Inquiring Minds Want to Know, but there are no Inquiring Minds on the Left

The Obama/Biden administration was the most corrupt administration in U.S. history, despite the Clinton administration's efforts to be as corrupt as possible.  The Obama/Biden administration used the IRS to prevent hundreds of Tea Party and Limited Government organizations from becoming tax-free institutions to minimize their effectiveness in the 2012 election.  The fact that they got away with this emboldened them to go massively in on interfering with the 2016 election.  The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) hired the Brit Christopher Steele to collaborate with the Russians to produce the faked dossier that was used with the extensive collaboration of the Obama/Biden administration to obtain FISA permissions to spy on the Trump campaign.  We now know that Obama, Biden, FBI Head James Comey, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Director of the CIA John Brennen, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, and numerous Dept. of Justice bureaucrats such as the lovebirds Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were all involved in the effort to spy on the Trump campaign using a dossier they knew to be fake as their justification.

Claims based on the known fake Steele dossier that Trump was collaborating with Russia were used to offset attention to Hillary Clinton's theft of tens of thousands of government emails, some of which were classified, and which she made readily available to foreign governments by callously putting them on an unsecure server in her home.  Unless Russia, Red China, North Korea, and Iran have only incompetent hacker resources, there is every reason to believe they had access to all of Hillary Clinton's emails dealing with many fascinating State Department activities, which are intertwined with military, intelligence, and commercial national interests of the United States and our allies.  Actually, even our allies may have been hacking into her emails, since they also want more insight into the activities of the State Department and its activities with the military, intelligence, and commercial interests so they can gain an advantage over American in their dealings with us.  By the way, we know that Russia and China have extremely competent hacker resources.

Let me remind you that Nixon was driven from office because a few people broke into the DNC headquarters in the Watergate because they actually believed the DNC was collaborating with Cuba to influence the upcoming election.  They did not break in using a dossier they knew was fake as their justification.  They at least thought they were actually chasing down a national security threat.  Then Nixon tried to cover this up and discovered doing it.  Obama and a host in his administration, including Joe Biden, went a step into corruption beyond what Nixon did by creating a hoax and using it to spy on the Trump campaign and then as a means to claim the illegitimacy of his presidency for about 2.5 years, before slighting altering their claims to then impeach the President.

Now we have a Democratic Party nominee for the presidency in Joe Biden who has amassed a fortune while serving as a public servant in Washington, D.C. for 47 years.  He has a son and other relatives who have made fortunes selling his influence to Russia, oligarchs in Ukraine, and the Communist Party of the People's Republic of China.  The Old Guard Media, the Swamp Rats of Washington, D.C., and the socialist left controlling academia do not want the American people to learn about the many decades of rampant corruption in the Federal Government and more state governments than not.  Their power, influence, easy moral pretense, and income all depend upon being the well-connected special interests who can take advantage of the power to make laws and regulations based on government force and on the vast taxes paid by the great majority of hard-working Americans in the private sector.

If you have an inquiring mind, then you will find this video of Tucker Carlson to be very interesting:

Should Joe Biden become President, we will have many national security problems, since he is certainly a puppet to not only the extreme socialist wing of his party, but he is also in the pockets of Russia and China, and oligarchs in Ukraine. Those are not nice people and they are very happy to hurt the American people.

I was wrong about the Democratic Party #walkaway

A friend, Tom Wright, directed my attention to a very interesting video of one young woman's story of the toxic culture experienced by a Teach for America teacher in a government-run school and then as a registered nurse in Los Angeles, CA. She had been brought up a Democrat and had long believed that conservatives were simply bad people. She learned that the progressive Democrat program maintained, rather than solved problems. She realized that many Democrats had so identified themselves as heroes fighting the problems of society, whether racism, women's rights, and homophobia, that they could not actually allow the problems to be solved because then their hero status would disappear. Policies that proved ineffective or catastrophic were continued, despite their clear failure.

She realized that many of the Democrats attitudes were grounded on a belief that some minorities simply were incapable of having the character expected of other Americans. In other words, they were bigoted. She came to realize that the main stream media cherry picked facts, dropped the context of events, told stories in a way to misdirect people, and simply ignored stories they could not present in a manner to misdirect their listeners. For some time, she found herself understanding that the Democrat agenda was very bad for people, but she still had a hard time examining the ideas of conservatives. In time she managed to overcome the barrier that she had long believed that Republicans and conservatives were not the evil people the Democrats had portrayed them to be.

The story of her evolution in the development of an independent mind is very fascinating. It is well worth listening to. See Georgia's great video about how she developed an independent mind -- a beautiful mind.

Biden Flies Across America to Rally with Ten People Causing Climate Catastrophe

For a man who tells us that the Earth and Mankind face an existential crisis due to the use of fossil fuels, Joe Biden does not hesitate to fly across the United States to give a "rally" for ten followers.  Our energy future is to be put on a starvation diet, while Joe Biden spews carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Is this just his megalomania, consistent with his belief that the American People do not deserve to know whether he will pack the Supreme Court?  Or does this mean Joe understands that the Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming theory is really just a scam for the Socialist Democratic Party to gain more power for the government, which is about to be "I am the Democratic Party" Joe Biden?

Because if Joe Biden is the Democratic Party, then rest assured that Joe Biden, if elected President, will be the Government.  There will be no more need for sharing power with the Supreme Court and the Congress then there is a need for Joe Biden to share power with multiple leaders, factions, and individuals in the Democratic Party.

Police use of deadly force is not about racism

Police use of deadly force is not about racism

Reality is far more complicated, but agenda-pushing activists don’t want to discuss it

David Wojick

The screaming headline said "Black Americans 2.5X more likely than whites to be killed by police." The statement is false. It is the kind of assertion that is used to claim police are systemically racist. It leads to fewer police, fewer arrests, more crime, more racial discord, and more innocent black deaths.

Accurate, honest statistics show just the opposite. When police must use deadly force, whites are more likely to be killed than blacks. But we rarely see these statistics, because they do not support claims of systemic, systematic racism against blacks. The statistics we do see are too often agenda-driven.

The sad reality is that, as a percentage of their total American population, black deaths by police are around 2.5 times white deaths. But this has nothing to do with likelihood, because the vast majority of people of both races have near-zero likelihood of being killed by police.

In fact, up to 88% of people killed by police were armed and being arrested at the time of their deaths. Such people are indeed at greater risk of being killed. However, racism has nothing to do with it.

On a per-arrest basis, the data say whites are much more likely to be killed by police than blacks. If so, the police are clearly not racist. Indeed, they seem to be deliberately trying not to kill blacks. Another study found that 36% of officer-involved shootings were “suicide by cop,” 16% of whom were blacks.

Statistical reality must begin with the fact that black males represent 6.5% of the US population – but according to FBI data they constitute 54% of arrests for robbery and 53% of arrests for murder. Far worse, nationally syndicated talk show host Larry Elder points out, in 2018 there were approximately 7,400 black homicide victims, more than half of America’s total homicides, and nearly all were murdered by other blacks. (Have Black Lives Matter or NFL-NBA-MLB athletes ever acknowledged any of this?)

Those are the real reasons blacks outnumber whites in the nation’s prisons – the real reasons more blacks are likely to be killed during arrests and other confrontations with police.

Even more telling, when we look at the issue that motivates and infuriates Black Lives Matter (BLM) and its allies – unarmed blacks killed by police – we learn that the Mapping Police Violence database tabulates “just” 25 such police killings in 2019, resulting from shootings, tasers, beatings, chokeholds and vehicles.  (A Washington Post database records only police shootings.) And then we read this:

“A wave of gun violence swept through the nation over the [July Fourth 2020] holiday weekend, leaving dozens dead from coast-to-coast – with children as young as 5 among the casualties,” the New York Post despaired. In Chicago, the article continued, police reported 87 shootings and 17 deaths, and nearly a dozen [of those shot] were children caught in the crossfire. The vast majority were black.

Think about that. In one weekend, in one city, we had three-fourths the number of deaths that BLM is raging about, for the entire nation, over the course of an entire year. Or consider this awful news:

“Every single person who has been shot in New York City [so far] this July, nearly 100 in total, has been a member of the minority community” and “97% of shooting victims in June were members of the city’s minority community,” NBC News reporter Tom Winter tweeted. New York City witnessed a 204% increase in shooting victims over the past 28 days, compared to the same period in 2019, he added.

Meanwhile, Darrius Sutton participated in at least three drive-by shootings after he was released from NYC jails without bail on attempted murder charges – a far too frequent occurrence in Di Blasio Town. Again, no comments, no outrage from BLM.

What about law enforcement officers like David Dorn and Patrick Underwood? What about Mekhi James, LeGend Taliferro, Secoriea Turner and too many other Black children gunned down by their fellow blacks? Seven-year-old Natalia Wallace was playing with other children in Chicago over this year’s Fourth of July weekend, when thugs leapt from a car and sprayed gunfire into a crowd, killing her.

Why don’t their black lives matter to Black Lives Matter, its often violent supporters, and its corporate, Hollywood and pro athlete funding sources? Does anyone really think the solution is “defunding” or “reimagining” police forces – perhaps replacing thousands of police officers with social workers?

The victims’ families certainly don’t. Natalia’s father told local news media he wants more police, not fewer. Her aunt said, “We talk about Black Lives Matter, but at the end of the day, we’re killing each other off. We’re killing our babies.”

“The No. 1 cause of preventable death for young white men is accidents, such as car accidents and drownings,” Larry Elder notes. “The No. 1 reason for death, preventable or otherwise for young black men, is homicide, almost always at the hands of another young black man.” How depressing.

Police have to deal with way too many criminals, attacks, confrontations and murders, especially in poor and minority areas of our cities. They never know who will pull a gun, even during a routine intervention, traffic stop or domestic disturbance – or which incident might be a setup, an ambush. That’s part of the reason some officers are jumpy or feel they must use potentially deadly force when they would much prefer not to. But racist tendencies, much less systemic racism, have nothing to do with it.

The United States once had systemic, government-decreed racism. This is no longer the case, and elevating individual, thankfully now pretty rare cases of racism into something systemic gets us nowhere.

It is much more likely that what is happening today is the result of too many black boys being raised fatherless, by gangs, amid street violence – and to their not attending school, and thus growing up with no education, skills or future. They likewise receive no grounding in civics, humanity, morality or religion, and have few scruples and little remorse over murdering someone to settle a score or perceived insult.

Just as in medicine, getting the diagnosis wrong can be much worse than useless. Trying to blame or cure systemic white racism or supposedly widespread individual white racism will only make matters worse. Blaming people for things they are not doing just makes them angry. Intimidating them into silence over these accusations just makes them angry and resentful.

Honest, probing social science, media coverage and debate could help us find solutions. Name calling, guilt trips and false assertions of systemic racism will make the situation worse. That people are being told everything is due to racism is tearing us apart, instead of pulling us together in search of solutions. It is a political trick that is causing horrific, widespread social upheaval, whether by accident or design.

Marching, screaming, burning, looting and simplistic, deceptive slogans are not solutions. They are not even calls for constructive action. They are certainly not calls to ponder the points presented here and in countless other articles and reports – or to reexamine some of the well-intended but woefully misguided government programs that helped get us where we are today.

Angrily demanding that “things have to change” is not a step forward. It may even be a step backward, if it leads to more confusion, and more stupid or useless programs. Promoting racial division and discord will ensure that the real causes of crime, violence and murder in our black and other minority communities are never addressed

These issues cry out for attention they are not getting. Perhaps after the elections, after the insanity and riots are over, we can have honest, no-holds-barred conversations about this, without being shouted down and canceled out. We must hope so. Otherwise, our nation’s future is bleak indeed.

David Wojick, PhD is an independent analyst working at the intersection of science, technology and policy. He writes regularly about climate change, energy and social issues.

My Comments:

Many violent young men in black communities were forced to attend government-run schools that were little more than holding pens.  They received extremely inadequate educations, despite the fact that the school systems often cost taxpayers very high ratios of money per student.  It is extremely frustrating to be forced to spend your time in a boring environment for many hours a day.  It also does not help that the mostly government education establishment in the name of feminism decries males as brutish and chauvinist suppressors of women, thereby depriving males of their role as protectors and providers of women and children.  This is hardly conducive in convincing young men to behave responsibly, to care for the women they have sex with, and to care for the children who may result.  Being so poorly educated, taking on such responsibilities becomes much harder.  So more children wind up without a father at home.  In these poorly educated communities, most of the people are not knowledgeable enough to vote intelligently.  It is common for them to cast 90% of their votes for the Democratic Party, which was almost always responsible for their extremely inadequate educations and for providing less policing than is needed to make their neighborhoods more secure. The lack of security and Democratic barriers to business formation, make it more expensive to live in their neighborhoods and result in few job opportunities.

A very vicious cycle has been set up in many black communities, especially those where there has long been Democratic Party control of the local government.  That party fights hard to prevent educational choice by suppressing non-government schools, it provides poor teachers, a poor school curriculum, and surprisingly poor school facilities and safety given the education budgets.  The Democrat Party is especially likely to create many barriers to starting businesses and causes business expenses to be much greater than they should be.  That party also underfunds police who are much needed to make these black communities safe enough to raise families in them and to operate businesses that provide needed services and jobs.

The systematic racism that does exist is that perpetrated by the Democratic Party.  It is hardly surprising that this is the same party of slavery, of Jim Crow laws, of the KKK (including President Woodrow Wilson and Senator Robert Byrd, who Joe Biden said was his Senate mentor), and the party that provided many more of the votes against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than did the Republicans who voted for it with much higher percentages in both the House and the Senate.

If you want a society in which every life is valued, then you should understand that such a society is one that believes that every individual has many broad rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.  These rights include the right to pursue an education, to pursue a livelihood, freedom of contract, freedom of privacy, freedom of conscience, and freedom of association.  None of these rights require that anyone else has to serve you or provide for you, but they certainly do require that no one initiate the use of force to prevent you as an individual from pursuing your values and managing your own life while enjoying these individual rights.  In our society, as in many, it is the government which is the main initiator of the use of force to prevent individuals from exercising their individual rights.  None of these individual rights is neither enhanced, nor diminished by virtue of one's ethnicity or skin color.  These are not collective, block, or faction rights.  They are the rights of each and every individual human being and must be honored for every citizen of the United States of America.  For that matter, every government and every society around the world should be doing the same.

Joe Biden's Infrastructure and Green Energy Jobs Will Force You to Join a Union

Joe Biden gave a talk to a few union workers in Eire, Pennsylvania today.  He spoke about the many jobs he was going to create as our next President.  His plan is simple and very simple-minded.  He will force us to spend huge amounts of money on "green energy."  This will create jobs.  He will spend huge amounts of money building government schools.  This will create jobs.  He will make college educations free, which will create jobs.  He will provide people up to $15,000 as down-payments on new homes.  This will create jobs.  He promises that these jobs will all require union wages.

He could also replace all the bulldozers with shovels and claim he was creating jobs.

Jobs that last are those that increase the productivity of people and raise our standard of living.  So-called "Green Energy" jobs that replace inexpensive, dependable, and in the modern era, clean, coal, oil, and natural gas energy with expensive, intermittent wind and solar energy, do not increase productivity and do not raise our standard of living.  As I have proven over and over, coal, oil, and natural gas energy are not bringing on catastrophic man-made global warming.  That hypothesis has failed to live up to its constant and determined hype by those who are always looking for an excuse to increase the power of governments in the micromanagement of our lives.  "Green energy" has only managed to increase the cost of energy to date and to make our power grids more vulnerable to blackouts.  By raising energy costs, it has reduced employment throughout our economy in all businesses that use electric power.  These reductions tend to be diffuse and hard to point at, but any requirement that raises the cost of doing business has to result in fewer jobs.

Having realized he might lose some states if he maintains his pledge of a few months ago to end fracking, Biden now claims he absolutely will not end fracking.  Though he will rejoin the Paris Climate Accord and eventually end the use of all hydrocarbon fuels, which does sound like the end of fracking to any rational thinker.  His current stance is that he will not allow it on federal lands and since he is largely against allowing pipelines to be built, he will limit its ability to get to markets.  Clearly, Biden cannot be trusted on the fracking issue.

What our education system needs is an infusion of the freedom to choose.  We do not need more government-run schools.  Government-run schools tend to become as well-managed as the Departments of Motor Vehicles, the Veterans Administration, the Social Security Administration, the Postal Service, or Fannie Mae.  We need better teachers.  We need more teachers who are not from the bottom quarter of college graduates.  We need better education curricula.  We need students to learn real history and economics -- not the hysterical fables the socialist left teaches.  We need to teach students to do math and to write coherently on serious subjects.  We need to encourage rational thought -- not simply promote stream of consciousness and to perpetuate childish feelings.

The government and most other schools too are in the hands of the socialist left, which is not surprising given that the vast majority of the educational establishment is in the hands of government.  As long as its center of gravity is the government, the thinking of education professionals will be dominated by those who want a never-ending increase in the power of government.  There is no surprise that those who want this are always seeking justifications such as group identity politics infused with critical race theory, peak resource production, claims that businesses only want to crush their customers, and predictions of catastrophic man-made global warming.  One has to scare the people into accepting being forced to comply with evermore mandates.

Jobs building more government schools will displace jobs in the private sector devoted to the goods and services individuals choose of their own free will.  It will ultimately take resources away from addressing the real needs of an educational system that would actually prepare students to become productive workers and freedom-maintaining citizens.  Those needs are best met by allowing the education system to become a vital part of the private sector.  Biden and the Democrats want at all costs to prevent that from happening.  The government-run school teachers unions are their strongest supporters.  

Accept a free college education and you are absolutely accepting a curriculum of propaganda approved by the government.  I should not have to say more to a freedom-loving individual.  Furthermore, that which is free, is not valued.  Free college educations will surely become an education in how to party.  Imagine what students will learn about binge drinking, drug use, and promiscuous sex.  All taxpayers should be delighted with the prospect of working hard in their jobs and giving a larger fraction of their pay up so more students can be educated in how they are mostly racist monsters (so-called whites), male chauvinists (all males), mean-hearted and selfish suppressors of the people (all who have above average income or wealth and are in the private sector), or Gaia rapists (all who use the resources of the Earth).  Nonetheless, private sector employers are expected to hire the partying experts and the private-sector business haters the free colleges will produce.  This is Biden's planned future.

New home down-payments up to $15,000:  In a fantasy world in which government can make anything and everything free without hurting everyone, why not?  Sure free education, free homes, free meals, free health care, free jobs  -- in exchange for our votes.  Actually, Biden claims all his freebies will only come from those making more than $400,000 a year, whatever that means.  This comes on the heals of massive, unnecessary business shutdowns in the Covid-19 scare and huge government relief bills that have run up our national debt already to otherworldly levels.  All of this has to be paid for and it will come out of our hides in the future loss of many other values we might have chosen as individuals.  This socialist free lunch is a fantasy with a deep and fearsome bite.

Those jobs Biden promises are promised to be good Union jobs.  Yes, he promised the union leaders he was talking to that he would ensure that the jobs he would create would be union jobs.  Most Americans do not want to be forced to join a union.  I, as an employer, do not want to be forced to share my management judgment with union leaders, almost all of whom are Mafia or Communists and none of whom are suitable partners in my business.  Your future with Biden and his socialist Democrat Party hosts is one of forced union dues and rules or the sharing of the management of your business with corrupt, inept union leaders.

With Biden as President, I see a future in we are all much more subject to the use of government force to make us do the bidding of the Socialist Democratic Party elitists.  Far more often, they will tell you which of your values you will be allowed to pursue and far more often they will take the resources from you that would have allowed you to pursue your own chosen values.  They will use those resources to pursue their values, which will often be designed to hurt you.  If you think that the people, who want the kind of power that characterizes the elite of the Socialist Democrat Party, care about you as an individual, you are incredibly gullible.

Government has a monopoly on the use of force.  This makes government the most dangerous institution we have to live with in our society.  When government takes on functions beyond those of protecting our freedom to exercise our many and broad individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, it necessarily starts choosing who it is going to hurt.  Its justification for hurting some is always couched in terms of helping others.  Most people accept that because they do not understand that the free market private sector is where relationships are based on mutual benefits, not one side wins and one side loses.  When government takes on massive numbers of functions, there are vast numbers of losers and some winners.  The winners are those who make a profession of cozying up to the government elite.  This is why the suburbs of Washington, DC are among the very richest in the nation.  The losers are most Americans, few of whom have any idea how much they have lost.

You Need to Elect Me to Find Out What I Will Do as President

There is a most interesting parallel between the presidential candidacy of Joe Biden and the passage of the infamous ObamaCare bill.  As Nancy Pelosi so famously said about the ObamaCare bill: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”

The man who claims to be the Democratic Party cannot tell us whether he wants to pack the Supreme Court or not.  He would not answer the question in the first debate with Trump.  He will not tell us whether he will encourage the Democrats to end the filibuster in the Senate so a simple majority can dictate any law it wants to the American people. 

This is a critical issue.  The Senate filibuster has long required that 60% of the Senators had to agree to create a new law, if 40% of the Senators were adamantly opposed to the bill.  For those who lust for power over the people, this has been an irritating limit on their power.  Obama has said the filibuster limit on government power has to be eliminated.  Senator Coons of Delaware wants the filibuster rule changed too.  The Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer will only say that if the Democrats get a majority in the Senate, then anything they want is on the table.  On this issue, AOC is at Schumer's side.

Just as many Democrats want to pack the Supreme Court, they also want to tip the scales among the states more in their favor by making the District of Columbia with its almost completely power-hungry government feed trough-eaters a state.  They also want to give the extreme welfare-dependent Puerto Ricans the federal vote that comes with statehood.  The more voters dependent upon a high-spending government for their very existence, the better for those of our betters who want to rule the unwashed, ignorant Deplorables.

Either Joe Biden wants to be a dictator who is not accountable to the American people as his claim of being the Democratic Party states and his refusal to answer basic questions about his use of power as President implies, or he is pawn of the extreme socialist wing of the Democratic Party trying to hide his role with a pretense of leadership over that party.  No sane person could want such a person to rule over them.

Those Stubborn Climate Modelers Absolutely Insist on Being Wrong

The previous set of wrongheaded climate models, CMIP5, generated too much warming over the sea and in the tropical troposphere (the lower, most dense, layer of the Earth's atmosphere).  The current CMIPS6 models cause excessive warming all over the Earth in both the lower and the middle troposphere.  It has long been recognized that too much warming in the tropical troposphere causes greater latitudinal temperature gradients that would cause too much warming worldwide.  The errors of the CMIPS5 models were not addressed.  Instead, the bias of the modelers in favor of exaggerated man-made global warming has led to their creation of a new generation of models that actually makes the errors of the previous models worse.  Apparently, these "scientists" believe that when you are proven wrong, the job of science is to develop models and theories that are even more wrong.  These CMIPS6 climate models are supposed to provide the basis for the next UN IPCC report on how man's use of hydrocarbon fuels will cause catastrophic global warming.

A new paper by Dann M. Mitchell et al.,  examines the temperature trends in the troposphere and stratosphere in the tropics for 48 of the CMIPS6 climate models, each of which is supposed to represent the well-understood consensus climate science, despite the differences in their predictions.  The essence of the results of this analysis by Mitchell et al. is shown in this figure from their manuscript accepted for publication in Environmental Research Letters:

The overwrite on the right-most graph is part of the word manuscript on this pre-publication paper.  The vertical atmosphere altitude is given in terms of the pressure in hPa, where an hPa is 100 Pa.  The x-axis gives the change in temperature per decade in Kelvins (a change of 1 Kelvin equals a change of 1 degree Centigrade).  There is warming in the troposphere and cooling in the stratosphere in the left-most graph, so you can tell the pressure at which the stratosphere begins by looking for the intersection with the zero trend line.

The left-most graph is the measured (black) and the model (red and blue) change in temperature/decade for the period 1979 to 2014.  The black measurements are based on three sets of data: RICH1.5 radiosondes, RAOBCORE1.5 radiosondes, and the Reanalysis ERA5/5.1.  The red horizontal lines indicate the so-called 95% uncertainty range of temperature rate change of the models which try to predict the ocean surface temperatures.  The blue model results are for those models that assume the measured ocean temperatures, rather than trying to predict them.  The red models that try to predict the ocean temperatures increase their errors with excessively high warming rates over the oceans at the surface.  Then, on top of that, they predict increasingly larger warming trends as they climb upwards through the troposphere.  The predictions for the cooling in the stratosphere seem to be much better for these models in the 1979-2014 period, but this is scientifically illusory.

The middle and the right graph separate out the 1979-1997 and the 1998-2014 periods of time.  In the earlier period, the models gave too little cooling in the stratosphere, while in the later period they gave too much cooling.  Putting these offsetting errors together, produced a seemingly good agreement in the stratosphere in the combined period from 1979 to 2014.  However, it is clear from the shorter period results that the modelers did not really know what they were doing.  The actual measured rates show little to no cooling in the stratosphere after 1997, while the models insist on cooling rates similar to those for the 1979-1997 period.

From 1998 to 2014, the CMIPS5 models excessively warmed at rates of 4 to 5 times faster than did the actual temperature measurements.  The CMIPS6 models are not improved.  They are especially in error in the upper troposphere at pressures of about 200 hPa.  There is one especially wrongheaded model and it is the one the Canadian government relies upon for its policies on global warming.  It yields a tropospheric warming rate about 7 times the observed warming rate.  Those poor, poor Canadians!  Governmental energy policies based on a seven-fold exaggeration of a "problem" sure does create real problems.

There is also an evaluation of the CMIPS6 models by McKitrick and Christy which has been accepted for publication by Earth and Space Science.  These authors had found that there was a warming bias in the CMIPS5 models in the tropical mid-troposphere in earlier analyses.  Their new work demonstrates that the CMIPS6 models are even more biased towards warming.  This increased warming is seen in their predictions in both the lower and middle troposphere at all latitudes - the tropics and beyond.  They found that the models using higher Equilibrium Climate Sensitivities (>3.4K) warmed faster than those using lower values of the ECS, but both sets of models all predicted faster than the observed rate of warming.  The observed rate of warming in the lower troposphere is given as 0.15 K/decade, while the lower ECS value set of models with an average ECS of 2.7K gave a lower troposphere warming rate of 0.21K/decade.  The observed middle troposphere warming rate is 0.09K/decade.  To get the right rate of warming, the models would have to use ECS values in the 1 to 2 K range.

In conclusion, the climate modelers, whose models are the basis for man-made global warming, continue to show that they do not understand the science and that their degree of understanding is not improving.  Yet, we can rest assured that many governmental bodies will continue to determine their energy-use policies based on their failed understanding of the science.  There will continue to be claims that they represent the consensus on well-understood science.  It is pretty much impossible to understand the stubborn persistence in the belief in the failed catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis as a matter of science.

Their clinging to this erroneous belief is a matter of payoffs, environmental religion, and socialist politics lusting to wrest away more and more control of the management of our individual lives. 

Why don't these black lives matter? by Paul Driessen

Child labor, human rights abuses and deaths are routinely ignored by Greens and Democrats

Marathon Petroleum recently announced it will “indefinitely idle” its Martinez Refinery. The decision will remove hundreds of jobs, billions of dollars, and nearly 7 million gallons of gasoline, diesel and other petroleum liquids per day from the energy-hungry California economy. It will also send fuel prices even higher for minority and other poor families that already pay by far the highest gasoline prices in the continental United States: $1.32 more per gallon of regular than in Louisiana and Texas.

California’s green and political interests don’t want drilling or fracking, pipelines, or nuclear, coal or hydroelectric power plants – or mining for the materials needed to manufacture electric cars. They prefer to have that work done somewhere else, and just import the energy, cars and consumer goods.

They’ve long wanted a totally electric vehicle (EV) fleet, which they claim would be clean, ethical, climate-friendly and sustainable. Of course, those labels hold up only so long as they look solely at activities and emissions within California state boundaries – and not where the mining, manufacturing and electricity generation take place. That kind of “life cycle” analysis would totally disrupt their claims.

Consider copper. A typical internal combustion engine uses about 50 pounds (23 kilograms) of this vital everyday metal, the International Copper Association says. A hybrid car requires almost 90 lb (40 kg); a plug-in EV needs 132 lb (60 kg); and a big electric bus can use up to 812 lb (369 kg) of copper. If all 15,000,000 California cars were EVs, they would need almost 1,000,000 tons of copper.

But copper ores average just 0.5% metal by weight, notes energy analyst Mark Mills. That means 200,000,000 tons of ore would have to be dug up, crushed, processed and refined to get that much copper. Almost every step in that process would require fossil fuels – and emit carbon dioxide and pollutants.

That’s just California. According to Cambridge University Emeritus Professor of Technology Michael Kelly, replacing all the United Kingdom’s vehicles with next-generation EVs would require more than half the world’s annual production of copper; twice its annual cobalt; three quarters of its yearly lithium carbonate output; and nearly its entire annual production of neodymium.

Just one electric car or backup-power battery weighs 1,000 pounds and requires extracting and processing some 500,000 pounds of various ores, Mills says. The true costs of “green” energy are staggering.

Imagine replacing all of the USA’s nearly 300,000,000 cars, SUVs, pickup trucks, buses, trucks and other vehicles with electric versions under the Green New Deal – and then charging them daily. The millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels, billions of backup-power batteries, thousands of miles of new transmission lines, grid upgrades and million or so fast charging stations all across America would also require copper, concrete, all these other metals and many more materials, in incomprehensible quantities.

Alaska’s Pebble Mine deposit has an estimated 35 million tons of high-grade copper ore and 3 million tons of molybdenum and other critical GND ores. The copper alone is nearly two times the world’s 2019 output of that essential element. Permits were blocked for years for questionable reasons. But the US Army Corps of Engineers recently found that mining would not have a “measurable effect” on sockeye salmon numbers in the Bristol Bay watershed and should be allowed to proceed, under tough US pollution control, reclamation, wildlife protection, workplace safety, fair wage and child labor laws.

Environmentalists intend to delay the Pebble Mine as long as possible – and block other US exploration and mining projects. That’s why most mining and processing is done overseas, much of it in China and Mongolia or by Chinese companies in Africa, Asia and Latin America, where none of these laws apply.

Most of the world’s rare earth ores are extracted near Baotou, Inner Mongolia by pumping acid into the ground, then processed using more acids and chemicals. Producing one ton of rare earth metals releases up to 420,000 cubic feet of toxic gases, 2,600 cubic feet of acidic wastewater, and a ton of radioactive waste. The resulting black sludge is piped into a foul, lifeless lake. Numerous local people suffer from severe skin and respiratory diseases, children are born with soft bones, and cancer rates have soared.

Lithium comes largely from Tibet and arid highlands of the Argentina-Bolivia-Chile “lithium triangle.” Dead, toxic fish join carcasses of cows and yaks floating down Tibet’s Liqi River, which has been poisoned by the Ganzizhou Rongda mine. Native people in the ABC triangle say lithium operations contaminate streams needed for humans, livestock and irrigation, and leave mountains of discarded salt.

The world’s top producer of cobalt is the Democratic Republic of Congo, where some 40,000 children as young as four toil with their parents for less than $2 a day up to 12 hours a day. Many die in cave-ins, or more slowly from constant exposure to toxic, radioactive mud, dust, water and air that puts dangerous levels of cobalt, lead, uranium and other heavy metals into their bodies. The cobalt ore is sent to China for processing by the Chinese-owned Congo Dongfang International Mining Company.

That’s just to meet current raw material requirements. Try to picture the raw material demands, Third World mining and child labor conditions, and ecological destruction, under the Green New Deal.

Liberals often say they support sustainable, ethical coffee, sneakers, handbags and diamonds. No child labor, sweat shops or unsafe conditions tolerated. But it’s a different story with green energy and EVs. In 2019, California Assembly Bill 735 proposed that the state certify that “zero emission” electric vehicles sold there are free of any materials or components that involve child labor. Democrats voted it down. The matter is complicated, they “explained.” It would be too hard to enforce, cost too much and imperil state climate goals. And besides, lots of other industries also use child labor. (So shut up about it.)

Last month, the US House of Representatives had an opportunity to legislate a national certification that federally funded electric buses and charging stations would not include minerals mined with child labor. The Transportation Committee approved the amendment 43-19 (all 19 nay votes were Democrats). But Pete DeFazio(D-OR) quietly replaced the enforceable certification language with a meaningless statement that “it is the policy of the United States” that funds “should not be used” for items involving child labor.

DeFazio claimed certification is unnecessary because US trade agreements prohibit child labor. But there is no agreement with Congo, and China has shown no interest in ending child labor in its supply chains. (Plus, the matter is complicated, hard to enforce and perilous for climate and Green New Deal goals.)

It’s easy for Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues to wear Kente cloth stoles in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. And for Sierra Club staff to criticize the organization’s “history and culture of white supremacy” – what I call callous, deadly and arguably racist eco-imperialism and carbon colonialism. We need real reform, and an end to the cancel culture that silences discussion about the horrors of what’s going on in too many non-white areas of the United States and world.

 

The human and ecological realities of GND policies cry out for debate. So do the violence and death that preceded and followed George Floyd’s inexcusable death. Not just the 25 police killings of unarmed blacks all across America in 2019 that have become the narrow focus of Black Lives Matter, politicians and rioters. But also the murders of David Dorn, Patrick Underwood and other police officers; Mekhi James, LeGend Taliferro, Secoriea Turner and other black children gunned down by their fellow blacks; and as many as 7,000 American black men, women and children murdered by blacks every year.

In Chicago, over the July 4 weekend, police reported 87 shootings and 17 deaths, and nearly a dozen of those shot were children caught in the crossfire, the New York Post despaired. In fact, the black-on-black Windy City murder toll over almost any two recent successive weekends exceeds those 25 police killings.

“Every single person who has been shot in New York City [so far] this July, nearly 100 in total, has been a member of the minority community,” NBC News reporter Tom Winter tweeted, “and 97% of shooting victims in June were members of the city’s minority community.” The solution is defunding the police?

ALL these African, Asian, Latin American and minority American lives matter. It’s time to talk about it honestly, figure out what’s really driving the inhumanity, and create a world we can be proud to live in.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues. 

How to Change a Society from a Largely Free Democratic Republic to a Fascist Socialist Totalitarian State

1.  Divide individuals by gender, by ethnicity, by wealth and income, by education, by age, and by sexuality; 

2.  Pit one group against another using the force of government to provide unearned rewards to some at the expense of others by putting limits on the rights of individuals to earn a living, limiting their freedom of association, and their freedom to cooperate with one another; 

3.  Thereby, creating distrust and hatred as the factions fight to control the government that insists on hurting many, making it a threat to all, thereby making it a matter of life and death for each group to control the government;

4.  Watch a country that once honored merit in the market place, but became an unlimited democracy, succumb to greed for the unearned with the development of ever more special interest groups dependent upon government largess;

5.  The government-run and funded education system becomes a tool promoting more and more government powers, seeks to suppress all private education alternatives, seeks to suppress individual rights especially freedom of speech and the freedom of the press or media, promotes the collective rights of some groups at the expense of the rights of the individuals in other groups, and promotes versions of the country's prior history that diverge ever more from the truth such that more and more power and money flow to the government and the education system;

6. In which a majority coalition of those who have less wealth and want government forced transfers of wealth to themselves and those who most lust for power turn the country into a socialist, fascist country (very poor, primitive countries usually turn communist instead);

7. Which in turn comes to be ruled by the most brutal elements of the power lusters with a total loss of individual rights.

I read William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich the summer after the 9th grade and came to understand most of this.  I think I understood some of these lessons better than Shirer did.  There have been many further examples of this process since WWII.

Here is a very interesting analysis video of what we are presently facing based on a young woman's experience during the disintegration of Yugoslavia.

Robert Bidinotto -- Many People Embrace Altruism Because They See Relationships as Win-Lose in a Zero-Sum World

I, Charles Anderson, have long argued that the private sector -- a broader concept than the free market -- allows everyone to pursue relationships offering mutual benefits, while the government sector is "dog eat dog" under the rule of brutal force. I have not railed much against altruism as a chosen philosophy, though Ayn Rand and many other Objectivists have. Instead, I have simply tried to convince people that our relationships should be worked to our mutual benefit and government should be limited by the principle that it should not be hurting anyone, not even with a rationale that it was acting for the "Greater Good."  

Yet before reading Robert Bidinotto's comments below, I did not quite recognize that many people were so repulsed by being an oppressor in a world they saw as a zero-sum game that they chose instead to be a victim.  In dealing with zero-sum win/lose governments, I have made this choice myself.  This repulsion for being the bully/oppressor serves as the reason that many people act as though they are altruists, the philosophy of self-sacrifice.  Fortunately, the free private sector is very accommodating to win/win relationships and we can develop a society in which self-sacrifice is not a necessary choice to avoid becoming a monster oppressor.

In a Facebook discussion, Robert Bidinotto, the author of the Hunter thriller novels, made what I believe to be unusually perceptive and brilliant observations that made this much clearer to me. As he says, this explanation for the popularity of altruism needs to be understood and promulgated with vigor.  With his permission, I am reproducing his comments here:

Robert Bidinotto:  On the Origins of "Self-Sacrifice" as Moral "Ideal"

Politics is force -- and the initiation of force necessarily creates zero-sum situations of victimizers vs. victims. This means politics necessarily fuels resentments, hatred, and social "polarization," because politics invariably, unavoidably results in "win/lose" relationships.

  

This state of affairs is the exact opposite of the voluntary, non-coercive trade relationships in a free society, which are to mutual benefit and are thus "win/win." In the marketplace, all parties to an uncoerced transaction walk away afterward believing that they are better off than before. It's why when we pay for something in stores, we customarily say "thank you" -- and so do the sellers. We are happy to get the goods and services sold to us, and they are happy to get our money in exchange. There are no victimizers, and no victims.

You'd think people who truly wanted a peaceful, benevolent, harmonious society would realize this, embrace the free market, and reject government coercion as the central organizing principle of society. But no. 

Why? 

I think that's because a huge percentage of people harbor a fundamental zero-sum, winner-loser view of economic and social relationships. Few people ever become leftists because they read turgid tracts by Marx and Engels about "class warfare." They become leftists because they see social and economic relationships in terms of either gaining power over others, or of submitting to the power of others. They see human interests as being fundamentally in conflict, so that the "self-interest" of some necessitates the "exploitation" of others.

This worldview or Narrative is rooted deep within humanity's tribal past, where human relationships *were* all about either domination or submission. We have to remember that capitalism, historically, is very new -- and from the outset it was misinterpreted through the conventional, long-standing filter of that zero-sum, win-lose worldview. Capitalists were thus "robber barons," not society's creative benefactors. Marx, and generations he influenced, interpreted capitalism and all human relationships in terms of class warfare. Today, "identity politics" rests on the same view of inherent conflicts of interest among demographic groups. Society, to the left, is all about "power relationships."

If I'm right about this, then many people's idealization of the ethics of "self-sacrifice" makes a kind of sense. Altruistic self-sacrifice is not so much the result of philosophical/ideological persuasion, as it is the result of a deep-seated core belief in inherent conflicts of interest -- and the subsequent conclusion that the only way for people to live in social harmony is to forgo their "selfish interests." 

This puts a different interpretive spin on the age-old popularity of altruism. On its face, self-sacrifice makes no sense. Acting in opposition to one's best interests is bizarre, and why people should *want* to accept it as a "moral ideal" is even more bizarre. So Ayn Rand, for one -- viewing human action as powered by abstract philosophical ideas -- tried to explain altruism's prevalence by imagining that malicious philosophers and thinkers have pushed it upon the gullible as a self-contained "ism," and embedded it into various philosophies. You can read endless articles from Rand and her followers bashing "altruism" per se, as a causal force in society. You also see that their critiques have had little societal impact.

My explanation for this failure is that the attacks on altruism per se are strategically misplaced. If what I said above is valid, then altruism is less a moral cause than a moral *conclusion* -- a logical choice for those who believe that socio-economic relationships involve inherent conflicts of interest. If that's your Narrative about the social world -- if you see transactions as nothing but power relationships about dominance and submission -- then you have a logical choice to make: either to become a cold-blooded, predatory brute, or to become (or remain) "nice" and allow yourself to be an exploited victim. Those who truly believe in this Narrative may conclude that they'd rather keep their self-respect by being victimized than join the ranks of criminals and brutes. Altruism thus becomes evidence not of low self-esteem, but rather the misguided quest to *retain* one's self-esteem and humanity in a world of brutes and barbarians.

Is this interpretation far-fetched? I observe that in discussions of emergencies and "lifeboat situations," even many Randians recoil from a view that sees these as zero-sum conflicts, which would require them to behave as ruthless brutes, surviving at the expense of others. Most would prefer to keep their humanity and self-esteem by dying nobly, rather than survive like predatory beasts.

Well, then imagine how you'd *live* (and vote) if you truly believed that *normal social life* was all about zero-sum conflicts of interest -- that each transaction under capitalism entailed someone gaining at someone else's expense. You'd conclude, logically, that economic winners were all rapacious predators and "robber barons." You'd conclude, logically, that to keep your soul, you'd have to sacrifice your prospects for economic well-being and do your work solely for the love of it, not for commercial success. You'd conclude, logically, that to keep the economic predators in check, you needed a powerful, highly regulatory government to suppress predatory "greed." You'd conclude, logically, that Marxism's "class warfare" worldview was valid -- as were Marx's proposed remedies -- which would explain the stubborn, indelible appeal of socialism, despite its epic, bloody failures wherever it is tried. 

If I'm right about this, then the *main* target of individualists' moral proselytizing ought to be the Zero-Sum Narrative, i.e., the belief in inherent conflicts of interest among people -- and not altruism per se, which is mainly an emotionally driven *reaction* to the zero-sum worldview. We need to teach people that economic relationships in a free society are "win/win," not "win/lose." We need to teach what 19th-century thinker Frederic Bastiat labeled "Economic Harmonies." 

And we ought to teach that the "win/win" marketplace, based on voluntary, unforced trades, is the moral antithesis of the world of politics, where all relationships *are* in fact coercive, zero-sum, and "win/lose." We ought to teach that if you want a world that minimizes the coercive victimization of some people by others, then we need to keep relationships in the *private sector* -- that the *political sector* is the *last* place you should turn for solutions, and that politicians are the *last* people you should turn to as saviors. 

And that my friends is a very wise analysis of most of our societal problems, if you think this through for yourself.  Thank you ever so much Robert Bidinotto.

By the way, the Bidinotto novels are a rare pleasure to read.  Here is his author page on amazon.com.