Scott Alexander.

In most journalistic settings, you can’t just write “here’s what I think”. You have to write “here’s what my source, a recognized expert, said when I interviewed them”. And the experts are pretty sparing with their interviews for contrarian stories.

The way my correspondent described it: sources don’t usually get to approve the way they’re quoted in an article, or to see it before it gets published. So they’re really cagey about saying anything that might get misinterpreted. Maybe their real opinion is that X is a hard question, there are good points on both sides, but overall they think it probably isn’t true. But if a reporter wants to write “X Is Dumb And All Epidemiologists Are Idiots For Believing It”, they can slice and dice your interview until your cautiously-skeptical-of-X statement sounds like you’re backing them up. So experts end up paranoid about saying potentially-controversial-sounding things to reporters. And since reporters can’t write without sources, it’s hard for them to write anything controversial about epidemiology.

UN Climate Envoy Bloomberg’s Private Jets Emitted More Than 500 Times The Carbon Footprint Of A Typical Car

Climate Researcher’s New E-Book: IPCC Significantly Overstates CO2, “The Sorry State Of Climate Science”

The problem with climate models

Read it.

“Disinformation” and “misinformation” are used to excuse incompetence and punish opposition.

Read it,

If you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em (and suck up the government subsidies).

Read it.

In a speech delivered at a degree ceremony at the California Institute of Technology, Richard Feynman, a noted physicist and Nobel Prize winner in 1974, compared the social sciences to the cargo cult. Representatives of the social sciences, he argued, imitate the behaviour of other sciences but to no effect. Feynman did not end with this comparison, but added examples from the fields of rehabilitation, psychotherapy, and parapsychology. He stated that despite the enormous effort invested in researching and perfecting teaching methods, students’ results are worse every year. The same goes for criminality and the other problems which the social sciences attempt to resolve. Was Feynman right?

Looks that way to me.

Scott Alexander on a problem of modern life.

WebMD is the Internet’s most important source of medical information. It’s also surprisingly useless. Its most famous problem is that whatever your symptoms, it’ll tell you that you have cancer. But the closer you look, the more problems you notice. Consider drug side effects.

…

Drug 1 is aspirin. Drug 2 is warfarin, which causes 40,000 ER visits a year and is widely considered one of the most dangerous drugs in common use. I challenge anyone to figure out, using WebMD’s side effects list alone, that warfarin is more dangerous than aspirin. I think this is because if WebMD said “aspirin is pretty safe and most people don’t need to worry about it”, people might use aspirin irresponsibly, die, and then their ghosts might sue WebMD. Or if WebMD said “warfarin can be dangerous, be careful with this one”, people might refuse to take warfarin because “the Internet said it was dangerous”, die of the stuff warfarin is supposed to treat, and then their ghosts might sue WebMD. WebMD solves this by never giving the tiniest shred of useful information to anybody.

Read it.

Watching American liberalism in action always reminds me of Churchill’s observation about Stanley Baldwin: “Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.”

Measuring melting ice

Claim: California’s Rainy Season Starting Nearly A Month Later Than It Did 60 Years Ago  ‘Highiimpact short-form reports with immediate implications’ means click-bait shrieks of DANGER WILL ROBINSON!

Are you ready for the climate lockdowns?

Read it.

Yeah, an ex-con is a tech executive’s first choice for a coding job.

“So what am I going to work on?” “You’re not. Your job is to sit here and Be Black so we can’t get sued for Lack Of Diversity. Just don’t touch anything.”

Millenial snowflakes are bad enough.

Actually, it taste’s like squirrel.

Read it.

If you’ve got enough money, acres upon acres of undeveloped land and an “innovative technology,” you soon could form a new local government in Nevada.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

UPDATE: Nevada bill would allow tech companies to create governments

Yeah, but you’re still in Nevada.

Read it.

Hey, it’s free.

NASA Announces New Role of Senior Climate Advisor  Why does NASA need a ‘climate advisor’? Who knows?

Politico: California Gov. Newsom Recall Now ‘Unavoidable’  Perhaps other states ought to have the robust recall mechanism that California has.

Victor Davis Hanson.

The corruption of the Renaissance Church prompted the Reformation, which in turn sparked a Counter-Reformation of reformist, and more zealous, Catholics.

The cultural excesses and economic recklessness of the Roaring ’20s were followed by the bleak, dour and impoverished years of the Great Depression.

The 1960s counterculture led to Richard Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972, as “carefree hippies” turned into careerist “yuppies.”

So social, cultural, economic and political extremism prompt reactions — and sometimes counterreactions.

The Bush-Clinton-Obama continuum of 24 years cemented the bipartisan fusion administrative state. Trump and his “Make America Great Again” agenda were its pushback.

The counterreaction to the populism of the Trump reset — or Trump himself — is as of yet unsure.

Read it.

Certain parts of academia seem to wish to turn the study of classics away from a historical, language- and evidence-based discipline whose focus is understanding the ancient world on its own terms, in favor of preaching to students about the evils of ancient imperialism, slavery, racism, sexism, privilege, all keenly advocated by anyone who has ever taught it. There should be added to that list of shame the ancients’ hopelessly misguided views about what it meant to be ‘liberal’.

Latin lîber meant ‘free’, and lîberalis meant ‘relating to the free, worthy of the free’; also ‘gentlemanly, ladylike’, by extension ‘magnanimous, obliging’ and so ‘munificent, generous’. Another crucial mark of the lîberalis was education, especially the wide-ranging knowledge and understanding arising from the study of history and the rich examples it provided of admirable and disgraceful human behavior. The associated noun was lîberalitas (‘liberality’), and in his dialogue On Duties the statesman Cicero linked lîberalitas with justice. His reasoning was that ‘we are not born for ourselves alone… but as humans we are born for the sake of humans, to contribute to the general good by common acts of kindness, and by our skill, industry and talents to cement human society more closely together’.

ZMan reminds us of some ancient wisdom.

There is an old expression that has fallen out of favor in the post-scarcity age, but it may be the key to understanding the current crisis. That expression is, “Idle hands do the Devil’s work.” When people do not have anything productive and useful to do with their time, they are more likely to get involved in trouble and criminality. A variant of this is “The Devil makes work for idle hands.” The idea there is if you want to avoid Old Scratch, then make sure you keep yourself useful to God.

The source of these proverbs is unknown, but variations of them go back to the early middle ages, so it is probable they evolved with Christianity. It is not unreasonable to think the idea is universal to civilization. After all, every human society has had to deal with the idle, lazy, and troublesome. Making sure these people are kept too busy to cause trouble is one of those primary challenges of civilization. Every ruler has known that too many idle young men is bad for his rule.

Two words: Kindle App.

Sea Levels Are Rising Faster Than Most Pessimistic Forecasts  At least, according to Bloomberg.

The New Pause lengthens from 5 years 4 months to 5 years 6 months

The Shocking Climate Graph @climateofgavin Doesn’t Want You To See

US Cities Are Vastly Undercounting Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Researchers Find  ‘Greenhouse gas emissions’ sounds like something that would afflict Uncle Fred.

Read it.

“We will categorically not allow any local government to lock people down. We will not let any local government kick anybody out of their job,” DeSantis told reporters when asked about local officials’ requests for more control over coronavirus mitigation measures. “We will not let any local government fine individual Floridians. We will not let any local government shut down schools. And we’re not going to let any local governments do those things.”

This gets around the fact that most metro areas are ruled by fascist Democrats. Texas could profit from their example.

I’d move to Florida if it weren’t for the hurricanes.

Severian teaches a little history.

A brief summary of our story so far: back at the dawn of the Age of Aquarius, the US Surgeon General finally let the cat out of the bag. Turns out that sucking the fumes of burning weeds straight into your lungs isn’t optimal for your pulmonary wellbeing. That being the case, huckster politicians saw a chance to plug a few budget holes by pretending to care about public health. They decided to tax smoking out of existence.

As they should’ve learned from Prohibition, but didn’t, politicians soon discovered that lifestyle crimes are basically unenforceable.* The new taxes created a vast black market economy for smokes. Which had three knock-on effects, in ascending order of importance:

1. massive budget shortfalls, as idiot state governments, being governments, had already spent the anticipated tax revenue several years in advance;
2. an increased disrespect for the law, as unenforced laws are worse than no laws; and
3. turning what was a harmless(-ish) private vice into a public statement of minor rebelliousness — total per capita smoking remained roughly the same from 1960 – 1990, while total cigarette consumption actually went way up (though the ever-increasing importation of Third Worlders, all of whom smoke like chimneys, probably had a lot to do with that).

Read it.

I have three college-age daughters who all view the underlying resentments and jealousies required to produce leftism as a sign of immaturity. The idea that a leftist Utopia could fix everyone’s problems if we just take enough money from rich people strikes them as the lazy thinking of the unimaginative. Besides their interest in world affairs, they also share an interest in boys. Specifically, boys who would not be wasting their time. They hope for a conservative boyfriend, or at least one who appears somewhat mature and open-minded.

Which is tricky, because no conservative college kid is out of the closet. Universities are such incredibly hostile territories for free-thinkers that they would never consider admitting what they think about anything. So my daughters engage in frequent discussions with one another, trying to figure out if a boy they like might be a closet conservative. And it’s fascinating to listen to them. The cues they pick up on are not necessarily what you might expect.

ZMan blows the whistle.

The paleoconservative thinker, Sam Francis, developed the concept of anarcho- tyranny, which is when the state tyrannically regulates citizens’ lives yet is unable or unwilling to perform the basics of rule. For example, the government put speed cameras and red-light cameras up, in order to catch small violations, but if your car gets stolen, the cops will not bother looking for it. The tyranny is the micromanagement of the good citizens while driving. The anarchy is ignoring the car thieves.

It is a great framing because it is both true and easily validated. It is one of those observations that reminds us that conservatism was not always a collection of toadies and flunkies validating the latest Progressive fads. The Right used to have smart and thoughtful men genuinely concerned with the direction of Western society. They also had the courage to honestly examine what was happening. In other words, the current crisis did not sneak up on us like the fog.

Look, people elect who they want to Congress. That’s the way the system is set up. There is no IQ test – would that there were! – and no education requirement – would that there were! – and, tellingly, no requirement that a doctor certify that they are sane. You get the votes, and if they can’t PROVE you broke the law, you’re in. So all this talk about policing our own or not suitable for public service is a bunch of self-righteous hand-waving. Votes count; sputtering chattering class members do not. That’s the way it works.

Democrats have been electing crooks (Alcee Hastings) and nut-cases (Sheila Jackson Lee) to Congress for decades, not to mention people who deliberately incite violence (Maxine Waters) and people who don’t openly advocate it but who are okay with it when it happens (Kamala Harris and every other member of the Congressional Black Caucus, not to mention The Squad). For them to get all up in arms about Greene is a case of the pot calling the non-stick pan black.

Unless the system changes, the results aren’t going to be any different. A look at who is now in Congress is the greatest argument against democracy as a form of government that I can imagine. The only problem is to demonstrate that some other form of government wouldn’t be as bad or worse. As Bill Buckley famously said, I’d rather be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2000 member of the faculty of Harvard University, and I don’t just say that because I’m a Yale man; Yale these days is just as bad.

We have to work with what we’ve got. Dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.

Read it.

Most non-stick pans are so only for a limited time. Still, they’re more non-stick than non-non-stick (sorry) pans, so you’ve got that going for you. And since most people are Too Fargin Lazy to learn how to cook properly in a plain metal pan, I suppose it’s all for the best.

I use non-stick pans because I’m bone-lazy. So there it is. (Two words: Swiss Diamond.)

Steve Sailer.

The reviewer doesn’t want to come out and flat out say that biographers of the Vice President should simply cover up the fact that her fabulous political career was launched in Willie Brown’s bed, but she wants to imply it.

Read it.

In case you need another job skill on your résumé during COVID Panic times.

Read it.

You can lead a union member to the workplace but you can’t make her work.

Greenland is careening toward a critical tipping point for ice loss

Claim: Atmospheric river storms can drive costly flooding – and climate change is making them stronger

At New York City’s biggest power plant, a switch to clean energy will help a neighborhood breathe easier  (Popular ‘Science’)

Those Most Likely to Get Covid Are Last in Line for Vaccines  We’re from the government, and we’re here to screw things up.

Climate Model Failure

Read it.

If Republicans in Alaska and Utah would show some of that backbone, perhaps we could fix the RINO problem.

Read it.

House Democrats prosecuting former President Donald Trump released a memorandum Tuesday laying out key points against Trump, the first president to face an impeachment trial in the Senate after leaving office.

A temper tantrum at taxpayer expense.

UPDATE: Trump Lawyers Counter Democrats With These 4 Impeachment Arguments

Severian applies some history.

Let’s take a closer look at yesterday’s example of “butt smuggling,” the now-hilarious contemporary term for the Mob’s cigarette racket in the late Sixties / early Seventies. This is exactly the kind of un-glamorous scam that will never make it into the movies, but which keeps Organized Crime afloat, and to which the Feds will soon be forcing us at an ever-increasing pace.

In the late Sixties, you’ll recall, a combination of cash-strapped state governments (places like Illinois were already feeling the pinch of a few decades’ worth of total Democratic control) and Health Nazis slapped egregious taxes on smokes. It turns out that the tax stamps are easy to forge, cigarette trucks are easy to hijack, and when all else fails, smuggling is pretty easy, too. It’s a low-margin, high-volume sort of racket, but it’s profitable — sure, you don’t make $10K per kilo (or whatever) like you do selling coke, but you don’t run coke’s ludicrous risks, either, since while some squarejohn citizen type might well rat you off to the fuzz for selling drugs, he’s much likelier to ask you for a pack when he finds you’re smuggling cigarettes…

Read it.

A climate scientist spent years trying to get people to pay attention to the disaster ahead. His wife is exhausted. His older son thinks there’s no future. And nobody but him will use the outdoor toilet he built to shrink his carbon footprint.

Read it.

The Daily Caller News Foundation and Judicial Watch filed a notice of appeal to the Supreme Court of Delaware on Monday asking for a reversal of a lower court opinion that blocked a Freedom of Information Act request for access to records from President Joe Biden’s Senate career.

The motion seeks a reversal of a ruling by the Superior Court of Delaware in early January that the 1,850 boxes and 415 gigabytes of digital records from Biden’s 36-year Senate career that he donated to the University of Delaware in 2012 are not subject to release because no public funds have been used to support the Biden library.

The lower court rejected the DCNF and Judicial Watch’s argument that some of the university’s approximately $120 million annual taxpayer appropriation could have been used to indirectly support the Biden library by funding archival space and staff salaries. The court said a statement from the university that claimed, without evidence, that no state funds supported the library was sufficient to rule against releasing the documents.

Read it. I wasn’t able to get the video to play but the concept is still entertaining.

Don’t ever say we don’t have useful stuff here.

Read it.

Yes, I would consider getting an Apple car, if it ever sees the light of day. (Not an electric but maybe a hybrid.)

Read it.

In November, the previously unknown Marjorie Taylor Greene was elected to Georgia’s open 14th Congressional District seat in a landslide. Now, after being in office less than a month, she is the object of a hate campaign by the Democrats, who are demanding that she be stripped of all committee assignments, and preferably kicked out of the House. It is reported that the Democrats’ press arm is trying to make Greene the face of the Republican Party.

What exactly has she done? Greene’s Facebook page apparently is a disaster. Even before the election, Politico investigated Greene on behalf of the Democratic Party and found Facebook videos that expressed “racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic views.” That was Kevin McCarthy’s characterization, not Nancy Pelosi’s, and Greene was denounced last June by the Republicans’ House leadership. But Georgia’s voters apparently were unimpressed.

Obviously Emmanuel Goldstein got to her at some point.

Why Phoenix may be uninhabitable by the end of this century (Salon) I’d guess because of Democrats moving in from California.

Who Will Tell the Greens There Is No Battery Fairy?

Claim: Important climate change mystery solved by scientists

Claim: Marine heatwaves becoming more intense, more frequent

One year later: The path to carbon negative – a report on our climate ‘moonshot’  Think of a polar bear showing you his butt.

How Will Climate Regulations Impact The Economy? Experts Are Divided  But normal people are not: ‘negatively’.

Unexpected ice

The So-Called Climate “Health Emergency”

New York Times Reviews Book Advocating Blowing Up Pipelines to Combat Climate Change

Read it.

They still make you look like a refugee from an LGBTQRSTUVWZYZ convention.

I’ll do anything for comfort, but I won’t do that.

Read it.

President Joe Biden’s latest climate-focused executive order promises a bustling clean energy sector backed by “good-paying union jobs.” That sector’s supply chain, however, is largely dominated by China.

Issued on Wednesday, Biden’s order calls on the federal government to purchase union-built, American electric vehicles. But both Chevrolet and Nissan’s top electric offerings fall well below the federal government’s domestic “component test” to determine American-made status, and Ford’s latest electric SUV, the Mustang Mach-E, will be built in China and Mexico. China also controls much of the world’s lithium battery supply, including 77 percent of global cell capacity and 60 percent of global component manufacturing, a September BloombergNEF report shows.

Read it.

Democrats don’t have this problem because Democrats never forget which side they’re on. Plus the ‘activists’ in the Democrat party would run any candidate out of town who was insufficiently Woke; there are no Republican activists to speak of, except the Trumpists, and you can see how they are treated.

Read it.

Nominated by Alan Dershowitz. All of them are Jews so it will go into the Memory Hole in modern Culturally-Enriched Norway, along with Trump’s two nominations.

The dark side of ‘green energy’ and its threat to the environment

Scientists solve a major climate mystery, confirming Earth is hotter than it’s been in at least 120 centuries

Guardian: “The Trump years may well have been the death rattle of influential [climate] denialism”

Increasing Hurricane Intensity Study Fatally Flawed

Read it.

Every time I read another excitable media article about New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern, I am reminded of an old quip: ‘Viewed from a distance, everything is beautiful.’ That was Publius Cornelius Tacitus (AD 58-120). Were this Roman intellectual and historian alive today, he would make a great New York Times columnist. His tactic was to spin political and historical analogies so they could influence public affairs back home.

Tacitus’s Germania, for example, was about framing the Germanic tribes as a noble culture so that his Roman compatriots would recognize their own society as corrupt and decadent in contrast. The only problem was that Tacitus had never crossed the Rhine. That did not matter much: most Romans had not traveled far north either.

That is happening again, except this time New Zealanders are the noble savages being lovingly invented by global columnists. Hardly any of these writers actually live in New Zealand or understand it. Their op-eds reveal more about them than the country they purport to write about. In normal circumstances, this would not be a problem. But over the past few years, Jacinda Ardern has risen to international stardom. Her rise was based on remote reporting by a progressive world media thirsting for a noble alternative to strongmen leaders.

New Zealand is not Middle Earth. New Zealand is the Shire under Saruman.

Zman waxes cynical.

Once you have been on this side of the great divide for a while, you end up in another place that is not obvious when you first make the journey. That is, you look on at conventional politics with a bemused detachment. Since it is obvious to you that it is all theater, you wonder why some of them put so much effort into the performance. Why does Elizabeth Warren, for example, feel the need to carry on like the champion of the little guy over GameStop? What is the point of this charade?

It could be that her script writers and directors have told her there are tribes on the Left that need to see this show. Maybe they think the Bernie Bros are starting to wise up about what is happening and need a booster shot. It is not as if she is going to follow through and do anything about the shenanigans. Even if she wanted to, she lacks the authority and she has no influence over those who do have authority. The SEC and FBI laugh when they hear a politician demand anything from them.

Read it.

The Alphabet Workers Union (AWU) is in turmoil following the announcement of an international alliance on Monday. The alliance, Alpha Global, was billed as a worker-led initiative, but union members in the US say they didn’t know about it until The Verge published an exclusive. That piece included a press release quote from AWU executive council member Parul Koul, which she says she didn’t write.

The news was an unwelcome surprise to union members who expect the Alphabet Workers Union to run democratically. Now, multiple sources tell The Verge that some AWU organizers are considering pushing the group to disaffiliate from the Communications Workers of America (CWA), a national union representing workers in telecommunications and media. AWU has also set up a committee to investigate CWA’s role in the announcement.

They’re learning the basic lesson of a trade union: Eventually it evolves into a scam where the leadership uses it as a vehicle for power and wealth and the actual interests of the workers wind up in the trash. (You never hear of the Mafia trying to take over a local Chamber of Commerce, do you?)