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In this new series, I propose to explore the sequence of errors, large and small, through which the climatological establishment has – until now – gotten away with greatly exaggerating climate sensitivity.

The errors have an unholy, cumulative effect, conspiring to bring about an exaggeration that is grievous.

The focus in this series will be on describing each error clearly, so that the commenters who have so vigorously had their say on my earlier descriptions of the current method of determining climate sensitivity can examine them and say whether they think the climatological establishment has come to the right conclusion.

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The real divide in politics pits the people who think government looks like The West Wing against the people who think it looks like Yes, Minister. The soaring principles of The West Wing did sometimes turn up in Yes, Minister (and its sequel, Yes, Prime Minister), but by the end of each half-hour they had usually been buried in a committee or snuffed out in a seedy bargain. The result may not have been an inspiring vision of good government, but it was one of the wittiest TV shows of the 1980s; this week, sadly, saw the death of Antony Jay, the British broadcaster who co-created and co-wrote it.

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No weed for me, then — I’m lazy enough as it is.

Freeberg nails it again.

If we discuss this cultural shift honestly, we have to see it for what it is. You simply aren’t supposed to do any enforcing; you aren’t supposed to confront evil. You’re only supposed to go through the motions. More rules, more rules, more rules…don’t ever enforce anything. It makes the people who’ve already decided not to do any enforcing, look bad.

The rules are always aimed at the same places. Soft, rule-abiding types. They may go along enthusiastically, racked by guilt, or they may go along the way I do, full of resentment. But an uprising is unlikely, so this is the soft, fatty tissue — the yummy part. No claws, no thorns, none of that messy back-fighting stuff. It’s quick, it’s easy, it’s popular. Hey you homeowners, don’t water your lawns, because drought! And hey you law-abiding gun owners, it’s high time we passed some (more) rules against you! Someone who is not you just shot up a school.

We seem to be living in the age of “Go after the ones who didn’t do it.” I’m not sure how we got here, or how to get out of here. But, we’re here. If we really do want things to get better, that’s our first step. We have to break free of that diseased mindset. People are looking for ways they can vote in elections to make things better, and that’s the answer to that question. Skip that step, the rest of the effort isn’t going to matter much.

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Macaroni and cheese is one of those dishes — beloved by all Americans — that transcends geographical location or history. We eat it from sea to shining sea. It’s a nostalgia-inducing classic, the perfect compliment for everything from BBQ, to burgers, to Hennessy. It thrives in dank college dorm rooms and upscale restaurants. Point being, mac and cheese can do it all.

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Harry’s not the only one whose wand sometimes acts up.

Joe Bob Briggs brings the heat.

Only two athletes in history have won medals in six consecutive Olympic Games.

Only two.

…

Let’s face it, though, nobody was gonna go out of their way to congratulate Kimberly Rhode, because Kimberly Rhode carries a shotgun.

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That’s pretty rude.

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“Laissez faire, laissez passer” is the most tolerant of all creeds. As Smith insisted, it’s the very opposite of “pro-business” or pro-inequality; the market loves to disrupt complacent cartels. Yet to listen to most of the intelligentsia, you would think that freedom to exchange goods and services – which they prefer to call by the Marxist word “capitalism” – has done terrible harm in the world and needs taming by virtuous government. Further, that small-government philosophy has been terminally discredited, not least by the financial crisis of 2008.

There is no such thing as ‘capitalism’, except in the minds of Marxists and their dupes (which is almost everybody these days).

There are free markets, and there are unfree markets; that’s all.

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Although popular culture and many of the leading media organizations have bought wholeheartedly into the idea that gender identity is something distinct from one’s biological sex — that a man could be born in a woman’s body or vice versa — such beliefs have no grounding in any credible scientific evidence, according to a report published Monday in the journal The New Atlantis.

Arizona State University professor of statistics and biostatistics Lawrence S. Mayer and John Hopkins University Medical School professor of psychiatrics Paul McHugh co-authored the report, which examined top peer-reviewed studies in the biological, psychological, and social sciences.

“Examining research from the biological, psychological, and social sciences, this report shows that some of the most frequently heard claims about sexuality and gender are not supported by scientific evidence,” they noted.

Among the key findings listed by the authors was that, “The hypothesis that gender identity is an innate, fixed property of human beings that is independent of biological sex — that a person might be ‘a man trapped in a woman’s body’ or ‘a woman trapped in a man’s body’ — is not supported by scientific evidence.”

Amazing how that works.

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Democrats — party of the rich.

What do they know that you don’t know?

Freeberg nails it again.

I am worried. I’m worried that it’s been so long since we’ve seen a problem actually solved, we don’t know what it looks like anymore and we don’t understand the process. The partisanship has just made things worse, when a U.S. President or some other executive inserts himself. Half the time, nothing identifiable actually gets done; if it does get done, then the party opposed to that executive will find all sorts of things wrong with it, while the executive’s own party just cherry-picks anything that might be interpreted as positive news, and hogs all the credit, casting blame upon whoever came before for whatever might not be so positive. People have resigned themselves to the reality that that’s the process. The idea that there are simple and reliable ways to forecast things from other things…genuine causes and effects, with genuine relationships tying them together…gets lost.

That’s modern American politics in a nutshell.

Political correctness is destruction, plain and simple. We’ve been wandering through the thick of it, like through a fog, since I was a kid. And I just turned fifty.

Yup.

Political correctness is political. It is not decency. An attempt to enhance decency, resulting in destruction of the person who caused offense, but realizing no acknowledgement that the better behavior is better behavior — will have failed. Political correctness is about the destruction. If P.C. can bring about the acknowledgement of better behavior, and a sincere promise not to re-offend, but fails to destroy, then it, too, has likewise failed. It’s got nothing to do at all with bringing about a more enlightened or civilized society, and some among us are quite tired of this obligatory expectation that we should treat it that way.

It’s about getting people canned. Period, full-stop.

As such, it does not promote civilized-human behavior. It promotes shark behavior.

Right on.

Jim Goad just lets it all hang out.

If you dare to question whether Hillary Clinton is physically ill, her dutiful media maidservants will smear you as mentally ill.

It matters not how many times she falls, how many speeches she interrupts with uncontrolled coughing, how many memory lapses she has in mid-sentence, how many times she cackles loudly and inappropriately, or how many apparent seizures she has while cameras roll and fawning reporters flinch. She’s not sick; you’re sick for even noticing.

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Steak is king. Steak is what other meat wishes it could be. When a person thinks of meat, the picture that forms in his or her mind is a steak. It can be cooked, crosshatched from the grill and lying in its own juice in a pose suggestive of unmatched succulence, or it can be raw, blood-coloured and framed by white fat, the steak that sleeping bulldogs in vintage cartoons dream of.

Dead cow and spuds are the basis of all true civilization.

Nobody ever built an empire on tofu or bean sprouts.

And don’t get me started on sushi….

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…leftists who are too obsessed with global warming to want to reproduce. Hey, if that’s what it takes, we probably should be grateful. NPR asks the question–seriously, as far as I can tell–“Should We Be Having Kids In The Age Of Climate Change?”

We certainly ought to encourage ‘progressives’ not to have children.

The problem is, once they get an idea into their heads, they won’t rest until you go along with it (by force of government if necessary).

Joe Bob Briggs reads the tea-leaves.

I should have waited four more days so that I could read the column by Jim Rutenberg in The New York Times explaining that there’s no media bias because all the rules of journalism have changed.

Damn, Jim, if you’d told me in advance, I could have saved Taki some money.

I learned from this article that the way it works now is, if you’re a working reporter and you think Donald Trump is a demagogue, “you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you’ve never approached anything in your career.” You have to “move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional.”

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the obvious questions.

Why do people say things like “talent must be distributed equally” when all the evidence of our eyes from watching the Olympics is that talent is not distributed equally? Instead, talent is distributed in complex patterns by nature, which are in turn made even more complex by nurture.

Because ‘progressives’ are all about Must Be Distributed Equally, and if it isn’t so, they strive to make it so — and where they can’t make it so (Hello, Nature!) they just assume it (because wishing will make it true).

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One of the best send-ups of SWPL life I’ve ever read.

Your wifi enabled coffee maker downloads the perfect instructions to brew a cup of Blue Bottle?—?and you don’t have to do anything. The Roomba purrs in the background while you continue to read from your smartphone. You see a few articles about Trump and how crazy he is?—?somehow this comforts you.

You decide to share an article about Brexit from The Atlantic, which will somehow shed light to all your friends as to why it happened. The article is 1,000 words long?—?you only read half of it, but that’s good enough. It captures all the arguments you’ve been wanting to make for the past two months to your friends. Will this be the Facebook post that finally spurns your friends into action? You realize your Facebook friends all agree with your political views and social views already.

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My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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What do these presidents have in common? Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy. When I saw that question posed by University of California Irvine neuroscientist James Fallon, my response was that they were the three most popular presidents of the 20th century.

They all had fascist inclinations and increased the footprint of the Federal government on daily life, precisely because of that popularity.

Now what about Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush? All markedly less popular – each lost his bid for re-election.What I didn’t know is that biographers of each president had been asked to rate their subjects on a standardized assessment of psychopathic traits. Those first three super-popular presidents ranked No. 1, 2, and 3; they were America’s most psychopathic presidents. The three who couldn’t win a second term ranked among the least psychopathic.

…

Practice saying “My candidate is a psychopath. And that’s okay.”

I’d really rather not.

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Not a happy time.

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Well. There it is.

No wonder birthrates in First World nations are dropping like a stone.

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Funny how the people who are so hot to have government in charge of our health care don’t like it when they take charge of recreational drugs.

Geez, make up your minds.

None. Not gonna happen. I don’t indulge in sweat myself, and see no purpose in watching other people do so.

No, not even women’s volleyball. Gave that up long ago.

I can, however, reveal the origins of the sport of curling. It came about because of golf.

God came to visit Scotland one day and watched a bunch of people playing golf.

He said, ‘That has got to be the damnedest silliest game that a human being could devise.’

The Scots, just to prove Him wrong, thereupon invented curling.

True story.

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The Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz highlights this factor in his “time for a change” forecasting model of presidential election outcomes. “When a party has held the White House for two or more terms,” he writes, “voters will be more likely to feel that it is time to give the opposing party an opportunity to govern than when a party has held the White House for only one term.”

 Mr. Abramowitz finds that the party in power performs approximately five percentage points worse in the popular vote after two or more terms in office in a model that controls for the current president’s approval rating and the state of the economy. The sample size of post-World War II elections is very small, but Mr. Abramowitz’s model dominates the field in its forecasting accuracy.

Both Mr. Abramowitz’s model and a similar one from the political scientists John Sides, Michael Tesler and Lynn Vavreck (an Upshot contributor) would characterize Republicans as the favorite in this election with an estimated probability of winning of approximately 60 percent. As Mr. Sides notes, the G.O.P. edge is due in large part “to the White House’s greater tendency to change hands the longer the incumbent party has been there.”

But of course Trump is the new Hitler so obviously this model won’t work this time and we’re all safe. Phew!

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The way most colleges teach general education to undergraduates is hopelessly broken, according to a group of professors and administrators at Southern Utah University.

…

Wyatt and a team of faculty members last year hatched a plan to reinvent how general education works at the university. Their solution, dubbed Jumpstart GE, began this fall with 43 students. It’s certainly a different approach. And while the experiment is too young to show any real learning outcomes, experts said the concept shows plenty of promise.

The first-year students are taking the full 34 credits for their general education requirements this year — the equivalent of 13 courses. But all that material has been converted into one course that eight professors from different disciplines are teaching jointly.

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I have always been puzzled by the term ‘McMansion’. This clears things up a bit.

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The researchers considered the vegan diet, two vegetarian diets (one that includes dairy, the other dairy and eggs), four omnivorous diets (with varying degrees of vegetarian influence), one low in fats and sugars, and one akin to the modern American dietary pattern.

Based on their models, the vegan diet would feed fewer people than two of the vegetarian and two of the four omnivorous diets studied. The bottom line: Going cold turkey on animal-based products may not actually be the most sustainable long choice for humanity in the long term.

Not to mention the scientific fact that we evolved as omnivores and vegetarianism is just another intellectual fantasy like astrology. (I’ll bet you find an amazing overlap between the two.)

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I certainly associate the two.

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Even Voice of the Crust the Denver Post has had enough.

There is no venue today more politically correct and sanctimoniously liberal than higher education, replete with academic departments “studying” and glorifying every conceivable ethnicity, race and gender.  Nonetheless, the current generation of student activists is overcome by some imaginary insensitivity that surrounds them. With self-righteous indignation inflamed by hyper-narcissism they demand a college campus be “a warm, caring, welcoming, safe place.” An ideological sanctuary from ideas and expressions that might hurt their tender feelings, invulnerable to even the most infinitesimal “microaggression.”

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What did he know that you don’t know?

(Probably not much. Any rational adult could tell that it was rigged.)

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Fortunately, being hipsters who read Mother Jones, this is the most important thing we have to worry about.

Bite is Mother Jones‘ new food politics podcast.

Yup. You heard that right: food politics. With Mother Jones, everything is politics, even food.

Steven Hayward at Powerline peers at the tea leaves.

Those who suffer the handicap, like myself, of having a Ph.D and writing for a living—the kind of people who actually sit in bars discussing, for example, Eric Voegelin’s injunction against “immanentizing the eschaton” (there’s a reason Voegelin devotees don’t get dates, and it’s not hard to figure out)—don’t understand that one reason for Trump’s appeal is that to a great many Americans he talks like they do—in sentence fragments, summary emotive thoughts, and imprecise terms. He’s the first prominent political figure in a long time who doesn’t use the certified official vocabulary and public demeanor of the political class. This, as much as anything, makes him anathema to the denizens of the Acela corridor. (Aside: I rode the Acela from Washington to New York not long ago, and had forgotten how precious—as in ludicrous—and utterly unreal are most of the conversations you overhear.)

That’s one theory anyway. Another is to recall the way Mitt Romney in 2012 “spoke conservatism as a second language,” Charles Krauthammer and Jonah Goldberg put it (there’s some dispute as to which of them came up with that observation first, but never mind). One of the Juice Voxers, as I call them, pointed out yesterday that Trump gets into the most trouble when he tries to talk conservative.

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Mel Gibson’s ex-wife Oksana Grigorieva just lost tens of millions of dollars in her divorce settlement. Grigorieva was originally set to receive a whopping $15 million, but that number was cut all the way down to $250,000 due to the domestic abuse claims she brought up during an interview on “The Howard Stern Show” in 2013.

Loose lips lose chips.

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Hillary Clinton has always pushed for a steep Death Tax on the American people. But when it comes to her own finances, it is a different story. Clinton’s newly released tax returns show she still uses tax avoidance strategies to shield their Death Tax liability.

According to a 2014 report by Bloomberg News, the Clintons created trusts in 2010 and shifted ownership of their New York home to it in 2011. In doing so, they will avoid paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in future death taxes.

‘We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.’ — Leona Helmsley

Freeberg nails it again.

So there are two problems here. One, liberals fancy themselves to be too good for any task that involves dirty hands…any task whose completion status is testable. We no longer live in the era in which such neglect bears consequences. If you think yourself too good to cook hamburgers, you can still get hamburgers whenever you want. So, liberals are running around on the Internet, on blogs and on other forms of social media, because Barack & Michelle have asked them to — and, they’re bored.

The other problem is that if the liberals ever did sweep the sidewalks or embalm the bodies or kill the weeds or design the car engines, they’d just do it until they found the entertainment factor to fall short of their expectations, which would be pretty damn soon. If they didn’t get the task done satisfactorily, who’s to say? So either way, they’ve got a lot more time for this than conservatives do, since the conservatives are doing things that are testable, which takes a great deal more time. Anytime you vote in an election, you have to be prepared to lose; anytime you gamble, you must be prepared to lose; and whenever you run tests in good faith, on anything, you must account for that proportion of times that the tests are going to fail.

Conservatives are building the bridges on top of which the cars are going to be driven — we wouldn’t have it any other way. Would you really want to drive a car upon a bridge built by a liberal? Not if you want to see your next birthday. So people are counting on the conservatives, the conservatives have to work away at the task until it’s really done, and the whatever really does work. While, the liberals are bored…so of course the liberals have taken over the arena of rhetoric. Add to that, the fact that conservatives are naturally harder to get engaged in any sort of coordinated political action, because they think too independently. Contrast the recent Trump vs. Cruz contest, versus the Hillary vs. Bernie contest; no need to comment further on that, I think.

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Most of what you think you know about the Crusades ain’t so. The OFlionn explains it all to you.

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Having won more than $600 million for clients in foodborne-illness cases, Marler says that his experiences convinced him that these foods aren’t worth the risks.

He missed a few.

1. Cauliflower
2. Brussels Sprouts
3. Asparagus
4. Broccholi
5. Rhubarb
6. Eggplant

These are the Devil’s Vegetables. Eating them is responsible for all of the evil in the world.

I have my doubts about avocados, too.

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I don’t know … seems pretty normal to me. Walk down a street in Frisco’s tenderloin district with your iPad out and see what happens to you.

The dolphins splashed the tourists standing around the pool for good measure.

Can’t say that I blame them.

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It’s a question that pretty much anyone looking at the arc of his life ends up asking: what happened to Henry VIII? From a hugely-admired prince, to a widely-feared king, the transformation in Henry’s behaviour and outlook would seem like the stuff of fiction, but for the fact that history bears out how real it was. Just how did the champion of the Catholic church come to be the notorious killer of queens? Researchers from the Behavioral Neurology Unit at the Yale School of Medicine think they may have the answer: traumatic head injury.

Fortunately, princes no longer go in for stuff like professional football.

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Last week, the two major domestic performance rights organizations for the American music industry, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, (ASCAP), and Broadcasting Music, Inc., (BMI), threw down the gauntlet on the Department of Justice. They just announced that they will be using a joint strategy of legislation and litigation to get around DOJ’s new interpretation of longstanding antitrust consent decrees, which limit the performance rights organizations’ flexibility to license rights to perform copyrighted music.

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Sorry, but that creeps me out.

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Indeed — those who think that not having children is a plus because it ‘benefits the environment’ ought to be encouraged not to have children.

Think of it as evolution in action.