an airing in the public square.

 

When Dems hold forth at Congressional hearings, their silliness and / or their evil are on full display

For the silliness, look no further than yesterday's House Committee on Energy and Commerce hearing on "global warming." It was short on witness with any kind of science expertise, but long on grandstanders. There was the Reverend Leo Woodbury of the Kingdom Living Temple Church, who pontificated about "environmental justice." Reverend Lennox Yearwood, president of - I kid you not, there's a real outfit with this name - the Hip Hop Caucus who said, "Climate change is a civil rights issue."

One Freedom-Hater legislator got a big-time case of the feels when interacting with one person appearing before the committee, due to that person's deep wisdom and vast knowledge accumulated over a long and experience-filled life:

New Mexico Democratic Rep. Debra Haaland broke into tears when speaking to one of hearing witnesses — a 16-year-old environmental activists. Haaland said, “I just want to recognize your presence here.”

Nadia Nazar, the 16-year-old founder of the Zero Hour Movement, said the Trump administration’s inaction on “climate change is violating my right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” according to her prepared remarks.

There was a "scientist" from the Union of Concerned Scientists who wanted to try to claim that at least 21 people recently died in some kind of "polar vortex," a dog-vomit concept being peddled by these ever-mer desperate alarmists.

Judith Curry was there as a voice of reason. God bless her.

Then there was Ilhan Omar's display of her signature obnoxiousness at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Venezuela. (By the way, what the hell is she doing still sitting on that committee now that her Jew-hatred and Israel-hatred are well known?)

Freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar on Wednesday angered Trump administration Special Envoy to Venezuela Elliott Abrams by saying his role in the Iran-Contra scandal gives her no reason to think he can be truthful before Congress. 

Abrams appeared at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing to talk about Venezuela, and the Michigan Democrat started her portion of the hearing by saying she doesn't trust him. 

"I fail to understand why members of this committee of the American people should find any testimony that you give today to be truthful," Omar said after noting that Abrams pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress about Iran-Contra.

When Abrams tried to reply, Omar said she hadn't asked him a question. 

"It is not right [if] members of this committee can attack the witness who is not permitted to reply," Abrams said. 

"That was not a question," Omar said. "Thank you for your participation." 

Omar has been the subject of criticism from both Republicans and Democrats after some of her tweets were labeled anti-Semitic. But she avoided talk about religion in her back-and-forth with Abrams, who is Jewish. 

Omar then asked Abrams if he supported violence against civilians if it furthers U.S. policy. 

"That is a ridiculous question," Abrams said. 

"Yes or no," Omar insisted. 

"No," Abrams said. 

"I will take that as a yes," she said. 

"I am not going to respond to that kind of personal attack, which is not a question," he said. 

Abrams refused another question that alluded to his past, but then did reply when she asked if it's U.S. policy to ensure human rights are not violated. 

"I suppose there is a question in there, and the answer is that the entire thrust of American policy in Venezuela is to support the Venezuelan people's effort to restore democracy to their country. That's our policy," he said. 

To my fellow post-Americans: We have turned the House of Representatives into a sewer. We have to live with it until November 2020. Please, let's redeem ourselves and restore it to being a place where grownups deliberate sane policy when we get the opportunity.