Quotulatiousness

February 3, 2024

The climate alarmists long ago gave up honest scientific reporting

Filed under: Environment, Government, Media, Politics, Science, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tom Knighton says he used to fully buy in to the climate alarmist message, but eventually realized the fix had been in for years, especially when it came to the predictive ability of all the climate change models … as in, their total lack of predictive ability:

When Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth came out, I watched it. I was terrified by the world being described, and since I was still pretty liberal and sort of an environmentalist, I took it all to heart.

Over time, as my personal politics shifted, I still had concerns regarding climate change. After all, it is what it is, right?

Until I came to look deeper into the issue and the one thing that shattered my belief in the whole concept: The fact that not a single climate model has ever panned out as predicted despite pretty much none of the draconian measures we’re told we need in order to avert disaster ever coming to fruition.

Science is supposed to be predictive. If it can’t predict something in its models, then scientists need to back up and figure out what the problem is. Instead, they seemingly just keep doubling down.

[…]

Let’s be clear here, the idea of taking measurements in heat islands is freshman year stuff. There’s absolutely no way they’re unaware the effect that’s having on their readings, even as most of their instruments are subject to heat bias.

In other words, I can’t accept this is a good faith error.

No, I believe this to be malicious.

Climatology isn’t exactly a field of science that would ever be considered sexy. Before all the climate alarmism, research grants were likely few and far between. People weren’t overly worried about the climate because it simply ways.

Then scientists started screaming that we were all doomed. The end is nigh, they told us, screaming at the top of their lung and acting just shy of wearing a sandwich board in Times Square.

With that came money and prestige.

Suddenly, climatologist could get recognition and write bestselling books. They could get grants from everyone and their brother to fund their research. The thing is, they had to keep up the charade. People had to believe that we were going to die if we didn’t do something.

Maybe they actually want the draconian measures they suggest, measures that pretty much amount to going back to living in mud huts, but with solar- and wind-created electricity so we won’t need to burn wood to survive.

Or something.

Justin Trudeau doesn’t seem to understand why he’s losing so much support from voters

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tailing on to the previous article, here are some thoughts from The Line‘s Matt Gurney about the strengths and weaknesses of Justin Trudeau — and I despise the man, but I accept he’s a very good politician — and the odd fact that he can’t seem to grasp the reason for his ongoing fall in popularity among Canadians:

… it was a specific comment by the PM that really stayed with me. It’s this:

    … Trudeau does believe, however, that Liberals are up against something relatively new in this climate, which he calls opinion-as-identity politics.

    “I don’t think that was a feature too much of other times in politics — where what you think about something actually creates the circles and the people that you actually associate with, and it defines who you are.”

I’m going to let Tom Cruise in the delightful and little-remembered sci-fi film Oblivion convey my reaction to the PM’s comment there:

This is a statement that I’m having a hard time processing, and that I’ve been reflecting on for weeks, because there is no version of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — at least, in my understanding of the man — that is dumb enough to believe such a silly thing. Dividing ourselves into tribes identified by our opinions on stuff is exactly what human beings do, and have always done. The first monkey to get out of a tree and stand on solid ground and think to themselves, “Hey, it’s kind of cool down here,” was undoubtedly, immediately ostracized by all the other monkeys that thought that life atop the trees could not possibly ever be beaten.

And we’ve been finding new things to disagree about, and kill each other over, ever since. Which skin colour is best, which holy book contains the real guide to salvation, which ideology is the path to true human enlightenment … human beings have slaughtered each other by the millions over this stuff for as long as there have been human beings. Sure, every so often we squabble over resources. Who gets to control which oil field or prime cattle pasture and the like. But most of our nastiest fights have been over opinions about stuff. Maybe substantive matters, things like racial identity or religious affiliation, but still just opinions. And if we’re honest, some of the opinions have been pretty dumb. Not worth killing or dying over.

Hell, as I was thinking about writing this column, my young son very solemnly and seriously told me about some drama on the schoolyard he’d been part of. It turns out some kids who are normally good buddies had come to tears and almost to blows because … they liked different NFL football teams, and tensions were running high during some of the recent playoff games. I know it’s easy to dismiss this as just boys being boys, but I actually think it’s pretty useful here as an example of humans being humans. There is nothing that symbolizes the way we simian-brained weirdos approach life better than imagining a bunch of thinking, feeling people becoming emotionally overwhelmed because of a disagreement over which collection of overpaid athletic prodigies should advance while a different collection of overpaid athletic prodigies wearing another colour shirt heads home for a long break.

It’s ridiculous. But it’s us. It’s humans. Through and through. I’m a sports fan, too, and I’m well aware of the fact that sports are one of those handy things we use as a society to channel our base, primal, aggressive instincts. I get up and cheer wildly when the Leafs beat the Canadiens because it satisfies some part of my brain, and millions of other brains, that would probably otherwise result in Toronto and Montreal raiding each other for chickens. Or worse. Human beings are constantly deciding stuff and then sorting whole populations accordingly, and then getting emotionally invested in those divisions. I like it more when we channel it into sports rivalries and fights over who has the superior bagel.

How can the prime minister not understand this about us?

“There are no tangible consequences for politicians who violate ethics rules. The maximum fine is just $500”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley helpfully explains why — even if the ethics commissioner turns a blind eye, again — Justin Trudeau should avoid ostentatiously living like an aristocrat in the Ancien Régime of pre-revolutionary France:

Image from Blazing Cat Fur

Interim federal Ethics Commissioner Konrad von Finckenstein authored a great moment in Canadian political accountability on Tuesday in explaining to a parliamentary committee when and why he might investigate a very generous gift to the prime minister from a friend. (Gifts from friends are explicitly allowed for in the Conflict of Interest Act.) The gift would have to be “really exceptional,” he suggested, like “a Ferrari,” or “$1 million,” to trigger an investigation.

You can get two Ferrari 296s for $1 million. Or a Daytona SP3 for around $2.5 million. It’s a very confusing standard.

Not rising to this “exceptional” level, apparently, is the free nine-day vacation in a luxury Jamaican villa the Trudeau clan enjoyed over the Christmas break, with a retail cost of around $84,000, courtesy of family friends who own the estate.

“This is a true friend, who has no relations with the government of Canada,” von Finckenstein told the committee (read: unlike the Aga Khan, whom von Finckenstein’s predecessor Mary Dawson found not to have been a real-enough friend to escape her wrath). “What we have here is clearly a generous gift, but it’s between people who are friends and I don’t see why, just because they’re well off, they can’t exchange gifts.”

Leaving aside what the prime minister is allowed to do with his truly rich true friends, it remains utterly astonishing to me that Justin Trudeau or someone with an ounce of sway in his office wouldn’t put a stop to this conspicuously consumptive behaviour as a matter of choice.

[…]

Hard cases make bad law, and it’s almost impossible to imagine a future prime minister luxuriating in his birthright lifestyle the way Trudeau does. In fact, so long as such gifts are disclosed — which the Aga Khan caper might well not have been, had the National Post not been tipped off — I think it’s probably better to let Canadians decide for themselves what they think of their PM’s behaviour when he’s unshackled by hard-and-fast rules.

It’s not as though the ethics commissioner’s findings of guilt have any real effect. There are no tangible consequences for politicians who violate ethics rules. The maximum fine is just $500. Former finance minister Bill Morneau was dinged just $200 for forgetting to disclose his villa in Provence. (I suspect La Villa Oubliée is unavailable to rent at any price.)

A Day in Ancient Rome

Filed under: Europe, History, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

toldinstone
Published Nov 10, 2023

Following Marcus Aurelius on the day of his final triumph.

Chapters:
0:00 Another day
1:05 Petitions
3:12 Breakfast
3:51 The Triumph
4:44 Romanis Magicae
5:37 Artifacts of the wars
7:09 Caesar, you are mortal
(more…)

QotD: The Postmodernist’s Dilemma

Filed under: Education, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

If Leftists could see the obvious consequences of their own positions, they wouldn’t be Leftists. We know this. But since it’s their world, and we have to live in it as best we can, it helps to go back and spell out those obvious consequences from time to time. The biggest, most obvious one of all is what I’m going to call The Great Contradiction. It’s the obvious next step from the Great Inversion: If “whatever is, is wrong”; then all authority, everywhere, is illegitimate — which includes the authority proclaiming The Great Inversion.

We could also call it “the PoMo’s Dilemma”, since this stuff originated in the ivory tower back in the Sixties, and finally broke containment in the late Seventies. Most intellectual fads quickly become caricatures of themselves, but in their haste to get to the next hot new thing the PoMos decided to cut to the chase. Postmodernism started as a self-parody. Put simply but not at all unfairly, PoMo is the assertion for a fact that there is no such thing as a fact. There is no Truth, just “truth”. No eternal verities, just perspective, just discourse; it’s all — say it with me now — “just a social construction”.

I suppose we must give the early PoMos credit for having — in a thoroughly Postmodern way – the courage of their convictions. When Alan Sokal invited the PoMos to try transgressing the Law of Gravity from his twenty-first floor apartment window, the goofs from Social Text published a “rebuttal” to Sokal, informing him, a working physicist, that they, the English Department, understood physics better than he did. He meant it as a joke, but he was really right all along about the so-called “law” of “gravity”.

That was 1996. At that point, any sane society would’ve had the editors of Social Text dragged out of the faculty lounge and shot in the middle of the quad, pour encourager les autres. But of course we chose not to. And why would we? Being close to three decades deep into the Great Inversion by then, we got much barmier stuff than anything Social Text published in freshman orientation. Stick it to The Man, we were told, and don’t trust anyone over thirty …

Severian, “Hoist on Their Own Petard”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-04-19.

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