Lunch video-----Bjorn Lomborg | Don't waste trillions on BAD Climate Policy

Centre for Independent Studies

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Global warming is a problem that we should tackle... smartly. But climate change will not mark the end of the world. The UN’s best estimate of the costs of unmitigated global warming by the end of the century is about 4% of global GDP. This is a problem, not an emergency. In our eagerness to enact climate policies, we could easily end up making the world worse off -- even if we tackle climate smartly, the policies could end up costing as much as 16% of global GDP or more. With a sense of proportion, Dr Lomborg presents a coherent argument on how to tackle climate smartly. Crucially, for most of the world's 7.5 billion people, climate change comes far down the list of priorities when faced with infant mortality from easily curable diseases and malnutrition, suffering from poor education and low energy access. Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Cool It and How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place. 💬 Join in the conversation in the comments.

Noon-toon

 

Recall Newsom Campaign Gaining Momentum Ahead Of Signature Deadline | The Daily Caller

Recall Newsom Campaign Gaining Momentum Ahead Of Signature Deadline | The Daily Caller: 

The Daily Caller’s Jorge Ventura spoke with California State Assemblyman Kevin Kiley about the effort to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The handling of the coronavirus pandemic has added political pressure on Newsom as he faces a potential recall election.

The Recall Gavin 2020 organizers announced on Friday they have reached the 1.5 million signatures required to place the proposal on the ballot.

"...Scream at them at airports..."

 

"...No comment is really needed, is there?"

Gregory Wrightstone
"First impactful chart of the day. 

Here is WTI oil pricing for the last 6 months. 

No comment is really needed, is there?

1Jim Riley

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Wow

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"...we can't use our own oil..."

 

The West's Decline of Intelligence

The West's Decline of Intelligence

"Recent studies have reported a worrisome decline in IQ scores in Western nations over the last decades, a reversal of the once-hopeful Flynn Effect (named after the late philosopher and psychologist James R. Flynn) which posited a growth in cognitive abilities for much of the 20th Century. 

Now the Flynn Effect seems to have reversed, leading to predictions of a general dumbing down of selective populations. 

Other studies report that IQ erosion is not confined to this century but that IQ has dropped by an average of 14.1 percent over the last century. 

As Evan Horowitz writes for NBC News, “A range of studies using a variety of well-established IQ tests and metrics have found declining scores across Scandinavia, Britain, Germany, France and Australia.”

#1 This day 1960-----Percy Faith - Theme From A Summer Place

US mom found SOS in box of decorations—and exposed China’s re-education camps

US mom found SOS in box of decorations—and exposed China’s re-education camps
"In 2012, Oregon mother Julie Keith opened a package of Halloween decorations from her local Kmart. 

Inside, she found something far more unsettling than a bunch of plastic skeletons and gravestones: an SOS letter from the prisoner who made them.
Written neatly in a blue pen, it read:
"Please kindly resend this letter to the World Human Right[s] Organization. Thousands [of] people here who are under the persecution of the Chinese Communist Party Government will thank and remember you forever."
Julie froze.
“Is this a prank?” she thought.
The 42-year-old read on as the note detailed inhumane work conditions and the fact that many workers were imprisoned despite having committed no crimes.

 She Googled the name of the labor camp mentioned in the note: Masanjia. 

It was real. 

She tried contacting various human rights organizations and finally went to the Oregonian newspaper, which published a story about the SOS.
Then she waited...Read all.

Always believe the experts!

 

Trump Impeachment Lawyer Hits CBSN Host with a Truth Bomb: 'It's Not OK to Doctor a Little Bit of Evidence'

Trump Impeachment Lawyer Hits CBSN Host with a Truth Bomb: 'It's Not OK to Doctor a Little Bit of Evidence': 

“It’s not OK to doctor a little bit of evidence,” van der Veen said. “The media has to start telling the right story in this country. The media is trying to divide this country. You are bloodthirsty for ratings, and as such, you’re asking questions now that are already set up with a fact pattern. I can’t believe you would ask me a question indicating that it’s all right just to doctor a little bit of evidence. There’s more stuff that we uncovered that they doctored, to be frank with you, and perhaps that will come out one day.”

Noting that his side had won the case, van der Veen told Zak there should be more that comes out of the trial than just that result.

“Somebody should look at the conduct of these House managers,” he tells Zak.

The Intellectuals' Assault on Intelligence - American Thinker

The Intellectuals' Assault on Intelligence - American Thinker
"When I went to college in the 1980s, I recall how inscrutable the politics of many of my professors was.
...The students could never figure out where the professor stood. 
...That was a time when there was assumed to be a shared human experience that the brilliant masters of the humanities were able to capture, before multiculturalism or university departments whose names ended in studies or microaggressions or safe spaces. 

This truly was a safe space, for thought. 

That was a time when universities were sanctuaries for free thought rather than the arsenals against free thought that they have now become.
The current class of intellectuals...now flout the principles of logic and reason far more than their relentlessly mocked uneducated rubes ever did. 

Complex issues requiring thoughtful analysis of probabilistic tradeoffs and consequences are replaced with simplistic models that would have left the intellectuals of yesteryear aghast. 

• Where complicated continuums are warranted, binary scales are substituted in which anything besides absolute purity is considered evil. 
• False analogies, poor pattern recognition, hasty conclusions, misjudging the whole by a part, ascribing false motives and meanings have become the artisan bread and butter of the pontificating patricians. 
• Double standards abound in which moving goalposts of unethical or even criminal behavior are applied to capture political opponents, while flexible extenders are granted to liberate supporters. 
• Political opponents, along with groups they may be associated with, are defined by their worst moments or qualities or members, regardless of how insignificant. 
• Conversely, supporters and their associated groups will be defined by their best moments and qualities and members, no matter how meager. 
• Finally all the abuses of logic and reason are wrapped up in shiny packages called science-data-facts with great big bows called decency so that those who refuse such offerings are taunted, censored, blacklisted, and ultimately criminalized...Read all!

AM Fruitcake

 

History for February 16

History for February 16 - On-This-Day.com

Sonny Bono 1935 - Singer (Sonny and Cher)

• 1804 - A raid was led by Lt. Stephen Decatur to burn the U.S. Navy frigate Philadelphia. The ship had been taken by pirates.
• 1857 - The National Deaf Mute College was incorporated in Washington, DC. It was the first school in the world for advanced education of the deaf. The school was later renamed Gallaudet College.
• 1883 - "Ladies Home Journal" began publication.
• 1937 - Wallace H. Carothers received a patent for nylon. Carothers was a research chemist for Du Pont.
• 1959 - Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba after the overthrow of President Fulgencio Batista.
• 2005 - The NHL announced the cancellation of the 2004-2005 season due to a labor dispute. It was the first time a major sports league in North America lost an entire season to a labor dispute.

Nancy Pelosi Interrupts Press Conference Over Impeachment - Louder With Crowder

Nancy Pelosi Interrupts Press Conference Over Impeachment - Louder With Crowder: 

Donald Trump was acquitted of another impeachment on Saturday. Also, the sky was blue. If it rained near you, that rain was most likely wet. Joe Biden probably sat in the oval office waiting for Barack to show up and start a meeting too. Obvious things are obvious is what I'm saying. Though, apparently not to Nancy Pelosi. Who interrupted a press conference to say, "I'mma let you finish, but the Bill Clinton acquittal was the greatest of all time!" Well, not quite. But grandma is big mad.

Tucker: Inside the seedy world of the 'Lincoln Project'

The way we were-----The Surprising Reason We Don't Hitchhike Anymore - Cheddar Explains

Boob-tube-----Miller Lite commercial w/ Bob Uecker and Rodney Dangerfield (1986)

The China War | Global Liberty Media - The Counter Narrative

The China War | Global Liberty Media - The Counter Narrative

China’s War College made two contradictory determinations in 2015. One was that a war with the United States was inevitable, and the other was that China had no chance of winning a military confrontation with the United States.

Based on these contradictions, the Chinese War College released a document, in English, listing three forms of warfare: informational, economic, and kinetic (aka ‘guns blazing’). China determined that the United States would win a kinetic war, so while they saw war with the United States as necessary, they decided to use information warfare, and economic warfare, avoiding a kinetic war until China was in a position to win.

In accordance with the recommendations given by the Chinese War College, China announced, side by side with Barrack Obama, in the White House Rose Garden, that China was building research facilities on reefs in the South China Sea. At the time, this seemed benign, but it was a declaration of war...Read all.

THOSE ARE MY PRINCIPLES, AND IF YOU DON’T LIKE THEM… WELL, I HAVE OTHERS

Instapundit--THOSE ARE MY PRINCIPLES, AND IF YOU DON’T LIKE THEM… WELL...

"...I HAVE OTHERS:

--Posted by Ed Driscoll

Cuomo faces bipartisan condemnation, calls for resignation following latest nursing home revelations - TheBlaze

Cuomo faces bipartisan condemnation, calls for resignation following latest nursing home revelations - TheBlaze: 

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's political troubles intensified Friday, as he faced the fallout from the latest bombshell in the widening nursing home scandal that has engulfed his administration: an admission from one of his top lieutenants that his office withheld information from the New York legislature because they were afraid that former President Donald Trump would tweet negatively about the governor's efforts if the information became public.

Global Cooling? NOAA Confirms ‘Full-blown’ Grand Solar Minimum

Global Cooling? NOAA Confirms ‘Full-blown’ Grand Solar Minimum

"...Despite loud claims in recent decades that man-made CO2 is somehow driving the Earth’s climate, history and science demonstrate that the largest and most influential driver of planetary climate is actually the Sun.

NASA data shows clearly that sunspot counts and solar flares are dropping which is a clear indicator that solar activity is receding slightly, which means that the Earth’s climate will change, only it won’t be getting warmer.

...A solar minimum does not mean that we’ll no longer have regular heat waves and warm weather, it simply means that solar activity will change, and this could translate into lower overall temperatures on Earth for the duration of this solar cycle – which could last beyond 2030...Read all.

How Equality Lost to ‘Equity’

How Equality Lost to ‘Equity’

• Civil-rights advocates abandon the old ideal for the new term, which ‘has no meaning’ and promises no progress but makes it easy to impute bigotry, says Shelby Steele. By Tunku Varadarajan

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-equality-lost-to-equity-11613155938?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

EXCERPTS-complete post because of WSJ pay-wall.

“Yet Mr. Steele also sees “more and more blacks” pushing back against “the tribalism of race” as it collides with the “reality of freedom.” He views the Black Lives Matter movement as a desperate attempt to salvage tribalism. For all his indignation, Mr. Steele foresees a better future. “Millions of black individuals, living their lives as individuals, will take us beyond tribes and into true American citizenship. Many blacks are thriving already. Their children will do even better.”

Mr. Steele, 75, is a longstanding conservative commentator on race in America and a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. We speak over Zoom a week after President Biden signed an Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity, intended to address “entrenched disparities in our laws and public policies, and in our public and private institutions.” In his remarks at the signing, Mr. Biden seemed to suggest that his is a project aimed at reshaping American governance. “We need to make the issue of racial equity not just an issue for any one department of government,” the president said. “It has to be the business of the whole of government.”

I can almost hear Mr. Steele growl in his study in Monterey, Calif., as I read these words aloud. “This equity is a term that has no meaning,” he says, “but it’s one that gives blacks power and leverage in American life. We can throw it around at any time, and wherever it lands, it carries this stigma that somebody’s a bigot.” Its message is that there’s “inequality that needs to be addressed, to be paid off. So if you hear me using the word ‘equity,’ I’m shaking you down.”

Equity in this “new sense,” Mr. Steele says, can be understood only as “a strategy.” The president is promising to “fix America morally, and aligning himself with the strategy of black people to gain power by focusing on victimization. He’s saying, ‘America must tackle that problem and create programs that help minorities achieve equity’—whatever that may be.”

The idea of equality has been eclipsed, Mr. Steele says, in part because “it was a little too specific” and bore the baggage of the old civil-rights movement. “We fought for equality 60 years ago,” he says. It was a struggle that brought his black father and white mother together. (They married in 1944. All of her siblings abandoned her, “and never came back.”) “We won the civil-rights legislation in the ’60s,” Mr. Steele says, “and the term ‘equality’ is exhausted now. And it’s lost much of its mystique—because you can measure it.”

Americans look at statistics and disparities and many think “there’s another explanation for inequality other than racism,” Mr. Steele says. “Inequality may be the result of blacks not standing up to the challenges that they face, not taking advantage of the equality that has been bestowed on them.” He points to affirmative action and diversity—“the whole movement designed to compensate for the fact that blacks were behind”—and says that blacks today have worse indices relative to whites in education, income levels, marriage and divorce, or “any socioeconomic measure that you want to look at” than they did 60 years ago.

“It’s inconceivable,” says Mr. Steele, “that blacks are competitive in universities today.” In the 1950s, by contrast, they matriculated with slightly lower grade-point averages than whites and graduated with GPAs slightly higher than whites. “Nobody gave them anything,” Mr. Steele affirms. “They didn’t want them in universities then. We would never put our race on an application, because it would be used against us. The minute we started to get all these handouts from guilty America in the civil-rights era, we entered this uninterrupted decline.”

Equality, Mr. Steele suggests, no longer offers an alibi for black underperformance. Equity, by contrast, “is above all that.” Its absence is “just a generalized sort of evil.” Black leaders and white liberals “wanted a new, cleaner, emptier term to organize around. And equity was perfect because it meant absolutely nothing.” It allows whites, he says, to prove themselves to be “innocent” of racism. “The emptiness is what invites them in, and they say, ‘Yes! Oh my God! We’ve got to help blacks create and achieve equity. Because it will show us to be redeemed of our racist past and therefore empower us’ ”—even as it empowers the black-community leaders who are their moral notaries. He describes this compact as a “nasty little symbiotic bond between white and black America,” with each using the other “to gain power and moral legitimacy.”

Mr. Steele laments that liberal America is “still not ready to talk realistically and frankly” about race. What is obvious to him, and, he says, “obvious to millions of Americans, is the fact that America has made more moral progress in the last 60 years regarding race than any nation, country or civilization in history.”

He describes this progress as “miraculous,” and cites his own life as proof. He was born into a deeply segregated America where every aspect of life was racially calibrated. In 1946, when his mother showed up at a Chicago hospital in full labor, nurses ushered her into the maternity ward. When her husband arrived after parking the car, the nurses realized that the baby wasn’t going to be white. They pushed her into the elevator, which descended to the basement, where the “colored maternity ward” was. This was where Mr. Steele and his identical twin brother, Claude, were born. (Claude Steele is also at Stanford, a psychology professor who has studied “stereotype threat” and its effects on minority academic performance. The twins hold polar opposite views on race.)

Mr. Steele encountered plenty of discrimination in his youth. He couldn’t be a paperboy because they wouldn’t let black kids ride a bike through white neighborhoods at 6 a.m. He couldn’t be a caddy on a golf course. He couldn’t wash dishes at the local Greek restaurant because people would see his black hands on the plates. He couldn’t work at J.C. Penney because he couldn’t be seen laying clothes out on display. He couldn’t go to the schools he wanted because all schools were segregated.

While pursuing a doctorate in English at the University of Utah in the mid-1970s, he had to go to court to get an apartment to live in. “Landlords didn’t want to rent to blacks,” he says. “The first housing desegregation lawsuit in the history of Salt Lake City—I filed it.” Offered a job as a literature professor at the university after earning his doctorate, Mr. Steele preferred a position at California’s San Jose State University. He and his Jewish wife, Rita (whose father escaped the Holocaust), wanted to get away from the racism they faced as an interracial couple in Utah.

“Every aspect of life assaulted me as a black,” Mr. Steele says, and things didn’t start to “really, deeply change” until he was in his 30s. “Because I’m that old,” he says, “I have segregation flashbacks” when walking by the lobby of a luxury hotel. When he was a kid, he wouldn’t dream of crossing the threshold into such a place.

“The point I’m making,” he says, “is that I know what racism really is like, what inequality is like.” Today, by contrast, blacks enter the American mainstream as a matter of course, where “they’re far more likely to run into racial preferences, be celebrated for their race, be promoted above their skill levels, than held back.” Mr. Steele says that he doesn’t know “anywhere where blacks are held back. They’re not just pushed forward, but they’re dragged forward into American life.”

That, he says, is a tragedy: Black Americans had “the hell knocked out of them in the mid-’60s” by freedom. “We had borne up under every abuse, every torture. But we had no experience in freedom. We didn’t know what freedom required. We didn’t know how much individual responsibility you have to take on to thrive in freedom.”

How could black Americans have been prepared for freedom? “They should have been left alone, as Frederick Douglass said,” Mr. Steele responds, invoking the 19th-century abolitionist. “Left alone.” Then, says Mr. Steele, they would discover “other talents, other attitudes, other ideas of responsibility.” Instead of thinking that “one has to be blacker than thou, they will actually begin to say, ‘We’ve got to have the skills. We’ve got to make a contribution. We have to join America. We are America.’ ” But today’s America is “too cowardly to do it.”

Mr. Steele again invokes his father, born in 1900. Whites didn’t feel “guilty” about blacks back then: “They didn’t give a damn about my father.” Shelby Steele Sr. taught himself to read and write, built a business, a family, a life. “Everybody in the neighborhood I grew up in in Chicago did that.” Blacks were making economic progress, Mr. Steele says, “until American liberalism came in under Lyndon Johnson and said, in effect, to black people, ‘We don’t really have any faith in you. We don’t believe you can do it on your own. We hurt you, so now we’ll make it better.’ ” A downward spiral ensued in much of black America. The three houses Mr. Steele’s father fixed up and rented fell victim to blight. In the end, as he writes in “White Guilt,” “the family signed them over to their nonpaying renters for nothing, happy to be rid of the liability.”

White America continues to determine the lives of black Americans, Mr. Steele says: “Patronizing black people is just a form of white decency,” burnished by concepts like systemic racism and white privilege. “ ‘We’re still in charge of your life,’ ” white Americans say to blacks. “ ‘You do what we tell you.’ ” And so, Mr. Steele says, “we’ve become slaves all over again. And we run around, coming up with words like ‘equity,’ trying to jack the white man up.”

Yet Mr. Steele also sees “more and more blacks” pushing back against “the tribalism of race” as it collides with the “reality of freedom.” He views the Black Lives Matter movement as a desperate attempt to salvage tribalism. For all his indignation, Mr. Steele foresees a better future. “Millions of black individuals, living their lives as individuals, will take us beyond tribes and into true American citizenship. Many blacks are thriving already. Their children will do even better.”

Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute."

Lunch video-----Thomas Sowell vs. Feminists

Noon-toon

 

Michigan County GOP Censures Rep. Peter Meijer over Vote to Impeach Trump

Michigan County GOP Censures Rep. Peter Meijer over Vote to Impeach Trump: 

A Michigan county Republican party voted this week to censure U.S. Rep. Peter Meijer (R) over his vote to impeachment President Donald Trump.

Meijer, a freshman congressman, joined nine other Republicans in agreeing with Democrats to swiftly pass an article of impeachment in Trump’s final days in office.

Keep the spotlight on those scumbags!

 

Desperate Americans Who Can't Afford Housing Are Becoming "Modern-Day Nomads"... But Not By Choice | ZeroHedge

Desperate Americans Who Can't Afford Housing Are Becoming "Modern-Day Nomads"... But Not By Choice | ZeroHedge
"A recent story floating around mainstream media regarding “modern-day nomads” reads like a contemporary article on Henry David Thoreau.
It shares stories of people looking to downsize their life and live simply and stories of people who have fallen on hard times, unable to afford rent.

However, what is lacking is the exposure of the dark underbelly of the “modern-day nomad” culture. In other words, they neglect to mention the fact that the enormous growth of the “modern-day nomad” is rooted in the fact that the world economy has all but collapsed, now mired in a global economic depression of unemployment, low wages, and personal financial catastrophes.

While it sounds romantic, it’s often rooted in desperation.

Nevertheless, some of the stories begin in the following way:

If you look closely on city streets, campgrounds, and stretches of desert run by the Bureau of Land Management, you’ll see more Americans living in vehicles than ever before. It was never their plan...Read all.

"Debt Strike!"-----Student Loan Debtors Refusing to Pay Off Debt

Student Loan Debtors Refusing to Pay Off Debt

"There was a viral Facebook post that appeared on February 2nd claiming student loan debt had been forgiven by President Biden. 

“My student loans are gone,” reads a Feb. 2nd Facebook post with hundreds of shares. “I love you Biden!”

...Many Democrats are urging the president to cancel $50,000 in debt with the stroke of a pen. 

...Some student loan debtors have decided to have a “debt strike” and refuse to pay on their loans until Biden acts...Read all.

# 1 Movie this week 1967-----Hurry Sundown - Trailer