Thomas SowellTV
Published 20 Nov 2021
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August 16, 2023
Facts about Africa’s Geography never taught in schools | Thomas Sowell
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August 10, 2023
“Forget global boiling … It’s global gaslighting we should be worried about”
Remember when [your local TV station/newspaper] was blaring the alarming news that your [city/town/state/province] was warming at twice the rate of everything else? All the legacy media NPCs got the same patch at the same time — and it was blatant enough that most people realized it was utter bullshit. As Brendan O’Neill explains, they’re not normally quite so clumsy in their constant attempts to gaslight us all about the climate, but they’re definitely still doing it:
Picture the scene. You’re in London, the sky is menacingly grey, it’s drizzling. You zip your jacket against the elements, annoyed that Britain has just had one of its wettest Julys since records began. Then you reach for your copy of the Evening Standard as you head home from work, only to see splashed across the front page a Photoshopped image of the Earth on fire. “WHO WILL STOP EARTH BURNING?”, the hysterical headline asks. The drizzle turns to rain and you fold your Standard in two to use as an impromptu umbrella, turning a mad piece of global-boiling propaganda into flimsy protection from this strange, wet summer.
This was London yesterday. It really happened. It was yet another overcast day, in keeping with the record-breaking precipitation of the past month. The UK had an average of 140.1mm of rain in July, the sixth-highest level of July rainfall since records were first kept in 1836. And yet here was the freebie London paper warning us that flames will shortly engulf our celestial home. That heat death is coming. That an inferno of our own dumb making is licking at our feet. I know we live in mad times but even I never expected to see damp commuters brushing raindrops off their shoulders while surrounded by discarded papers telling us it’s so hellishly hot we might all soon die. Rarely has the gap between MSM BS and real life felt so cavernously vast.
They’re lying to us. Forget global boiling, the crazy term invented by UN chief António Guterres a couple of weeks ago. Forget global warming, even. It’s global gaslighting we should be worried about. If gaslighting, in the words of the Oxford dictionary, is “the process of making somebody believe untrue things in order to control them”, then that lunatic Standard cover was classic gaslighting. The planet is not on fire. Earth is not burning. These are untruths. This is delirium, not journalism; fearmongering, not fact-gathering. And the aim, it seems to me, is to try to control us; to frighten us with pseudo-Biblical prophesies of hellfire and doom until we obediently bow down to the eco-ideology.
Adding insult to injury, the Standard frontpage had pics of Joe Biden, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi and Rishi Sunak next to its crackpot query, “WHO WILL STOP EARTH BURNING?”. Let’s leave to one side that President Biden doesn’t seem to know what planet he’s on half the time, never mind being able to save one; and that Rishi can’t even control Britain’s borders, far less the climate of our entire mortal coil; and that Xi and Modi are surely more concerned with their pursuit of economic development than with indulging the End Times hysteria of the Notting Hill set that writes and publishes the Standard. The more pressing point is this: no one needs to stop Earth from burning because Earth isn’t burning. You can’t put out a fire that doesn’t exist. As Bjorn Lomborg said last week, the idea that the “world is ablaze” is pure bunkum.
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QotD: The variable pace of evolution
The central argument of Gelernter’s essay is that random chance is not good enough, even at geologic timescales, to produce the ratchet of escalating complexity we see when we look at living organisms and the fossil record. Most mutations are deleterious and degrade the functioning of the organism; few are useful enough to build on. There hasn’t been enough time for the results we see.
Before getting to that one I want to deal with a subsidiary argument in the essay, that Darwinism is somehow falsified because we don’t observe the the slow and uniform evolution that Darwin posited. But we have actually observed evolution (all the way up to speciation) in bacteria and other organisms with rapid lifespans, and we know the answer to this one.
The rate of evolutionary change varies; it increases when environmental changes increase selective pressures on a species and decreases when their environment is stable. You can watch this happen in a Petri dish, even trigger episodes of rapid evolution in bacteria by introducing novel environmental stressors.
Rate of evolution can also increase when a species enters a new, unexploited environment and promptly radiates into subspecies all expressing slightly different modes of exploitation. Darwin himself spotted this happening among Galapagos finches. An excellent recent book, The 10,000 Year Explosion, observes the same acceleration in humans since the invention of agriculture.
Thus, when we observe punctuated equilibrium (long stretches of stable morphology in species punctuated by rapid changes that are hard to spot in the fossil record) we shouldn’t see this as the kind of ineffable mystery that Gelernter and other opponents of Darwinism want to make of it. Rather, it is a signal about the shape of variability in the adaptive environment – also punctuated.
Even huge punctuation marks like the Cambrian explosion, which Gelernter spends a lot of rhetorical energy trying to make into an insuperable puzzle, fall to this analysis. The fossil record is telling us that something happened at the dawn of the Cambrian that let loose a huge fan of possibilities; adaptive radiation, a period of rapid evolution, promptly followed just as it did for the Galapagos finches.
We don’t know what happened, exactly. It could have been something as simple as the oxygen level in seawater going up. Or maybe there was some key biological invention – better structural material for forming hard body parts with would be one obvious one. Both these things, or several other things, might have happened near enough together in time that the effects can’t be disentangled in the fossil record.
The real point here is that there is nothing special about the Cambrian explosion that demands mechanisms we haven’t observed (not just theorized about, but observed) on much faster timescales. It takes an ignotum per æque ignotum kind of mistake to erect a mystery here, and it’s difficult to imagine a thinker as bright as Dr. Gelernter falling into such a trap … unless he wants to.
But Dr. Gelernter makes an even more basic error when he says “The engine that powers Neo-Darwinian evolution is pure chance and lots of time.” That is wrong, or at any rate leaves out an important co-factor and leads to badly wrong intuitions about the scope of the problem and the timescale required to get the results we see. Down that road one ends up doing silly thought experiments like “How often would a hurricane assemble a 747 from a pile of parts?”
Eric S. Raymond, “Contra Gelernter on Darwin”, Armed and Dangerous, 2019-08-14.
August 8, 2023
Holding the BBC to account for their climate change alarmism
Paul Homewood‘s updated accounting of the BBC’s coverage — and blatant falsehoods — of climate change news over the last twelve months:
The BBC’s coverage of climate change and related policy issues, such as energy policy, has long been of serious and widespread concern. There have been numerous instances of factual errors, bias and omission of alternative views to the BBC’s narrative. Our 2022 paper, Institutional Alarmism, provided many examples. Some led to formal complaints, later upheld by the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit. However, many programmes and articles escaped such attention, though they were equally biased and misleading.
The purpose of this paper is to update that previous analysis with further instances of factual errors, misinformation, half truths, omissions and sheer bias. These either post-date the original report or were not included previously. However, the list is still by no means complete.
The case for the prosecution
The third most active hurricane season
In December 2021, BBC News reported that “The 2021 Atlantic hurricane season has now officially ended, and it’s been the third most active on record”. It was nothing of the sort. There were seven Atlantic hurricanes in 2021, and since 1851 there have been 32 years with a higher count. The article also made great play of the fact that all of the pre-determined names had been used up, implying that hurricanes are becoming more common. They failed to explain, however, that with satellite technology we are now able to spot hurricanes in mid-ocean that would have been missed before.Hurricanes: are they getting more violent?
Shortly after Hurricane Ian in September 2022, a BBC “Reality Check” claimed that “Hurricanes are among the most violent storms on Earth and there’s evidence they’re getting more powerful”. The video offered absolutely no data or evidence to back up this claim, which contradicted the official agencies. For instance, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) state in their latest review:
There is no strong evidence of century-scale increasing trends in U.S. landfalling hurricanes or major hurricanes. Similarly for Atlantic basin-wide hurricane frequency (after adjusting for observing capabilities), there is not strong evidence for an increase since the late 1800s in hurricanes, major hurricanes, or the proportion of hurricanes that reach major hurricane intensity.
The IPCC came to a similar conclusion about hurricanes globally in their latest Assessment Review. However, the BBC article failed to mention any of this.
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August 7, 2023
UN Secretary General updates Dante’s Inferno
Sean Walsh on the differences between the lowest level of Hell as described by Dante and the UN Secretary General’s modern characterization:
Source: Jerome, Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell, Daily Infographic, August 27, 2017, http://www.dailyinfographic.com/dantes-nine-circles-of-hell
“In the tide of time there have only been four absolutely fundamental physical theories: Newtonian mechanics; Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism; Einstein’s theory of relativity, and quantum mechanics” – David Berlinski, The Deniable Darwin
In Dante’s Inferno, Hell is, counter-intuitively perhaps, freezing cold. In the 9th Circle the Devil is entrapped in a lake of ice. An imaginative inversion of what we normally take Hell to be.
Clearly the 14th century Italian poet didn’t get the memo from UN secretary general Antonio Guterres, for whom the Hell we currently suffer is boiling hot. Or if he did get it, perhaps he binned it. I wouldn’t blame him.
There is, of course, another difference between the two Hells: in Dante’s conception you know you’re in it; in Guterres’s diagnosis you need to be told you are. Some “Hell” that is.
I jest of course. Guterres claim is not that we are currently in Hell, more that we are on the road to it. And that the diesel-fuelled vehicle we are travelling in is called “complacency”: a stubborn and bewildering refusal on the part of you and me to recalibrate, or rather abandon, our lives in accordance with the instructions of “settled science”. An inexplicable refusal to genuflect at the altar of the Climate Change Sanhedrin.
You’ll notice that we have been here before. Restrictions imposed during the “Covid pandemic” were also justified on the grounds of an alleged scientific consensus. It’s tempting, perhaps even irresistible, to think that lockdown was the rehearsal and that incoming climate-related restrictions (and they are incoming) the main event. An amplification of the tyranny. A bit like when a thug tries his hand at assault before graduating to murder.
It’s easy to establish a consensus when the grown-ups are excluded from the discussion. And such a consensus is not really worth the candle. In fact, it is normally injurious to a genuine search for truth.
I refer you to the quotation at the top of the piece. For context: David Berlinski is a polymath who has taught philosophy, mathematics and English at universities including Columbia and Princeton. He’s the real deal and a genuine maverick whose genius is confirmed by the fact that he’s been sacked from every academic position he’s ever held.
The four foundational theories he references were in the main constructed by geniuses whose creativity was enabled precisely by their cultivated indifference to the “settled science” of the day.
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August 1, 2023
Evil climate heretics deny the revealed holy truth of global BOILING!
Notorious heretic Brendan O’Neill preaches climate denial! Where are the Green Gestapo when you need them?
And just like that we’ve entered a new epoch. “The era of global warming has ended, the era of global boiling has arrived”, decreed UN chief António Guterres last week. It’s hard to know what’s worse: the hubris and arrogance of this globalist official who imagines he has the right to declare the start of an entire new age, or the servile compliance of the media elites who lapped up his deranged edict about the coming heat death of Earth. “Era of global boiling has arrived and it is terrifying”, said the front page of the Guardian, as if Guterres’s word was gospel, his every utterance a divine truth. We urgently need to throw the waters of reason on this delirious talk of a “boiling” planet.
Guterres issued his neo-papal bull about the boiling of our world in response to the heatwaves that have hit some countries over the past two weeks. “Climate change is here [and] it is terrifying”, he said. We see “families running from the flames [and] workers collapsing in scorching heat” and “it is just the beginning”, he said, doing his best impersonation of a 1st-century millenarian crackpot. In fact, forget “climate change”, he said. Forget “global warming”, too. What we’re witnessing is a boiling. It all brings to mind the Book of Job which warned that the serpent Leviathan would cause the seas to “boil like a cauldron”. Leviathan’s back, only we call him climate change now.
The obsequious speed with which the media turned Guterres’s commandment into frontpage news was extraordinary. They behaved less like reporters than like the slavish scribes of this secular god and his delusional visions. “World entering ‘era of global boiling'”, cried the Independent, and we “know who is responsible”. No prizes for guessing who that is. It’s you, me and the rest of our pesky species. It always is. “Planet is boiling”, one headline breezily declared, confirming that Guterres’s fearful phrase, his propagandistic line no doubt drawn up with the aid of spin doctors in some UN backroom, is already being christened as fact.
Almost instantly, media outlets started lecturing readers on how they might help to put a halt to the coming evaporation of our planet. SBS in Australia advised us to “Reduce meat intake”, “Stop driving cars” and “Cut down on flights”. In short, stop all the fun stuff; make sacrifices to appease nature’s angry gods. Even self-styled radicals made themselves mouthpieces of the UN’s medieval sermonising. Novara Media instantly embraced “global boiling” as an apt metaphor for the arsonist impact humanity has had on Earth. Scratch a Marxist these days, find a Malthusian.
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July 31, 2023
The grim plight of the UK as global BOILING advances
Alexander McKibbin reports on the UK’s latest set of climate-related warnings from the Met Office:
No one who has read and digested this authoritative and comprehensive report can fail to be apprehensive about the future. Harnessing the technological power of its powerful computer modelling system, the Met Office can produce a highly accurate forecast of how the changing climate will affect the UK. It is a truly dystopian projection and one which should ring alarm bells in the top echelons of Whitehall.
Below is a selection of areas highlighted as being at risk if we do not achieve Net Zero by 2030.
Berwick-upon-Tweed
This charming border town with castle ruins and cobbled streets will disappear in the next five years, according to the Met Office. The picturesque Royal Border, Berwick and Union Suspension bridges will all be drowned by an unstoppable and ever-rising River Tweed. Displaced residents will need to find alternative accommodation and it is likely that looting and scavenging will become commonplace.
Kent
Known for centuries as “The Garden of England”, this delightful county currently plays host to gentle hills, fertile farmland and fruit-filled orchards. Country estates such as Penshurst Place, Sissinghurst Castle and Hall Place Gardens are all well known for the scenic views they offer.
Sadly, this will all shortly vanish under burning heat exceeding 200 degrees Fahrenheit. The rivers Stour, Medway, Darent and Dour will slow to a trickle and finally dry up completely. Dust storms and dust bowls will be part and parcel of daily living, as will camels and occasional prickly pear cacti dotted across a barren and arid wasteland. Dartford, the Met Office confidently asserts, will be a never-ending vista of shape changing sand dunes.
Yorkshire
Known to inhabitants as “God’s Own County”, no one can deny the many charms of England’s largest county with a population twice the size of Wales.
Horse-racing is a major attraction and with nine courses to choose from including Thirsk, Wetherby, Redcar and Catterick, no wonder Yorkshire is a popular tourist destination. What a pity that all of these temples to equestrian prowess will be lost to an all-consuming glacier that will blanket the land. The report is not sure whether at 104ft high the scenic Ribblehead Viaduct will avoid being trapped in this icy embrace. It is suggested that refugees should make their way south to seek food and shelter.
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July 17, 2023
The WEF considers whether to use the carrot or the stick next time
Elizabeth Nickson on the World Economic Forum’s latest gathering in China:
Last week the WEFers held their summer camp in China. More to come, they warned us. More pandemics, more catastrophic global warming, more inflation, hell on wheels, they promise us, Armageddon is coming. Be very afraid.
The following was a particularly lovely event:
“How to Stay Within Planetary Boundaries — Carrot or Stick?” which focused on whether to incentivize or force compliance with “climate goals”. It was hosted by some joker who edits a magazine called Nature Energy, no doubt funded by the WEF and read by exactly nobody. And some very po-faced morons of various colors, paid in the six figures, cited a bunch of falsified statistics ending with these pretty little paragraphs:
We are — broadly speaking — agreed that we need to get on track towards a net-zero, climate-safe and nature-positive future, but we know this will not be easy. And we’re going to need to change behaviours of both individuals but also the way that our industries and corporations and also our governments work and practices.
We’re going to need to do this through a mixture of carrots and hopefully perhaps not so many sticks, in some kind of mix. And there is a very active and live debate as to how we go about this. But we’re likely to see an increasing move towards more stick-like interventions …
These guys, they make me laugh. Seriously? How stupid do they think we are? How hated are they? All over the world, they are loathed and laughed at. Every time one of them is taken out, we laugh and laugh and laugh. Larry Fink from BlackRock? Hiding, Scared. Mocked, publicly humiliated. We need a lot more of that.
[…]
They have to destroy western culture, because we middle-class-unnecessary-eaters are too damned uppity. They have stolen so much that when the tipping point arrives, and it will, they will be hung from the highest tree. “Better to ruin those likely to catch and imprison us, and feed on peasants and serfs, the desperate in the rest of the world.”
Proof?
OK, let’s review the Biden/Trudeau/Macron/Sunak economy shall we? Since the out-in-the-open globalist theft of elections during the past three years — Sunak was installed, Trudeau is the most hated man in Canada, Biden is gaga and Macron is just crazy — this is what the bottom 50% are experiencing. Short form, ground into the dirt.
Ninety percent of the jobs “created” were those gained back after the pandemic. Most jobs are going to the foreign born – they work cheap.
Of the roughly 900 days Joe Biden has been in the White House, real wages have fallen for almost 700 days — about 75% of Biden’s time in office. All total, the collective drop in real wages has been 3% rather than the robust real wage gains workers deserve and expect.
Every single American has lost $36,000 to Biden’s inflation. It has crippled us, especially those working in the real (not digital) economy — Uber drivers, truckers, farmers, manufacturers, ranchers, the bottom 50% — gas prices have gone up 50%. Home heating up 23%, milk 16%, beef 25%, eggs 83%. Home prices 32%, rents 15%, electricity 21%.
Let’s not even talk about interest rates. Ten raises in the last 30 months. Last week the Bank of Canada gave its people $26 million in bonuses. Meanwhile, people are losing their houses.
How much more punishment are we expected to take? This is directly caused by their mad hatter spending during the pandemic — which was fake but for a few months in early 2020 — and their subsequent restriction of the energy supply. Restriction of energy causes prices to skyrocket because producing anything requires energy.
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July 15, 2023
Environmental fanatics want to impose “austerity on steroids”
Brendan O’Neill points out the hypocrisy of the progressives who protest against anything smacking of government austerity — often merely a slowing down in the rate of increase of funding that they condemn as “cuts” — yet fervently desire to impose a form of austerity that would literally lead to hundreds of thousands or even millions of deaths:
There are countless contradictions on what passes for the left these days. We’re against sexism, they cry, and then they’ll while away entire days hounding every uppity broad who dares to question the trans ideology. We’re anti-racist, they say, even as they yell “Uncle Tom” at any person of colour who deviates from their white liberal orthodoxies. Be kind, they tweet, in between their venomous crusades against TERFs, gammon, boomers, deplorables, “semi-fascists”, you name it.
We’re against austerity, they insist, and yet then they agitate for an austerity of apocalyptic proportions. This, surely, is the most stark incongruity of the modern left. They rail against every library closure or reform of welfare payments as an intolerable assault on people’s living standards, and then they take to the streets in their thousands in support of a degrowth agenda that would plunge vast swathes of humankind into penury. They’re far meaner than any right-wing penny-pincher they claim to oppose.
[…]
Environmentalism is austerity on steroids. Consider one of JSO’s key demands: “No new oil or gas”. This would be – there’s no other word for it – psychotic. Not only would such a crazed policy instantly throw hundreds of thousands of people out of work, by decommissioning the rigs and mines where they make their living – it would also make it all but impossible to keep society going. The infantile moralism of modern greens would have us believe that vile oil and gas are only used to propel 4x4s and airplanes packed with the rich and other “bad things”. In truth, every facet of our lives requires energy from oil and gas. The delivery of foodstuffs, house-building, schools, hospitals, life-support machines, heaters to protect the elderly from death in winter – all need energy derived from fossil fuels. Or consider libraries. The left wept when Osborne’s cuts led to library closures, but you try running a library in your post-fossil-fuel dystopia. Without oil, gas, electricity and trees torn down to make books, libraries would cease to exist.
As Alex Epstein argues, to “rapidly eliminate fossil-fuel use” would make the world “an impoverished, dangerous and miserable place for most people”. Fossil fuels provide 80 per cent of the world’s energy. Just three per cent comes from solar and wind power, so beloved of green anti-modernists. And even that measly slice of global energy production is, in Epstein’s words, “totally dependent on fossil fuels, especially natural gas, for 24/7 back-up”. That is, if the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, we have to crank up the fossil fuels. Ours is a world in which three billion people still use less electricity than your average American fridge. Agitating for less energy production in such a time is callous beyond belief. It would issue a death sentence on the world’s poor. George Osborne is Father Christmas in comparison with these crusaders against the gains and wonders of modernity.
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July 13, 2023
QotD: The Annales school of history
The big shift in focus for the Annales school was an interest in charting the experience of society below the level of elites (though the elites are not abandoned either), what is sometimes termed “history from below”, as distinct from traditional elite-centered “great man” history or the more deterministic Marxist models of history at the time. You can see the political implications, of course, in the very early 1900s, of declaring the common man worthy of study; this is generally a history from the left but not the extreme left. That focus in turn demanded new approaches because it turned the focus of social history towards people who by and large do not write to us.
In reaching for that experience, Annales scholars tended to frame their thinking in terms of la longue durée (“the long run”); history was composed of three parts: événements (“events”), conjonctures (“circumstances”) and finally la longue durée itself. Often in English this gets rendered as a distinction between “events” (kings, wars, politics, crises) and “structures” (economics, social thought and at a deeper level climate, ecology, and geography). What Annales scholars tended to argue was that those structures were often more important than the events that traditional historians studied: the farmer’s life was far more shaped by very long-term factors like the local ecology, the organization of his farming village, the economic structure of the region and so on. And then the idea goes, that by charting those structures, you can figure things out about the lives of those farmers even if you don’t have many – or any – of those farmers writing to you.
Important to this was the idea of enduring patterns of thought within a society, what Bloch termed mentalités (“mentalities”, like longue durée, this is a technical term usually used in French to make that fact clear). Mentalités – Bloch’s original example was the idea that kings had a holy healing touch, but this could be almost any kind of social construct or pattern of ideas (indeed, one critique of it is that the notion of mentalités is broad and ill-defined) – can last a long time and can inform or constrain the actions of many actors within a society; think of how successive generations of kings can have their decisions shaped or constrained by their societies view – their own view – of kingship. That view of kingship might be more impactful than any one king and so pervasive that even a king would struggle to change it.
So how does this influence my work? I tend to be very much a “history from below” kind of historian, interested in charting the experience of regular farmers, soldiers, weavers and so on. The distinction between the long-term structures that shape life and the short-term events that populate our history is very valuable to think with, especially for identifying when an event alters a structure, because those tend to be very important events indeed. And I think a keen attention to the way people thought about things in the past and how those mentalités can be different than ours is very important.
That said, the Annales stress on mentalités has in some ways been overtaken by more data-driven historical methods on the one hand or a strong emphasis on local or individual experience (“microhistory”) on the other. Mentalités tend to be very big picture, asking how, say, “the French” thought about something over a period of decades or centuries and seeking to know how that shaped their experience. But archaeology, demographics or economic data can reveal patterns of behavior which might not correspond to the mentalités that show up in written texts; this is fundamentally the interaction that informs the “revenge of the archaeologists” in the study of the ancient economy, for instance. On the other hand, not everyone in that big group thinks the same and a microhistory of an individual or a single village might reveal telling local variations not captured in massive-scale structures.
Fortunately, historians do not need to be doctrinaire in our use of theory, we don’t have to pick one and stick to it. Different projects also lend themselves to different approaches. I think the Annales school offers a lot of really useful tools to have my historian’s toolbox, but they sit alongside military theory, archaeological material culture studies methods, philological approaches, a smattering of economic and demographic tools, etc.
Bret Devereaux, “Referenda ad Senatum: January 13, 2023: Roman Traditionalism, Ancient Dates and Imperial Spies”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-01-13.
July 11, 2023
Western legacy media is suffering from an overdose of Professionally Correct speech
David Friedman can’t help but notice this phenomenon:
When the question of alcohol and health came up on “Doctor Radio”, a satellite radio program, all of the participants agreed that evidence showed that consuming a moderate level of alcohol, something like one beer a day for a woman, one or two for a man, or the equivalent in other drinks, was good for you, better than no alcohol at all. All of them also agreed that they would not advise their patients to do so.
Why? They mentioned that there were problems with prescribing something that depended on the exact dosage and that a higher level of consumption was likely to lead to auto accidents, but distinguishing one beer a day from three is not a difficult problem even for those who are not doctors. My conjecture was that the real explanation was the reluctance of doctors to appear to be on the wrong side. Everyone knew that alcohol was a bad thing, a source of auto accidents and various medical (and other) problems. By giving a truthful account of the medical evidence the doctors on the program might appear to be pro-alcohol; all good people are anti. Hence they had to qualify their conclusion as a purely theoretical matter, not something that would affect what they told their patients. Think of it as a different version of PC — Professionally Correct speech.
A similar pattern exists for ice cream. Multiple independent studies have found evidence that consuming ice cream reduces the chance of getting diabetes — and found ways of explaining the evidence away. In several cases they have gone so far, in public statements, as to report that yogurt is protective against diabetes, other dairy products are not, when ice cream in their study showed as strong, in some studies a stronger, effect than yogurt.
Yogurt, as everyone knows, is a healthy food. Ice cream, as everyone knows, is bad for you.
From time to time I see a news story on some piece of scientific research that somewhat weakens the case for taking strong action against global warming. I believe that every time I have seen such a report it was accompanied by a quote from the researchers to the effect that global warming was a serious problem and their work should not be taken as a reason to be less worried about it. They almost certainly believed the first half of that, but their work was a reason to be less worried even if not to stop worrying.
Good people are on the side that believes that warming is happening, is anthropogenic, is a serious problem that needs to be dealt with immediately. Bad people deny one or more of those claims. If that is what all the people who matter to you, such as the fellow members of your profession, believe, and you are so unfortunate as to produce results that strengthen the bad people’s case, it is prudent to make it clear that you are still on the side of the angels. Just as, if you are so unfortunate as to be an honest doctor aware of the evidence in favor of alcohol, it is prudent to make it clear that you have not transferred your allegiance to demon rum.
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July 5, 2023
Why Engineers Can’t Control Rivers
Practical Engineering
Published 4 Apr 2023💧 The unintended consequences of trying to change the course of rivers
(more…)
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June 27, 2023
“People’s patience in the face of the daily elitist provocations of Just Stop Oil is nothing short of Herculean”
The virtue-signalling lunatics of the various Extinction Rebellion sub-groups depend far more than they realize on the patience and tolerance of ordinary Britons who are just trying to get on with their daily lives. Wealthy, highly educated, privileged scions of the well-connected may very quickly learn that the well of tolerance they’re drawing from can run dry extremely quickly. Brendan O’Neill says even some of the movers and shakers of the donor class are starting realize the dangers their protest foot soldiers are running:
“Just Stop Oil Courtauld Gallery 30062022” by Just Stop Oil is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 
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So even one of Just Stop Oil’s wealthy donors is tiring of its classist stunts. Trevor Neilson, a co-founder of the Climate Emergency Fund, which has pumped money into Just Stop Oil, says the eco-irritants’ funereal, road-blocking marches for Mother Earth increasingly come off as “disruption for the sake of disruption“. You have “working people that are trying to get to their job, get their kid dropped off at school [and] survive a brutal cost-of-living crisis”, he says, and then along comes a “pink-haired, tattooed and pierced protester standing in front of their car”. It pisses people off, he said.
He’s not wrong. Anyone with eyes in their head can see that Just Stop Oil, and its mother movement Extinction Rebellion, is riling the workers of Britain. Imagine you’re trying to get to work to earn a crust in tough times and up pops a privately educated, possibly non-binary loon with multi-coloured hair to tell you in a voice breaking with juvenile emotion that Judgement Day is coming. The fainthearts of the liberal media are always aghast when an angry scaffolder or stressed trucker drags one of the green hysterics off the road, but I’m blown away by the restraint of the British public. People’s patience in the face of the daily elitist provocations of Just Stop Oil is nothing short of Herculean.
It is “counterproductive”, says Mr Neilson, to have pink-haired sons and daughters of privilege inconveniencing workers during a “brutal” economic downturn. Again, he’s not wrong. The class-war streak in eco-activism is undeniable. Many Extinction Rebellion types are descendants of money. Writer Harry Mount calls them “Econians”, a green twist on “Etonians”. They’re the “public-school boys and girls who rule the wokerati world”. A survey of 6,000 XR activists who brought London to a halt in April 2019 found they were “overwhelmingly middle-class [and] highly educated”. Anyone who walked through London that month will have heard “Cut carbon emissions!” being cried in cut-glass tones and understood right away that our great city was under siege by vengeful aristocrats still smarting from the Industrial Revolution.
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June 25, 2023
Workers will be forced to stop working to salve the consciences of university-educated elite wankers
Brendan O’Neill on the Climate Goblin’s latest stunt in Sweden:
Picture the daughter of an opera singer preventing working-class men from doing their jobs. A young woman so well-connected that she probably has presidents on speed-dial physically blocking truck drivers from doing what they do. A child of privilege gathering with her similarly comfortable pals to stop working people from working.
Well, shorn of all the fact-lite bluster about “saving the planet”, that’s exactly what Greta Thunberg’s latest eco-stunt adds up to. The pint-sized prophetess of doom is back in the headlines. This time for getting arrested in Malmo harbour in Sweden, where she and other members of the End is Nigh cult have been holding a sit-down protest to stop oil tankers from leaving and delivering their life-giving cargo to the good people of Sweden and beyond.
The photographs from this temper tantrum disguised as a political protest tell a fascinating tale of the classism and narcissism in green politics. In the middle of the road are the smug-looking youths. One has green hair. Others sport beanie hats. None has ever driven a truck, clearly. Their banners speak of defending Earth from man’s evil burning of the toxic sludge of oil. And in the background are the supposed agents of this evil – the truckers; working men idly standing by their tankers while the world’s media get shots of Greta looking sad for Gaia.
What an apt snapshot of the hierarchy of virtue in what passes for radical politics today. Working-class people reduced to background actors, non-player characters, in a drama feverishly focussed on the jumped-up angst of the privileged. Working men as mere backdrop to the eco-neuroses of the comfortably off. In the moral universe fashioned by eco-influencers and their legion fawners in the political and media elites, the irrational fears of the upper-middle class carry more weight than the living standards of the working class.
It’s a story we see repeated across every act of eco-agitation today. In the UK, the plummy activists of Just Stop Oil, all called Poppy or Edred, block roads and prevent builders, scaffolders, deliverymen, mums and others from carrying out their essential work. The fightback of working men against this imperious imposition on their right to earn a living – witness scaffolders pushing eco-irritants out of the road – has been heartening to see. As a worker at Smithfield meat market in London put it a few years back when Extinction Rebellion types stormed in to speak up for animal rights or something, why should I allow this “happy-clappy mob” to stop me from being “able to pay my bills”?
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June 24, 2023
“… every time I see some fine new supercluster-aspirational buzzword-laden legislative boondoggle coming from our federal government I know that my life is going to get worse in some minor, petty, and yet measurable way”
Jen Gerson is irked by the federal government’s latest petty diktat to “save the planet” from single-use plastic bags that bans the use of bags that are not made of plastic:
Those who follow my work will know that I am an unreformed Calgary evangelist. I like this city for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that I’m a member of the Calgary CO-OP, a chain of local grocery stores. For those who are lucky enough to enjoy something like this, a co-op offers particular advantages over their conventional counterparts; we get a small share of the profits that the chain earns every year, for example. The stores stock local produce, meats, grain, and processed foods from Calgary-based suppliers, and from nearby farms. CO-OP also provides a number of top-notch house brand supplies. National chains are simply not as nimble, nor as local. They can’t be.
But I admit that one of the things I enjoy most about CO-OP is its green grocery bags. When stores across Canada began to phase out the use of single-use plastic bags, I was despondent. The environmental rationale for the ban was thin, but mostly I was annoyed because I’m chronically disorganized and can never remember to bring reusable bags.
So when CO-OP replaced plastic bags with a fully compostable alternative, I was delighted. Granted, we would have to pay a small fee to purchase these bags, but the per-unit cost was actually less than what we would normally spend on a box of Glad compost-bin liners. So it all evened out.
To make matters even better, unlike paper straws, the compostable bags are superior to their plastic alternatives. CO-OP advertises this point on their site: “They are stronger than a plastic checkout bag. You can carry a medium-size turkey or three bottles of wine with no problem.”
I can also attest to this. The bags are an absolute win for everybody involved.
So when I discovered on Thursday that Ottawa plans to ban these items, considering them a “single-use plastic”, I lost my goddamn mind.
Not only will this represent a small inconvenience for me and my family, but it is also one of the laziest, most idiotic decisions issued from this remote, non-responsive federal government I have yet to encounter.
The bags do not contain plastic.
Let me say that again, because apparently the sound of western voices doesn’t quite travel all the way to the the slower bureaucrats in the back: “THE BAGS DO NOT CONTAIN PLASTIC”. You fucking muppets.
[…]
Look, Ottawa, are you there? Are any of you listening, or am I just screaming into the void? For the sake of the entire country, I hope, I pray that there is somebody with an IQ above 92 capable of not just reading this desperate missive, but of really, truly understanding it.
This shit — this, right here.
This. Shit.
This is why we hate you.
This is why we fucking hate you.
Nobody outside the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal triangle sees a headline like “New Initiative from Ottawa!” and thinks: “Oh, how exciting. I’m so keen to see what grand notion those crafty MPs in Ottawa have cooked up now! Come, Maude, let us settle ourselves before the The National at Six so we can understand how our fine federal government is working to make our lives better.”
Nobody does that. Because every time I see some fine new supercluster-aspirational buzzword-laden legislative boondoggle coming from our federal government I know that my life is going to get worse in some minor, petty, and yet measurable way.
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