The ‘battery fairy’ and other delusions in the demand to replace gasoline powered vehicles with electric cars and trucks

I continue to be amazed that serious people think that gasoline powered vehicles can be completely replaced by electric vehicles in a decade-and-a-half, and that this would be a good thing, even if possible. Under threat of government action, however, the world’s major auto manufacturers are falling in line boosting production of plug-in models, and upstart Tesla Motors is now the world’s most valuable auto manufacture, based on the value of its capital stock issued and in the public’s hands. Mary T. Barra, CEO of General Motors, has pledged to sell only zero emission vehicles by 2035.  That would meet the deadline imposed by California Governor Gavin Newsom, who signed an executive order banning the sale of internal combustion vehicles in the nation’s largest car market by 2035.

GM, rescued from liquidation courtesy of US taxpayers (and bondholders who were cheated out of their place in line as creditors by the Obama administration), may simply be sucking up to governmental power. But Akio Toyoda, CEO of Toyota Motors, the world’s largest (or second largest, depending on the year). and grandson of the automaker’s founder, has spoken out and called out fallacy of thinking that this is possible or desirable. [I must here disclose that I was a consultant for a Toyota company for several years, but that all my comments on the company here are based on publicly available information.]

According to this account in CarBuzz:


Studies detailing the carbon emissions necessary to manufacture an electric vehicle reveal that on a net basis, there are more emissions for vehicle bought and used for its expected lifetime, than would be generated by buying and using a conventional gasoline-powered vehicle.

Toyota can certainly make electric powered vehicles. It introduced the hybrid Prius, after all, and has a strong position in that market. Toyota’s mastery of the discipline of mass production of vehicles is such that it could do well no matter what power source is used. But the costs of complete conversion to electricity-powered vehicles are mind boggling.

Where will all, the electricity needed to power to entire fleet of cars in the US (or Japan) come from? Despite the fantasies of greenies, it won’t be from windmills or solar farms. They are too unreliable, take up too much land, and cost too much. Right now, it is coal and natural gas that produce the most electricity at the most reasonable cost.  And they emit CO2. Plus, there is considerable loss of power due to resistance in the transmission lines, requiring an even greater amount of gross power before the net power reaches the battery in the vehicle, charging at the user’s home ort some other location.  Nuclear power does offer some potential, but how many people want to live near the hundreds and hundreds of nuclear power plants that would be required to fuel the nation’s vehicles?

Then there is the small matter of batteries. The very large batteries needed for electric cars use lots of expensive lithium (and some other rare elements) whose supply is limited, and whose mining requires lots of scarce water. In fact, powering the world’s vehicles by battery is simply impossible, given the limited world supply of lithium, as this clever post by Powerline’s Steve Hayward makes clear. The title gives away the punchline:

He cites an article in Wired, The Spiraling Environmental Cost of our Lithium Battery Addiction:


I am glad that some grownups are pointing out that the electric vehicle conversion emperor has no clothes on. But that hasn’t stopped governments, manufacturers, and investors from pretending that electric vehicles are our only future.

As Herbert Stein famously said, "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." We’re only beginning to discover that about pipe dreams of an all-electric vehicle future. (read more)

Toward a Renewable Chaos: Carbon Imperialism and Disadvantaged Smaller Nations

Net Zero, Climate Action, Build Back Better, and the Great Reset are some of the names for policies aimed at expediting the transition of the global energy sector from fossil fuel to renewable technology. The goal? Saving the planet from climate apocalypse.
 
But there is a huge hurdle to make this transition a reality. Most of the world’s primary energy comes from coal, oil, and gas.

Fossil fuels dominate the global energy sector, and there is a reason for that: they are reliable, abundant, and affordable. Further, with constant innovations, the amounts of pollutants emitted from burning them have been reduced considerably.

Japan’s clean-coal technology and improved combustion engines in automobiles are two of the many technologies that have reduced pollutants in emissions, making fossil fuels all the more desirable.

Wind and Solar Will Usher in Chaos

In contrast, wind and solar make up an insignificant percentage of the world’s energy consumption.

The renewable contribution to global energy consumption in 2017 was less than 2%. Solar and wind contributed just 7% of the world’s electricity in 2018.
 
There is a reason for that. Besides being expensive, they are highly intermittent and so are unreliable. Further, wind and solar power cannot be used without backup by fossil fuel-powered energy sources.

Even in Germany, increased reliance on wind and solar has resulted in energy chaos. Berlin is facing energy shortages as both wind and solar have failed during the ongoing winter, and coal plants are running at full capacity to meet the demand.

“With this supply of wind and photovoltaic energy, it’s between 0 and 2 or 3 percent -- that is de facto zero. You can see it in many diagrams that we have days, weeks, in the year where we have neither wind nor PV. Especially this time (winter) for example -- there is no wind and PV, and there are often times when the wind is very minuscule.  These are things, I must say, that have been physically established and known for centuries, and we’ve simply totally neglected this during the green energies discussion,” said Dr. Harald Schwarz, professor of power distribution at the University of Cottbus.

It will be impossible to replace fossil fuels with solar and wind. Neither the developed West nor the developing countries in Africa, Asia, and South America can afford to make a move that will jeopardize their economic growth and the well-being of their citizens.

In developing countries, the risk of renewable dependency is much higher. Their GDP growth is highly sensitive to disruptions in the energy sector. Predominantly industrial in nature, the economies in developing countries are completely reliant on the supply of reliable and affordable energy. Apart from electricity, the supply of oil and gas is also critical for the transportation and manufacturing sector.

Resistance to Carbon Imperialism and Hypocrisy

However, the present onslaught of anti-fossil fuel policies -- from the European Union, United Nations, and now from the Biden administration in America -- will likely force countries to increase their dependency on unreliable renewable technologies. In turn, the countries will risk the growth of their commercial sectors, their industries, and the well-being of their households.

Defenders of developing countries’ rights to use fossil fuels have called this type of climate diplomacy and fossil fuel arm-twisting “carbon imperialism.” They are right to do so.

The economic success of Western civilization -- and its unprecedented social development -- can be credited to the Industrial Revolution and how fossil fuels enabled it. Today, the very benefactors of that fossil fuel-empowered economic progress are asking developing and poor countries to forgo the use of fossil fuels. This is nothing short of a form of economic suppression and is indeed carbon imperialism.

As far as the current energy outlook is concerned, some of the biggest fossil-fuel consumers, like India and China, are determined to resist this form of carbon imperialism. But not all developing nations will be able to show this resolute display of political willpower to continue using fossil fuels.

Smaller Nations Worse Off

Much smaller nations and poor countries are entirely dependent on foreign aid to keep their economies running. Such nations have no choice but to surrender to the carbon imperialism imposed upon them.

... Carbon imperialism is evil, and the biggest benefactors of fossil fuels perpetrate it. The world should not remain silent.

“He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.” -- Martin Luther King, Jr. (read more)

Late Quaternary
Since the ice sheets of the Wisconsin Glaciation retreated from North America, the climate of this planet has been characterized by alternating warming periods and cooling periods. Most recently, we have recorded the Little Ice Age (ca 1650 to 1850) and the Modern Warm Period (ca 1850 to 1998).

On a longer time scale, we are in the midst of the Pleistocene Ice Age. It began approximately 2,588,000 years ago when the Isthmus of Panama was formed by plate tectonics, closing the Interamerican Seaway connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific. This disruption of oceanic currents was apparently the precipitating event. The Pleistocene has been characterized by long glacial periods with extensive ice sheets and short interglacials when warming occurred and the ice sheets retreated. It has been suggested the Pleistocene will continue so long as the Isthmus of Panama blocks substantial circulation between the Atlantic and the Pacific. The Isthmus will eventually disintegrate into islands and ultimately disappear as the Nazca, Cocos and North American plates continue their motions. We do not know if the Panamanians would consent to thermonuclear devices placed at depth being used to remove the Isthmus to end the cycle of glaciation.

Evidence from ice cores and ocean sediments shows those cycles of cooling and warming. Throughout the Pleistocene, the glacial periods account for 90% of the time. The interglacials occupy only 10% of those 2,588,000 years. We are in the later stages of an interglacial period that, by some accounts, began about 11,700 years ago (or longer if it actually began before the Younger Dryas). This interglacial, called the Holocene, has been good for the advancement of human civilizations.

The most recent glaciation is known as Wuerm (Würm)/Weichselian/Wisconsin glaciation.

The Würm glaciation (German: Würm-Kaltzeit or Würm-Glazial or Würmeiszeit or Würmzeit); refers to the same glacial period in the Alps.

That glacial period in Northern Europe is called the Weichselian glaciation or Weichselian ice age (German: Weichsel-Eiszeit), Vistulian glaciation, Weichsel or Weichsel-Kaltzeit, Weichsel-Glazial, or Weichsel-Komplex).

In the British Isles, it is the Devensian glaciation. In North America, we call it the Wisconsin glaciation.

The interglacial before the Würmrm/Weichselian/Wisconsin glaciation, is named the Eemian (MIS 5). It occurred ca. 131,400 years BP, and lasted about 16,000 years. It was warmer than the Holocene.

FROM OUR CLIMATE ARCHIVE: 4 February 2017

The Mail on Sunday today reveals astonishing evidence that the organisation that is the world’s leading source of climate data rushed to publish a landmark paper that exaggerated global warming and was timed to influence the historic Paris Agreement on climate change.

A high-level whistleblower has told this newspaper that America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) breached its own rules on scientific integrity when it published the sensational but flawed report, aimed at making the maximum possible impact on world leaders including Barack Obama and David Cameron at the UN climate conference in Paris in 2015.

The report claimed that the ‘pause’ or ‘slowdown’ in global warming in the period since 1998 – revealed by UN scientists in 2013 – never existed, and that world temperatures had been rising faster than scientists expected. Launched by NOAA with a public relations fanfare, it was splashed across the world’s media, and cited repeatedly by politicians and policy makers.

But the whistleblower, Dr John Bates, a top NOAA scientist with an impeccable reputation, has shown The Mail on Sunday irrefutable evidence that the paper was based on misleading, ‘unverified’ data.

It was never subjected to NOAA’s rigorous internal evaluation process – which Dr Bates devised.

His vehement objections to the publication of the faulty data were overridden by his NOAA superiors in what he describes as a ‘blatant attempt to intensify the impact’ of what became known as the Pausebuster paper.

His disclosures are likely to stiffen President Trump’s determination to enact his pledges to reverse his predecessor’s ‘green’ policies, and to withdraw from the Paris deal – so triggering an intense political row.
...
In an exclusive interview, Dr Bates accused the lead author of the paper, Thomas Karl, who was until last year director of the NOAA section that produces climate data – the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) – of ‘insisting on decisions and scientific choices that maximised warming and minimised documentation… in an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming pause, rushed so that he could time publication to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy’.

Dr Bates was one of two Principal Scientists at NCEI, based in Asheville, North Carolina.

... The scandal has disturbing echoes of the ‘Climategate’ affair which broke shortly before the UN climate summit in 2009, when the leak of thousands of emails between climate scientists suggested they had manipulated and hidden data. Some were British experts at the influential Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. (read more)

Should We Celebrate Carbon Dioxide?

My Lords and Ladies, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Thank you for the opportunity to set out my views on climate change. As I have stated publicly on many occasions, there is no definitive scientific proof, through real-world observation, that carbon dioxide is responsible for any of the slight warming of the global climate that has occurred during the past 300 years, since the peak of the Little Ice Age. If there were such a proof through testing and replication it would have been written down for all to see.

The contention that human emissions are now the dominant influence on climate is simply a hypothesis, rather than a universally accepted scientific theory. It is therefore correct, indeed verging on compulsory in the scientific tradition, to be skeptical of those who express certainty that “the science is settled” and “the debate is over”.

But there is certainty beyond any doubt that CO2 is the building block for all life on Earth and that without its presence in the global atmosphere at a sufficient concentration this would be a dead planet. Yet today our children and our publics are taught that CO2 is a toxic pollutant that will destroy life and bring civilization to its knees. Tonight I hope to turn this dangerous human-caused propaganda on its head. Tonight I will demonstrate that human emissions of CO2 have already saved life on our planet from a very untimely end. That in the absence of our emitting some of the carbon back into the atmosphere from whence it came in the first place, most or perhaps all life on Earth would begin to die less than two million years from today.

But first a bit of background.

I was born and raised in the tiny floating village of Winter Harbour on the northwest tip of Vancouver Island, in the rainforest by the Pacific. There was no road to my village so for eight years myself and a few other children were taken by boat each day to a one-room schoolhouse in the nearby fishing village. I didn’t realize how lucky I was playing on the tide flats by the salmon-spawning streams in the rainforest, until I was sent off to boarding school in Vancouver where I excelled in science. I did my undergraduate studies at the University of British Columbia, gravitating to the life sciences – biology, biochemistry, genetics, and forestry – the environment and the industry my family has been in for more than 100 years. Then, before the word was known to the general public, I discovered the science of ecology, the science of how all living things are inter-related, and how we are related to them. At the height of the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the threat of all-out nuclear war and the newly emerging consciousness of the environment I was transformed into a radical environmental activist. While doing my PhD in ecology in 1971 I joined a group of activists who had begun to meet in the basement of the Unitarian Church, to plan a protest voyage against US hydrogen bomb testing in Alaska.

We proved that a somewhat rag-tag looking group of activists could sail an old fishing boat across the north Pacific ocean and help change the course of history. We created a focal point for the media to report on public opposition to the tests.

When that H-bomb exploded in November 1971, it was the last hydrogen bomb the United States ever detonated. Even though there were four more tests planned in the series, President Nixon canceled them due to the public opposition we had helped to create. That was the birth of Greenpeace.

Flushed with victory, on our way home from Alaska we were made brothers of the Namgis Nation in their Big House at Alert Bay near my northern Vancouver Island home. For Greenpeace this began the tradition of the Warriors of the Rainbow, after a Cree Indian legend that predicted the coming together of all races and creeds to save the Earth from destruction. We named our ship the Rainbow Warrior and I spent the next fifteen years in the top committee of Greenpeace, on the front lines of the environmental movement as we evolved from that church basement into the world’s largest environmental activist organization.

Next we took on French atmospheric nuclear testing in the South Pacific. They proved a bit more difficult than the US nuclear tests. It took years to eventually drive these tests underground at Mururoa Atoll in French Polynesia. In 1985, under direct orders from President Mitterrand, French commandos bombed and sank the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour, killing our photographer. Those protests continued until long after I left Greenpeace. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that nuclear testing finally ended in the South Pacific, and it most other parts of the world as well.

Going back to 1975, Greenpeace set out to save the whales from extinction at the hands of huge factory whaling fleets.  We confronted the Soviet factory whaling fleet in the North Pacific, putting ourselves in front of their harpoons in our little rubber boats to protect the fleeing whales. This was broadcast on television news around the world, bringing the Save the Whales movement into everyone’s living rooms for the first time. After four years of voyages, in 1979 factory whaling was finally banned in the North Pacific, and by 1981 in all the world’s oceans.

In 1978 I sat on a baby seal off the East Coast of Canada to protect it from the hunter’s club. I was arrested and hauled off to jail, the seal was clubbed and skinned, but a photo of me being arrested while sitting on the baby seal appeared in more than 3000 newspapers around the world the next morning. We won the hearts and minds of millions of people who saw the baby seal slaughter as outdated, cruel, and unnecessary.

Why then did I leave Greenpeace after 15 years in the leadership? When Greenpeace began we had a strong humanitarian orientation, to save civilization from destruction by all-out nuclear war. Over the years the “peace” in Greenpeace was gradually lost and my organization, along with much of the environmental movement, drifted into a belief that humans are the enemies of the earth. I believe in a humanitarian environmentalism because we are part of nature, not separate from it. The first principle of ecology is that we are all part of the same ecosystem, as Barbara Ward put it, “One human family on spaceship Earth”, and to preach otherwise teaches that the world would be better off without us. As we shall see later in the presentation there is very good reason to see humans as essential to the survival of life on this planet.

In the mid 1980s I found myself the only director of Greenpeace International with a formal education in science. My fellow directors proposed a campaign to “ban chlorine worldwide”, naming it “The Devil’s Element”. I pointed out that chlorine is one of the elements in the Periodic Table, one of the building blocks of the Universe and the 11th most common element in the Earth’s crust. I argued the fact that chlorine is the most important element for public health and medicine. Adding chlorine to drinking water was the biggest advance in the history of public health and the majority of our synthetic medicines are based on chlorine chemistry. This fell on deaf ears, and for me this was the final straw. I had to leave.

When I left Greenpeace I vowed to develop an environmental policy that was based on science and logic rather than sensationalism, misinformation, anti-humanism and fear. In a classic example, a recent protest led by Greenpeace in the Philippines used the skull and crossbones to associate Golden Rice with death, when in fact Golden Rice has the potential to help save 2 million children from death due to vitamin A deficiency every year.

The Keeling curve of CO2 concentration in the Earth’s atmosphere since 1959 is the supposed smoking gun of catastrophic climate change. We presume CO2 was at 280 ppm at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, before human activity could have caused a significant impact. I accept that most of the rise from 280 to 400 ppm is caused by human CO2 emissions with the possibility that some of it is due to outgassing from warming of the oceans.

NASA tells us that “Carbon Dioxide Controls Earth’s Temperature” in child-like denial of the many other factors involved in climate change. This is reminiscent of NASA’s contention that there might be life on Mars. Decades after it was demonstrated that there was no life on Mars, NASA continues to use it as a hook to raise public funding for more expeditions to the Red Planet. The promulgation of fear of Climate Change now serves the same purpose. As Bob Dylan prophetically pointed out, “Money doesn’t talk, it swears”, even in one of the most admired science organizations in the world.

On the political front the leaders of the G7 plan to “end extreme poverty and hunger” by phasing out 85% of the world’s energy supply including 98% of the energy used to transport people and goods, including food. The Emperors of the world appear clothed in the photo taken at the close of the meeting but it was obviously Photo-shopped. They should be required to stand naked for making such a foolish statement.

The world’s top climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change, is hopelessly conflicted by its makeup and it mandate. The Panel is composed solely of the World Meteorological Organization, weather forecasters, and the United Nations Environment Program, environmentalists. Both these organizations are focused primarily on short-term timescales, days to maybe a century or two. But the most significant conflict is with the Panel’s mandate from the United Nations. They are required only to focus on “a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the atmosphere, and which is in addition to natural climate variability.”?So if the IPCC found that climate change was not being affected by human alteration of the atmosphere or that it is not “dangerous” there would be no need for them to exist. They are virtually mandated to find on the side of apocalypse.

Scientific certainty, political pandering, a hopelessly conflicted IPCC, and now the Pope, spiritual leader of the Catholic Church, in a bold move to reinforce the concept of original sin, says the Earth looks like “an immense pile of filth” and we must go back to pre-industrial bliss, or is that squalor?

And then there is the actual immense pile of filth fed to us more than three times daily by the green-media nexus, a seething cauldron of imminent doom, like we are already condemned to Damnation in Hell and there is little chance of Redemption. I fear for the end of the Enlightenment. I fear an intellectual Gulag with Greenpeace as my prison guards.

Let’s begin with our knowledge of the long-term history of the Earth’s temperature and of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere. Our best inference from various proxies back indicate that CO2 was higher for the first 4 billion years of Earth’s history than it has been since the Cambrian Period until today. I will focus on the past 540 million years since modern life forms evolved. It is glaringly obvious that temperature and CO2 are in an inverse correlation at least as often as they are in any semblance of correlation. Two clear examples of reverse correlation occurred 150 million years and 50 million years ago. At the end of the Jurassic temperature fell dramatically while CO2 spiked. During the Eocene Thermal Maximum, temperature was likely higher than any time in the past 550 million years while CO2 had been on a downward track for 100 million years. This evidence alone sufficient to warrant deep speculation of any claimed lock-step causal relationship between CO2 and temperature.

The Devonian Period beginning 400 million years ago marked the culmination of the invasion of life onto the land. Plants evolved to produce lignin, which in combination with cellulose, created wood which in turn for the first time allowed plants to grow tall, in competition with each other for sunlight. As vast forests spread across the land living biomass increased by orders of magnitude, pulling down carbon as CO2 from the atmosphere to make wood. Lignin is very difficult to break down and no decomposer species possessed the enzymes to digest it. Trees died atop one another until they were 100 metres or more in depth. This was the making of the great coal beds around the world as this huge store of sequestered carbon continued to build for 90 million years. Then, fortunately for the future of life, white rot fungi evolved to produce the enzymes that can digest lignin and coincident with that the coal-making era came to an end.

There was no guarantee that fungi or any other decomposer species would develop the complex of enzymes required to digest lignin. If they had not, CO2, which had already been drawn down for the first time in Earth’s history to levels similar to todays, would have continued to decline as trees continued to grow and die. That is until CO2 approached the threshold of 150 ppm below which plants begin first to starve, then stop growing altogether, and then die. Not just woody plants but all plants. This would bring about the extinction of most, if not all, terrestrial species, as animals, insects, and other invertebrates starved for lack of food. And that would be that. The human species would never have existed. This was only the first time that there was a distinct possibility that life would come close to extinguishing itself, due to a shortage of CO2, which is essential for life on Earth.

A well-documented record of global temperature over the past 65 million years shows that we have been in a major cooling period since the Eocene Thermal Maximum 50 million years ago. The Earth was an average 16C warmer then, with most of the increased warmth at the higher latitudes. The entire planet, including the Arctic and Antarctica were ice-free and the land there was covered in forest. The ancestors of every species on Earth today survived through what may have been the warmest time in the history of life. It makes one wonder about dire predictions that even a 2C rise in temperature from pre-industrial times would cause mass extinctions and the destruction of civilization. Glaciers began to form in Antarctica 30 million years ago and in the northern hemisphere 3 million years ago. Today, even in this interglacial period of the Pleistocene Ice Age, we are experiencing one of the coldest climates in the Earth’s history.

Coming closer to the present we have learned from Antarctic ice cores that for the past 800,000 years there have been regular periods of major glaciation followed by interglacial periods in 100,000 year-cycles. These cycles coincide with the Milankovitch cycles that are tied to the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit and its axial tilt. It is highly plausible that these cycles are related to solar intensity and the seasonal distribution of solar heat on the Earth’s surface. There is a strong correlation between temperature and the level of atmospheric CO2 during these successive glaciations, indicating a possible cause-effect relationship between the two. CO2 lags temperature by an average of 800 years during the most recent 400,000-year period, indicating that temperature is the cause, as the cause never comes after the effect.

Looking at the past 50,000 years of temperature and CO2 we can see that changes in CO2 follow changes in temperature. This is as one could expect, as the Milankovitch cycles are far more likely to cause a change in temperature than a change in CO2. And a change in the temperature is far more likely to cause a change in CO2 due to outgassing of CO2 from the oceans during warmer times and an ingassing (absorption) of CO2 during colder periods. Yet climate alarmists persist in insisting that CO2 is causing the change in temperature, despite the illogical nature of that assertion.

It is sobering to consider the magnitude of climate change during the past 20,000 years, since the peak of the last major glaciation. At that time there were 3.3 kilometres of ice on top of what is today the city of Montreal, a city of more than 3 million people. 95% of Canada was covered in a sheet of ice. Even as far south as Chicago there was nearly a kilometre of ice. If the Milankovitch cycle continues to prevail, and there is little reason aside from our CO2 emissions to think otherwise, this will happen gradually again during the next 80,000 years. Will our CO2 emissions stave off another glaciation as James Lovelock has suggested? There doesn’t seem to be much hope of that so far, as despite 1/3 of all our CO2 emissions being released during the past 18 years the UK Met Office contends there has been no statistically significant warming during this century.

At the height of the last glaciation the sea level was about 120 metres lower than it is today. By 7,000 years ago all the low-altitude, mid-latitude glaciers had melted. There is no consensus about the variation in sea level since then although many scientists have concluded that the sea level was higher than today during the Holocene Thermal optimum from 9,000 to 5,000 years ago when the Sahara was green. The sea level may also have been higher than today during the Medieval Warm Period.

Hundred of islands near the Equator in Papua, Indonesia, have been undercut by the sea in a manner that gives credence to the hypothesis that there has been little net change in sea level in the past thousands of years. It takes a long time for so much erosion to occur from gentle wave action in a tropical sea.

Coming back to the relationship between temperature and CO2 in the modern era we can see that temperature has risen at a steady slow rate in Central England since 1700 while human CO2 emissions were not relevant until 1850 and then began an exponential rise after 1950. This is not indicative of a direct causal relationship between the two. After freezing over regularly during the Little Ice Age the River Thames froze for the last time in 1814, as the Earth moved into what might be called the Modern Warm Period.

The IPCC states it is “extremely likely” that human emissions have been the dominant cause of global warming “since the mid-20th century”, that is since 1950. They claim that “extremely” means 95% certain, even though the number 95 was simply plucked from the air like an act of magic. And “likely” is not a scientific word but rather indicative of a judgment, another word for an opinion.

There was a 30-year period of warming from 1910-1940, then a cooling from 1940 to 1970, just as CO2 emissions began to rise exponentially, and then a 30-year warming from 1970-2000 that was very similar in duration and temperature rise to the rise from 1910-1940. One may then ask “what caused the increase in temperature from 1910-1940 if it was not human emissions? And if it was natural factors how do we know that the same natural factors were not responsible for the rise between 1970-2000.” You don’t need to go back millions of years to find the logical fallacy in the IPCC’s certainty that we are the villains in the piece.

Water is by far the most important greenhouse gas, and is the only molecule that is present in the atmosphere in all three states, gas, liquid, and solid. As a gas, water vapour is a greenhouse gas, but as a liquid and solid it is not. As a liquid water forms clouds, which send solar radiation back into space during the day and hold heat in at night. There is no possibility that computer models can predict the net effect of atmospheric water in a higher CO2 atmosphere. Yet warmists postulate that higher CO2 will result in positive feedback from water, thus magnifying the effect of CO2 alone by 2-3 times. Other scientists believe that water may have a neutral or negative feedback on CO2. The observational evidence from the early years of this century tends to reinforce the latter hypothesis.

How many politicians or members of the media or the public are aware of this statement about climate change from the IPCC in 2007?

“we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled nonlinear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”

There is a graph showing that the climate models have grossly exaggerated the rate of warming that confirms the IPCC statement. The only trends the computer models seem able to predict accurately are ones that have already occurred.

Coming to the core of my presentation, CO2 is the currency of life and the most important building block for all life on Earth. All life is carbon-based, including our own. Surely the carbon cycle and its central role in the creation of life should be taught to our children rather than the demonization of CO2, that “carbon” is a “pollutant” that threatens the continuation of life. We know for a fact that CO2 is essential for life and that it must be at a certain level in the atmosphere for the survival of plants, which are the primary food for all the other species alive today. Should we not encourage our citizens, students, teachers, politicians, scientists, and other leaders to celebrate CO2 as the giver of life that it is?

It is a proven fact that plants, including trees and all our food crops, are capable of growing much faster at higher levels of CO2 than present in the atmosphere today. Even at the today’s concentration of 400 ppm plants are relatively starved for nutrition. The optimum level of CO2 for plant growth is about 5 times higher, 2000 ppm, yet the alarmists warn it is already too high. They must be challenged every day by every person who knows the truth in this matter. CO2 is the giver of life and we should celebrate CO2 rather than denigrate it as is the fashion today.

We are witnessing the “Greening of the Earth” as higher levels of CO2, due to human emissions from the use of fossil fuels, promote increased growth of plants around the world. This has been confirmed by scientists with CSIRO in Australia, in Germany, and in North America. Only half of the CO2 we are emitting from the use of fossil fuels is showing up in the atmosphere. The balance is going somewhere else and the best science says most of it is going into an increase in global plant biomass. And what could be wrong with that, as forests and agricultural crops become more productive?

All the CO2 in the atmosphere has been created by outgassing from the Earth’s core during massive volcanic eruptions. This was much more prevalent in the early history of the Earth when the core was hotter than it is today. During the past 150 million years there has not been enough addition of CO2 to the atmosphere to offset the gradual losses due to burial in sediments.

Let’s look at where all the carbon is in the world, and how it is moving around.

Today, at just over 400 ppm, there are 850 billion tons of carbon as CO2 in the atmosphere. By comparison, when modern life-forms evolved over 500 million years ago there was nearly 15,000 billion tons of carbon in the atmosphere, 17 times today’s level. Plants and soils combined contain more than 2,000 billion tons of carbon, more that twice as much as the entire global atmosphere. The oceans contain 38,000 billion tons of carbon, as dissolved CO2, 45 times as much as in the atmosphere. Fossil fuels, which are made from plants that pulled CO2 from the atmosphere account for 5,000 – 10,000 billion tons of carbon, 6 – 12 times as much carbon as is in the atmosphere.

But the truly stunning number is the amount of carbon that has been sequestered from the atmosphere and turned into carbonaceous rocks. 100,000,000 billion tons, that’s one quadrillion tons of carbon, have been turned into stone by marine species that learned to make armour-plating for themselves by combining calcium and carbon into calcium carbonate. Limestone, chalk, and marble are all of life origin and amount to 99.9% of all the carbon ever present in the global atmosphere. The white cliffs of Dover are made of the calcium carbonate skeletons of coccolithophores, tiny marine phytoplankton.

The vast majority of the carbon dioxide that originated in the atmosphere has been sequestered and stored quite permanently in carbonaceous rocks where it cannot be used as food by plants.

Beginning 540 million years ago at the beginning of the Cambrian Period many marine species of invertebrates evolved the ability to control calcification and to build armour plating to protect their soft bodies. Shellfish such as clams and snails, corals, coccolithofores (phytoplankton) and foraminifera (zooplankton) began to combine carbon dioxide with calcium and thus to remove carbon from the life cycle as the shells sank into sediments; 100,000,000 billion tons of carbonaceous sediment. It is ironic that life itself, by devising a protective suit of armour, determined its own eventual demise by continuously removing CO2 from the atmosphere. This is carbon sequestration and storage writ large. These are the carbonaceous sediments that form the shale deposits from which we are fracking gas and oil today. And I add my support to those who say, “OK UK, get fracking”.

The past 150 million years has seen a steady drawing down of CO2 from the atmosphere. There are many components to this but what matters is the net effect, a removal on average of 37,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere every year for 150 million years. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was reduced by about 90% during this period. This means that volcanic emissions of CO2 have been outweighed by the loss of carbon to calcium carbonate sediments on a multi-million year basis.

If this trend continues CO2 will inevitably fall to levels that threaten the survival of plants, which require a minimum of 150 ppm to survive. If plants die all the animals, insects, and other invertebrates that depend on plants for their survival will also die.

How long will it be at the present level of CO2 depletion until most or all of life on Earth is threatened with extinction by lack of CO2 in the atmosphere?

During this Pleistocene Ice Age, CO2 tends to reach a minimum level when the successive glaciations reach their peak. During the last glaciation, which peaked 18,000 years ago, CO2 bottomed out at 180 ppm, extremely likely the lowest level CO2 has been in the history of the Earth. This is only 30 ppm above the level that plants begin to die. Paleontological research has demonstrated that even at 180 ppm there was a severe restriction of growth as plants began to starve. With the onset of the warmer interglacial period CO2 rebounded to 280 ppm.  But even today, with human emissions causing CO2 to reach 400 ppm plants are still restricted in their growth rate, which would be much higher if CO2 were at 1000-2000 ppm.

Here is the shocking news. If humans had not begun to unlock some of the carbon stored as fossil fuels, all of which had been in the atmosphere as CO2 before sequestration by plants and animals, life on Earth would have soon been starved of this essential nutrient and would begin to die. Given the present trends of glaciations and interglacial periods this would likely have occurred less than 2 million years from today, a blink in nature’s eye, 0.05% of the 3.5 billion-year history of life.

No other species could have accomplished the task of putting some of the carbon back into the atmosphere that was taken out and locked in the Earth’s crust by plants and animals over the millennia. This is why I honour James Lovelock in my lecture this evening. Jim was for many years of the belief that humans are the one-and-only rogue species on Gaia, destined to cause catastrophic global warming. I enjoy the Gaia hypothesis but I am not religious about it and for me this was too much like original sin. It was as if humans were the only evil species on the Earth.

But James Lovelock has seen the light and realized that humans may be part of Gaia’s plan, and he has good reason to do so. And I honour him because it takes courage to change your mind after investing so much of your reputation on the opposite opinion. Rather than seeing humans as the enemies of Gaia, Lovelock now sees that we may be working with Gaia to “stave of another ice age”, or major glaciation. This is much more plausible than the climate doom-and gloom scenario because our release of CO2 back into the atmosphere has definitely reversed the steady downward slide of this essential food for life, and hopefully may reduce the chance that the climate will slide into another period of major glaciation. We can be certain that higher levels of CO2 will result in increased plant growth and biomass. We really don’t know whether or not higher levels of CO2 will prevent or reduce the eventual slide into another major glaciation. Personally I am not hopeful for this because the long-term history just doesn’t support a strong correlation between CO2 and temperature.

It does boggle the mind in the face of our knowledge that the level of CO2 has been steadily falling that human CO2 emissions are not universally acclaimed as a miracle of salvation. From direct observation we already know that the extreme predictions of CO2’s impact on global temperature are highly unlikely given that about one-third of all our CO2 emissions have been discharged during the past 18 years and there has been no statistically significant warming. And even if there were some additional warming that would surely be preferable to the extermination of all or most species on the planet.

You heard it here. “Human emissions of carbon dioxide have saved life on Earth from inevitable starvation and extinction due to lack of CO2”. To use the analogy of the Atomic Clock, if the Earth were 24 hours old we were at 38 seconds to midnight when we reversed the trend towards the End Times. If that isn’t good news I don’t know what is. You don’t get to stave off Armageddon every day.

I issue a challenge to anyone to provide a compelling argument that counters my analysis of the historical record and the prediction of CO2 starvation based on the 150 million year trend. Ad hominem arguments about “deniers” need not apply. I submit that much of society has been collectively misled into believing that global CO2 and temperature are too high when the opposite is true for both. Does anyone deny that below 150 ppm CO2 that plants will die? Does anyone deny that the Earth has been in a 50 million-year cooling period and that this Pleistocene Ice Age is one of the coldest periods in the history of the planet?

If we assume human emissions have to date added some 200 billion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere, even if we ceased using fossil fuels today we have already bought another 5 million years for life on earth. But we will not stop using fossil fuels to power our civilization so it is likely that we can forestall plant starvation for lack of CO2 by at least 65 million years. Even when the fossil fuels have become scarce we have the quadrillion tons of carbon in carbonaceous rocks, which we can transform into lime and CO2 for the manufacture of cement. And we already know how to do that with solar energy or nuclear energy. This alone, regardless of fossil fuel consumption, will more than offset the loss of CO2 due to calcium carbonate burial in marine sediments. Without a doubt the human species has made it possible to prolong the survival of life on Earth for more than 100 million years. We are not the enemy of nature but its salvation.

As a postscript I would like to make a few comments about the other side of the alleged dangerous climate change coin, our energy policy, in particular the much maligned fossil fuels; coal, oil, and natural gas.

Depending how it’s tallied, fossil fuels account for between 85-88% of global energy consumption and more than 95% of energy for the transport of people and goods, including our food.

Earlier this year the leaders of the G7 countries agreed that fossil fuels should be phased out by 2100, a most bizarre development to say the least. Of course no intelligent person really believes this will happen but it is a testament to the power of the elites that have converged around the catastrophic human-caused climate change that so many alleged world leaders must participate in the charade. How might we convince them to celebrate CO2 rather than to denigrate it?

A lot of nasty things are said about fossil fuels even though they are largely responsible for our longevity, our prosperity, and our comfortable lifestyles.

Hydrocarbons, the energy components of fossil fuels, are 100% organic, as in organic chemistry. They were produced by solar energy in ancient seas and forests. When they are burned for energy the main products are water and CO2, the two most essential foods for life. And fossil fuels are by far the largest storage battery of direct solar energy on Earth. Nothing else comes close except nuclear fuel, which is also solar in the sense that it was produced in dying stars.

Today, Greenpeace protests Russian and American oil rigs with 3000 HP diesel-powered ships and uses 200 HP outboard motors to board the rigs and hang anti-oil plastic banners made with fossil fuels. Then they issue a media release telling us we must “end our addiction to oil”. I wouldn’t mind so much if Greenpeace rode bicycles to their sailing ships and rowed their little boats into the rigs to hang organic cotton banners. We didn’t have an H-bomb on board the boat that sailed on the first Greenpeace campaign against nuclear testing.

Some of the world’s oil comes from my native country in the Canadian oil sands of northern Alberta. I had never worked with fossil fuel interests until I became incensed with the lies being spread about my country’s oil production in the capitals of our allies around the world. I visited the oil sands operations to find out for myself what was happening there.

It is true it’s not a pretty sight when the land is stripped bare to get at the sand so the oil can be removed from it. Canada is actually cleaning up the biggest natural oil spill in history, and making a profit from it. The oil was brought to the surface when the Rocky Mountains were thrust up by the colliding Pacific Plate. When the sand is returned back to the land 99% of the so-called “toxic oil” has been removed from it.

Anti-oil activists say the oil-sands operations are destroying the boreal forest of Canada. Canada’s boreal forest accounts for 10% of all the world’s forests and the oil-sands area is like a pimple on an elephant by comparison. By law, every square inch of land disturbed by oil-sands extraction must be returned to native boreal forest. When will cities like London, Brussels, and New York that have laid waste to the natural environment be returned to their native ecosystems?

The art and science of ecological restoration, or reclamation as it is called in the mining industry, is a well-established practice. The land is re-contoured, the original soil is put back, and native species of plants and trees are established. It is possible, by creating depressions where the land was flat, to increase biodiversity by making ponds and lakes where wetland plants, insects, and waterfowl can become established in the reclaimed landscape.

The tailings ponds where the cleaned sand is returned look ugly for a few years but are eventually reclaimed into grasslands. The Fort McKay First Nation is under contract to manage a herd of bison on a reclaimed tailings pond. Every tailings pond will be reclaimed in a similar manner when operations have been completed.

As an ecologist and environmentalist for more than 45 years this is good enough for me. The land is disturbed for a blink of an eye in geological time and is then returned to a sustainable boreal forest ecosystem with cleaner sand. And as a bonus we get the fuel to power our weed-eaters, scooters, motorcycles, cars, trucks, buses, trains, and aircraft.

To conclude, carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is the stuff of life, the staff of life, the currency of life, indeed the backbone of life on Earth.

I am honoured to have been chosen to deliver your annual lecture.

Thank you for listening to me this evening.

I hope you have seen CO2 from a new perspective and will join with me to Celebrate CO2! (original source)

Strictly speaking, I am neither a climate denier nor a climate change denier. Every planet with an atmosphere has a climate. And the climate of this planet does indeed change: sometimes cyclically, usually gradually, but sometimes cataclysmically. I mean what I say and say what I mean. Unlike the algoreans, warmists, Green New Deal Marxists and their media stenographers, I use words precisely.

Any compendium of modern pieties must include the unquestioned and unquestioning belief in Global Warming specifically or Climate Change in general. Faith, not facts, guide the pious. They have heard the green catechism since kindergarten. The strength of their beliefs would make a Calvinist jealous. Consequently, both believers or agnostics of that dogma show little interest in knowing its origins or underpinings. They treat it like holy writ and do not tolerate heretics or doubters. It is, as they claim, settled science. But is any science ever settled? Can we know everything about a subject of scientific inquiry and be dogmatically certain no new facts will be uncovered by further research?

The pious faithful of the settled science cult suffer from the "Semmelweis reflex" or "Semmelweis effect."  They tend to reject any new evidence or new knowledge that contradicts their established beliefs or paradigms. Timothy Leary, the LSD researcher, gave us a good definition of the Semmelweis reflex: "Mob behavior found among primates and larval hominids on undeveloped planets, in which a discovery of important scientific fact is punished.".

For me, socialist economist Robert Heilbroner was the founding father of the modern climate cult. His article, After Communism, The New Yorker, Reflections, 10 September 1990, page 91, was his attempt to restore, “the honorable title of socialism,” after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He envisioned socialism being reborn by destroying capitalism and restoring central planning to mitigate, “the ecological burden that economic growth is placing on the environment.” Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates must have clipped that article and filed it away. Heilbroner stated, “Capitalism must be monitored, regulated, and contained to such a degree that it would be difficult to call the final order capitalism.”  Are the Covid-Con and the proposed (but doomed to fail) Great Reset the result of Heilbronner's manifesto?

The pious faithful of the settled science cult also suffer from a misplaced belief in consensus. Just as might does not make right, consensus does not make anything right. Science is not decided by majority vote. Anyway, the fiction of consensus in climate "science" dates to a paper by Peter Doran and Maggie Kendall Zimmerman of the University of Illinois. They reported the skewed results of an opinion poll of climate scientists that Ms. Zimmerman had done for her MSc thesis. They concluded that 97% of climatologists thought that mankind was having a significant impact on the climate. Though the survey was sent to over 10,000 scientists, only 79 responses were received from climatologists. The vaunted 97% figure represented just 75 out of 77 scientists. "Many participants were appalled by the survey and recorded their feelings at the time, calling it simplistic and biased, and suggesting that it was an attempt to provide support for a predetermined view."

Though the mainstream media insist otherwise, there is no consensus. See also these old links:

http://business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/meaningless-consensus-on-climate-change

http://opinion.financialpost.com/2011/01/03/lawrence-solomon-97-cooked-stats/

http://climatequotes.com/2011/02/10/study-claiming-97-of-climate-scientists-agree-is-flawed/

http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2014/05/the-phony-claim-that-97-of-scientists.html

http://www.garnautreview.org.au/update-2011/commissioned-work/the-%e2%80%99scientigic-consensus-on-climate-change%e2%80%99.pdf

http://sppiblog.org/news/the-97-consensus-is-only-75-self-selected-climatologists

http://tinyurl.com/Clim97pct

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/18/what-else-did-the-97-of-scientists-say/

http://www.wendymcelroy.com/news.php?extend.3684

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki Under Fire For Tweeting Homophobic Slur About Lindsey Graham

Liberal White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki is under fire for tweeting a homophobic slur at Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham back in August of 2020.


“LadyG” is a reference to conspiracy theories that have swirled around about Graham’s sexuality. (read more)

Republicans Move to Take Massive Action Against Rep. Ilhan Omar, Seek to Remove Her From Committee Assignments

Several Republican lawmakers are pushing to remove far-left anti-semite and congresswoman Ilhan Omar from her committee assignments because of her history of anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories.

The move comes after Democrats pushed to remove Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) from her committee assignments in response to her alleged conspiracy theories.

... Fox News reporter revealed Reps. Brian Babin (R-TX), Jeff Duncan (R-SC), Jody Hice (R-GA), Andy Biggs (R-AZ) and Ronny Jackson (R-TX) all support the legislation against Omar.

... Check out what the Daily Wire reported on the development:


Just last year, the federal government concluded that the “Global BDS Campaign” was anti-Semitic.

“Many of the founding goals of the BDS movement, including denying the Jewish people the universal right of self-determination – along with many of the strategies employed in BDS campaigns are anti-Semitic,” liberal ADL said in a statement.

“Many individuals involved in BDS campaigns are driven by opposition to Israel’s very existence as a Jewish state. Often time, BDS campaigns give rise to tensions in communities – particularly on college campuses – that can result in harassment or intimidation of Jews and Israel supporters, including overt antisemitic expression and acts.”

“Omar has spoken out against sanctions being used against nations like socialist Venezuela and the Islamic Republic of Iran, but reportedly has different views when it comes to sanctioning Israel,” the Daily Wire reported. “Omar is not the only Democrat that Republicans could seek to get kicked off of committee assignments as far-left Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) has her own history of making anti-Semitic remarks.” (read more)

Explore Economist Thomas Sowell’s Remarkable Life In New Documentary

Despite writing more than 50 books on economics, race, and history, there's a good chance Thomas Sowell is the national treasure you’ve never heard of.

The past ten months have proved we live in a senseless world. There are large groups of people on both sides of the aisle who have no regard for reality, or what were once considered the normal and expected rules of polite society. One man, however, has never been swayed by the prevailing winds of the political moment over his illustrious 50-year career, keeping himself grounded in empiricism, fact, and logic: economist Thomas Sowell.

While he has published more than 50 books on subjects such as economics, race, and history, there is still a good chance that Sowell is the national treasure you’ve never heard of. The recently released documentary, “Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World,” successfully introduces Sowell both to those who’ve never heard of him and dives deep into the lesser-known aspects of his life for those who are already avid fans.

Narrated by Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley, the documentary takes the audience through Sowell’s life from his birth in North Carolina to his time as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he still works today. For the most underappreciated public intellectual of our time, this film is a well-deserved tribute to a magnificent career.

Sowell and Education

“Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World” appropriately begins with Sowell’s childhood. He was born in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1930, and both of his parents died by the time he was only a few years old. He was adopted by his great aunt and raised by her, as well as her two adult daughters. When Sowell was eight, they moved to Harlem to gain access to greater opportunities than were available in the Jim Crow South.

While none of the women who raised Sowell ever graduated high school, he says they were “interested in education and they were interested in me.” He did not grow up with any semblance of material wealth — his family did not have a telephone in the house until he was well into his teen years, and they never had a television — but Sowell did grow up with the cultural value of education: something that was able to eventually propel him to great heights.

Education has long been a road to success in America. It is for this reason the two highest-earning religious groups in America — Hindus and Jews — also happen to have the most education out of all religious groups. Today, the tragic reality is that, for many low-income students, the chance to acquire a quality education is significantly diminished by the conditions of the failing public schools they are required to attend.

Having benefited from the option to transfer to a better school when he was young, Sowell now advocates the same policy for the disadvantaged families of today. While Sowell has been writing about education for decades, arguably his deepest dive into the subject came just last year when he wrote “Charter Schools and Their Enemies,” a book that deserves to be remembered as one of his finest works.

The film spends a commendable amount of time emphasizing the role and importance of education, as well as introducing the audience to the various alternatives to the traditional public school monopoly, such as charter schools.

Eva Moskowitz, founder of Success Academy Charter School, correctly points out that the benefits of school choice are concentrated within the most vulnerable communities, despite the fact people with Sowell’s political persuasion are so often maligned as “uncaring” and “unempathetic” towards those who are disadvantaged. By correctly framing the issue in a way that highlights the communities the policy is helping, it allows conservatives and libertarians to begin reclaiming the moral high ground.

Sowell’s Intellectual Influences

Sowell was drafted into the military in 1951. Afterward, he attended Howard University as an undergraduate, then transferred to Harvard University, where he procured a degree in economics. He earned his master’s at the University of Columbia, then went on to the University of Chicago for his Ph.D.

During his college years, Sowell was a Marxist, and he remained so even after taking a class taught by Milton Friedman. Yet all it took was one summer interning in the federal government for him to be exposed to government’s inefficiencies and perverse incentives.

In detailing Sowell’s journey from Marxism to capitalism, the film strikes a chord with those paying attention to the current condition of higher education. Many college students today have a similar disposition to Sowell when he was in college. They believe capitalism has proved to be corrupt at its core, as evidenced by things like climate change, increasing income inequality, and decreasing income mobility.

While people can debate about the merits of these various concerns for hours on end, the real thing these students miss is the efficacy (or lack thereof) of government control of the economy. Sowell’s personal experience in the government opened his eyes to the truth about capitalism, but that should leave all of us wondering what the wake-up call to many in my generation will be.

Sowell credits the Chicago School of Economics with teaching him the importance of gathering hard data. That lesson has stuck with him throughout the years, as his data gathering and usage remains one of his strong suits. Although empiricism and objective truth have largely been replaced by intuition among today’s college students, Sowell never argues based on feelings, but backs up his assertions with facts — and a lot of them at that.

Sowell Today

In 1980, Sowell became a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where they essentially offered to “pay him to be Tom Sowell” by allowing him to choose what and when he writes. Riley explains, “thousands of students would miss out on having Professor Sowell as a teacher, but millions of intellectually curious readers would benefit from Thomas Sowell’s work here [at the Hoover Institution].”

Among the best aspects of “Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World” is the extent it explains Sowell’s enduring popularity. Arguably the key reason Sowell is so beloved is that he fearlessly makes his argument no matter the fashionable sentiment at the time. Whether it be on the perverse incentives attached to the welfare state, his critique of the idea that every disparity signals discrimination, or the idea of human capital as the chief necessity for group advancement, Sowell takes on the intellectual establishment.

At a time people are increasingly afraid to speak their minds for fear of being “canceled,” Sowell is a refreshing presence — a presence that lets people know that there are other people who approach the questions of the day with simple common sense. As Riley describes him, “[Sowell is] that rarest of species: an honest intellectual. He spent a career putting truth over popularity. He’s explored the answers to questions others were afraid to even ask.”

Bringing Sowell to the Next Generation

One would not be blamed for believing that a 90-year-old economist would not be particularly popular among a younger audience. Yet, make no mistake, Sowell’s work has proved to be timeless, and he’s gaining a large following among the next generation. On Instagram, the unofficial Thomas Sowell account has more than 150,000 followers, while on Twitter, Sowell’s followers number more than 650,000, and his reach continues to grow.

A documentary such as “Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World” helps widen that reach. Garnering more than 2.1 million views on YouTube in the first week since its release, there is no doubt that it has done its part in keeping the work of Sowell alive and in the minds of the next generation of students, thinkers, and leaders.

Without a doubt, the world has been lucky to benefit from Sowell’s insights. We can only hope that with the help of films like this, we can adequately extend those insights to those who will be next in line to influence our world. (read more)

Opinion: We were right to worry about the nation’s fiscal future. But I know when to fold 'em

Like most people, I really hate to admit defeat. Okay, some take it a little further than others, but it’s among the most common of human traits. On a matter in which I’ve invested no small amount of time and worries, I’m throwing in the towel: Regarding our national fiscal future, as the man said, you’ve got to know when to fold ’em.

In a variety of public employments and from various posts in private life, I’ve been among those urging that we take greater care with our public finances, to ward off serious, permanent damage to the economy and, just as important, to the safety net on which so many vulnerable Americans rely.

Until recently, I’ve held on tightly to two beliefs essential to long-term fiscal survival.

The first, grounded in actuarial reality, was that, if we began acting now, we could keep the promises of Social Security, Medicare and the other so-called entitlement programs.

The second, always as much a matter of faith as of proven fact, was that the American people could engage in an adult conversation about the subject and support the needed changes, before it was too late. Surely someone eventually would appeal successfully to our reason and to our concern for our children, grandchildren and the country’s future.

I conclude, reluctantly and dejectedly, that it’s time to face the unpleasant facts. The past decade demonstrates amply that our political process is not capable of the kind of decisions that are necessary. The temptation to savage anyone proposing safety-net reform (the sine qua non of any serious fiscal rescue, really the only issue that matters) remains electorally irresistible and invariably effective.

From very different directions, either of the past two presidents could have led the nation to a safer place, but neither had any interest in doing so. Instead, both perpetuated the “noble lies” — “You’re just getting your own money back,” “We owe it to ourselves,” etc. — by which the public has been misled through the years.

Even the modest, painless actions we could have started with, such as means-testing, or small, distant future increases in the age of eligibility, or correction of the system’s over-adjustment for inflation, have never had a ghost of a chance.

Meanwhile, the inexorable arithmetic of dollars times demography has taken us past the point of no return. It’s no longer possible to say that, by starting now, we can avert massive, and massively unfair, changes in the promises we have made, or that current beneficiaries have nothing to worry about. That line was crossed even before the emergency budget blowout of 2020 added trillions to the debt tab we will dump on younger generations.

... No computer models are needed to see that there is zero chance of delivering on the promises already in place, let alone the fresh, astonishing proposals in Washington to make these commitments even larger.

A start on mitigation would be for the Social Security Administration to begin including in beneficiary bulletins a disclosure that, starting soon, the system cannot fulfill all of its commitments. The disclosure could then provide sample calculations of the amount of savings a given recipient will need to replace those expected payments under alternative scenarios. Something similar could be done for doctors and medical students, projecting the deep cuts in reimbursement rates to which Medicare will resort.

Allowing the fiction of full-payment-for-all to persist will only add the rage of betrayal to the hardships imposed by the now-inevitable sudden cuts in benefits and huge tax increases. If you think confidence in the federal government is shaky now, wait until it starts reneging on these “sacred” promises. Better to come clean, and help people plan, starting now. (read more)

Chuck Schumer Used Violent Rhetoric To Sic A Mob On Two Supreme Court Justices
 
One year ago, Schumer incited a mob on the steps of the Supreme Court in order to bully justices to rule in Democrats' favor.

When Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., spoke against the constitutionality of the Democrats’ impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, he reminded his colleagues that Democrat elected officials had recently told their followers to attack Republicans. If Trump was to be impeached for asking followers to “peacefully and patriotically” make their voices heard by members of Congress on Jan. 6, what to do with Democrats’ more incendiary rhetoric and actions, he wondered.

Sen. Kamala Harris solicited funds to bail out the rioters who destroyed Minneapolis during 2020’s “Summer of Rage.” Rep. Maxine Waters called on Democrats to seek out Republicans in public places and “create a crowd” and “push back” on them to let them know “they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

The Bernie Sanders supporter who nearly killed House Republican Whip Steve Scalise at a baseball field in Virginia said he was motivated to kill for “health care” after Sanders and other Democrats had said the Republican health care plan was to kill many Americans. Sen. Cory Booker told his supporters at one gathering in D.C. to “Please don’t just come here today and then go home. Go to the Hill today. Get up and, please, get up in the face of some congresspeople.”

One example Paul left out of his excellent speech is even more relevant to next week’s impeachment. Less than one year ago, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York led a mob on the steps of the Supreme Court while a case was being heard and tried to thwart the natural deliberation of justices by violently threatening two of them to rule in favor of his and other Democrats’ preferred outcome.

“I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions,” Schumer threatened the two most recently confirmed justices, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

The threat was so alarming that even leftist activists such as Laurence Tribe condemned it. Schumer received a rare, same-day rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts, who said, “Justices know that criticism comes with the territory, but threatening statements of this sort from the highest levels of government are not only inappropriate, they are dangerous.”

Then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell condemned Schumer’s remarks as “astonishingly reckless and completely irresponsible.” However, Sen. Josh Hawley’s efforts to censure Schumer for his violent threats were scuttled.

The Washington Post write-up of Schumer’s threats focused instead on Republican opposition to them. “GOP seizes on Schumer’s remarks” read the headline.

Schumer’s threats came just 17 months after the Supreme Court had been besieged and attacked by abortion activists upset at Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Like the Jan. 6 event, the October 2018 siege also involved Vice President Mike Pence being condemned by protesters. As he walked down the steps of the U.S. Senate following the vote to confirm Kavanaugh, the crowd greeted him with chants of “shame!”

Across the street, hordes of protesters broke through a police barricade and attempted to beat down the 13-ton bronze doors of the court. Protesters included a topless woman with a Hitler mustache and another woman who scaled the Contemplation of Justice statue in front of the court and sat in her lap to the cheers of other protesters.

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan, who attended Kavanaugh’s immediate swearing in, were hit with water bottles and tomatoes when their car left the court afterward. Some 164 people were arrested in that protest.

For all the concern about disruptions to the constitutional processes regarding Electoral College votes on Jan. 6, there was far less concern from corporate media and others on the left when Democrat mobs completely disrupted the constitutional proceedings for confirming a Supreme Court justice in 2018.

The Center for Popular Democracy brought 600 protesters to Washington, staging a demonstration in and around the Capitol. On August 1, 2018, following the group’s rally, 74 protesters were arrested when they blocked the Senate hallways to prevent Kavanaugh from meeting with U.S. senators.

Kavanaugh’s first day of hearings included 63 interruptions from Senate Democrats and more than 70 arrests of protesters. The protesters had been flown in by Planned Parenthood Action Fund from across the country.

Winnie Wong, a senior advisor to the Women’s March, explained their carefully coordinated messages. Members going into the hearing room were given “a script where we suggest certain messaging that may resonate more.” The storytellers’ travel and accommodations were paid for, as were their legal aid and bail if they were arrested, which was generally the goal.

Later in the hearings, the organizers of the protesters—the Women’s March and the Center for Popular Democracy— were warning activists that being arrested three times might lead to a night in jail. The group raised sums of more than six figures to finance the protests. “This is well-organized and scripted,” said Wong, “This isn’t chaos.”

Protesters also occupied senators’ offices, managed to shut down the Capitol building, and trapped senators in elevators. All of this was done to disrupt the constitutional process for confirming a justice.

“We were planning to shut down the Capitol Building but the authorities were so scared of this #WomensWave that they shut it down for us,” read a tweet from one activist group: (read more)

The [Progressive] hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marveling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers …. In a word, the [Progressive] is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every [Progressive] in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.

FLASHBACK: Biden Said ‘You Can’t Legislate By Executive Orders Unless You’re A Dictator’

“I have this strange notion. We are a democracy.”

This video from the 15th October 2020 speaks for itself.

During a town hall broadcast by ABC News just over a fortnight before the election, Joe Biden was discussing his tax proposals when he declared that in order to see them implemented he would need votes and approval from Congress.

“I have this strange notion. We are a democracy,” Biden sardonically declared, pointing out that “Some of my Republican friends, and some of my Democratic friends occasionally say ‘well if you can’t get the votes, by executive order you’re going to do something'”.

“You can’t do it by executive order, unless you’re a dictator,” Biden declared, adding “We’re a democracy, we need consensus.”

Fast forward to the first day of Biden’s presidency.

The guy implemented NINETEEN executive actions.

Before the first week of his [fraudulency] was over, Biden had signed THIRTY-SEVEN executive actions.

Despite the apparent fact that Biden doesn’t even know what he’s signing, he has already put pen to paper on more than three times as many orders as the previous four Presidents COMBINED.

In their first weeks Trump signed four, Obama signed five, George W. Bush signed none, and Bill Clinton signed one.

Indeed, no other President has ever signed as many orders as Biden, according to The American Presidency Project at the University of California Santa Barbara. (read more)

San Francisco to Strip Washington, Lincoln From School Names

For some San Francisco parents, the brush stroke was too broad

The names of Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and other prominent figures including U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California will be removed from 44 San Francisco public schools, a move that stirred debate Wednesday on whether the famously liberal city has taken the national reckoning on America’s racist past too far.

After months of controversy, the decision made by the San Francisco Board of Education in a 6-1 vote Tuesday night will strip the names of one-third of the city’s schools. The board approved a resolution to change school names that honored historical figures with direct or broad ties to slavery, oppression, racism or the “subjugation" of human beings.

In addition to Washington and Thomas Jefferson — former presidents with connections to slavery or oppression — the list includes naturalist John Muir, Spanish priest Junipero Serra, American revolution patriot Paul Revere and Francis Scott Key, composer of the “Star Spangled Banner."

Changing the name of Dianne Feinstein Elementary school, named for the Democratic senator and former mayor of San Francisco, has raised eyebrows. The trailblazing 87-year old’s star has dimmed in recent years with dismayed liberals joining calls for her retirement after she embraced Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham at the heated confirmation hearings on U.S. Supreme Court Judge Amy Coney Barrett.

Feinstein's spokesman Tom Mentzer said the senator had no comment.

The committee that selected the names included Feinstein because in 1984, while mayor, she replaced a vandalized Confederate flag that was part of a long-standing flag display in front of City Hall. When the flag was pulled down a second time, she did not replace it.

“I want to ensure people this in no way cancels or erases history,” San Francisco Board of Education president Gabriela Lopez said, commenting specifically about Feinstein and the wider group as well. “But it does shift from upholding them and honoring them, and these opportunities are a great way to have that conversation about our past and have an opportunity to uplift new voices.”

Lopez said the decision is timely and important and sends a strong message that goes beyond racism tied to slavery band condemns wider “racist symbols and white supremacy culture we see in our country.”

For some San Francisco parents, the brush stroke was too broad.

“This is a bit of a joke. It’s almost like a parody of leftist activism,” said Gerald Kanapathy, a father of two young children, including a kindergartner at a San Francisco school not on the list.

“I don’t particularly mind the notion that some of the schools need to be renamed. There are a lot of questionable choices out there,” he said. “But they sort of decided on this and pushed it through without much community input.”

A group called Families for San Francisco opposed the vote for similar reasons, calling it a “top-down process” in which a small group of people made the decision without consulting experts and the wider school community.

“We think it is very important for the community at large to be engaged to figure out who should be honored with public school names,” said Seeyew Mo, the group's executive director.

“We would like to have historical experts to provide historical context as we are evaluating people from the past with today’s sensibilities,” he said.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed called the move poorly timed given the pandemic that has kept the city’s schools closed since March.

“Our students are suffering, and we should be talking about getting them in classrooms, getting them mental health support and getting them the resources they need in this challenging time,” Breed said, adding that she supports the discussion of renaming schools but feels it should include parents, students and others and take place when classrooms reopen.

The renaming process was led by a committee created in 2018 that was set up to study the names of district schools, amid a national reckoning on racial injustice that followed deadly clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, ...

The committee was asked to identify schools named for people who were slave owners or had connections to slavery, colonization, exploitation of workers or others, and anyone who oppressed women, children, queer or transgender people. They also sought to change names of schools that honored anyone connected to human rights or environmental abuses or espoused racist or white supremacist beliefs.

The committee didn’t move forward until 2020, ultimately recommending the renaming of 44 school sites. (read more)

Trump Lawyer: Impeachment Is ‘Political Weaponization’ of a Constitutional Process

David Schoen, one of former President Donald Trump’s newly appointed impeachment defense attorneys, said he believes that Democrats are using the impeachment process as a “weapon” to go after Trump in an attempt to bar him from running for office again.

“This is the political weaponization of the impeachment process,” Schoen told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Monday. “I think it’s also the most ill-advised legislative action that I’ve seen in my lifetime. It is tearing the country apart at a time when we don’t need anything like that.”

Democrat lawmakers have been calling for Trump’s impeachment since the beginning of his term, Schoen said, and the upcoming trial is their latest attempt to target him, as well as to carry out their agenda of preventing him from ever running for president again.

“That’s about as undemocratic as you can get,” Schoen said. “Can you imagine the slap in the face that is to the 75 million or more voters?”

“Fair-minded people don’t support using the impeachment process to then try to bar someone from running for office again,” he added.

The Democrat-controlled House on Jan. 13 voted 232–197 to impeach Trump on a single article of impeachment, alleging that the president incited an “insurrection” that caused the U.S. Capitol breach on Jan. 6.

The impeachment, which was completed in a single seven-hour session, has been criticized by Republicans for its expediency and lack of due process. Meanwhile, the question of whether the Senate trial, which will begin on the week of Feb. 8, is constitutional has prompted a heated public debate among legal scholars and lawmakers.

Scholars who are arguing that the trial is unconstitutional are relying on an interpretation of Article II, Section 4, of the U.S. Constitution, which states, “The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

According to their reading of the text, these scholars say impeachment is for current officeholders, and since Trump had already left office, the Senate’s jurisdiction—or authority—to hold an impeachment trial expired on Jan. 20, when his term came to a close.

On the other hand, scholars who are arguing that the upcoming trial is constitutional say that the impeachment power and the Senate’s jurisdiction needs to be read in conjunction with Article I, Section 3, which states, “Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.”

These scholars also contend that the argument for impeachment is supported by historical precedents.

Schoen also signaled that he and attorney Bruce Castor Jr. will also argue that Trump’s speech at the rally on Jan. 6 is protected by the First Amendment.

“This is a very, very dangerous road to take with respect to the First Amendment, putting at risk any passionate political speaker,” Schoen said.

The media, lawmakers, former officials, and other critics have put the blame on Trump for the Jan. 6 Capitol breach and have been calling for his impeachment. Hours earlier, the president addressed a crowd in Washington D.C. where he reiterated allegations about election irregularities and potential fraud, and his dissatisfaction with the media and several lawmakers. Before calling on his supporters to “fight like hell” to be well-represented in Congress, Trump urged supporters to protest “peacefully and patriotically” at the U.S. Capitol.

The breach at the U.S. Capitol began before Trump had finished his speech at the rally, according to a timeline compiled by The Epoch Times. As the incident escalated, Trump continued his urge for peace and respect for law enforcement throughout the afternoon.

Following the incident, Trump condemned the “violence, lawlessness, and mayhem,” saying that those who “infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy.”

The Justice Department and FBI have also announced that they have charged protesters who had conspired to breach the U.S. Capitol days before the incident, a detail that challenges the argument put forward by the media that Trump’s speech on Jan. 6 was the impetus for the violence.

“President Trump has condemned the violence at all times. Read the words of his speech. [He] calls for peacefulness. This has nothing to do with President Trump,” Schoen said. (read more)

Trump Lawyer: Impeachment Is ‘Political Weaponization’ of a Constitutional Process

David Schoen, one of former President Donald Trump’s newly appointed impeachment defense attorneys, said he believes that Democrats are using the impeachment process as a “weapon” to go after Trump in an attempt to bar him from running for office again.

“This is the political weaponization of the impeachment process,” Schoen told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Monday. “I think it’s also the most ill-advised legislative action that I’ve seen in my lifetime. It is tearing the country apart at a time when we don’t need anything like that.”

Democrat lawmakers have been calling for Trump’s impeachment since the beginning of his term, Schoen said, and the upcoming trial is their latest attempt to target him, as well as to carry out their agenda of preventing him from ever running for president again.

“That’s about as undemocratic as you can get,” Schoen said. “Can you imagine the slap in the face that is to the 75 million or more voters?”

“Fair-minded people don’t support using the impeachment process to then try to bar someone from running for office again,” he added.

The Democrat-controlled House on Jan. 13 voted 232–197 to impeach Trump on a single article of impeachment, alleging that the president incited an “insurrection” that caused the U.S. Capitol breach on Jan. 6.

The impeachment, which was completed in a single seven-hour session, has been criticized by Republicans for its expediency and lack of due process. Meanwhile, the question of whether the Senate trial, which will begin on the week of Feb. 8, is constitutional has prompted a heated public debate among legal scholars and lawmakers.

Scholars who are arguing that the trial is unconstitutional are relying on an interpretation of Article II, Section 4, of the U.S. Constitution, which states, “The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

According to their reading of the text, these scholars say impeachment is for current officeholders, and since Trump had already left office, the Senate’s jurisdiction—or authority—to hold an impeachment trial expired on Jan. 20, when his term came to a close.

On the other hand, scholars who are arguing that the upcoming trial is constitutional say that the impeachment power and the Senate’s jurisdiction needs to be read in conjunction with Article I, Section 3, which states, “Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.”

These scholars also contend that the argument for impeachment is supported by historical precedents.

Schoen also signaled that he and attorney Bruce Castor Jr. will also argue that Trump’s speech at the rally on Jan. 6 is protected by the First Amendment.

“This is a very, very dangerous road to take with respect to the First Amendment, putting at risk any passionate political speaker,” Schoen said.

The media, lawmakers, former officials, and other critics have put the blame on Trump for the Jan. 6 Capitol breach and have been calling for his impeachment. Hours earlier, the president addressed a crowd in Washington D.C. where he reiterated allegations about election irregularities and potential fraud, and his dissatisfaction with the media and several lawmakers. Before calling on his supporters to “fight like hell” to be well-represented in Congress, Trump urged supporters to protest “peacefully and patriotically” at the U.S. Capitol.

The breach at the U.S. Capitol began before Trump had finished his speech at the rally, according to a timeline compiled by The Epoch Times. As the incident escalated, Trump continued his urge for peace and respect for law enforcement throughout the afternoon.

Following the incident, Trump condemned the “violence, lawlessness, and mayhem,” saying that those who “infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy.”

The Justice Department and FBI have also announced that they have charged protesters who had conspired to breach the U.S. Capitol days before the incident, a detail that challenges the argument put forward by the media that Trump’s speech on Jan. 6 was the impetus for the violence.

“President Trump has condemned the violence at all times. Read the words of his speech. [He] calls for peacefulness. This has nothing to do with President Trump,” Schoen said. (read more)

Lockdown: The cruelty is the point

YES, the cruelty is the point. What Boris Johnson and his henchman are doing now is cruel and wicked. They have been aided and abetted by a propaganda media that rarely asks any tough questions, such as how accurate is the 100,000 Covid death figure, where are all the flu deaths, why did you empty the hospitals of Covid positive patients and put them in care homes, why are schools still closed when Public Heath England said it was safe to open after half term, and how many lives will be lost to lockdown conditions and recession conditions?

Pretty much every question from the media is, why didn’t you lock down earlier, and why didn’t you lock down harder? This is what counts as journalism these days, a false opposition interested only in pushing the government agenda and propaganda. What the media have done is to manufacture consent from the population for what is a needlessly cruel and wicked lockdown that we will never recover from. It is a classic media propaganda model.

Let’s take schools. Before the latest announcement it was the case that ‘primary schools can safely reopen after half-term if cases keep falling, government health advisers have concluded. Public Health England (PHE) said that there was now a “strong case” for the return to class, adding more pressure on Boris Johnson to set out a timetable for primary schools to reopen’.

(The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control’s review of evidence from 17 countries found that reopening of schools could not be blamed for a resurgence in the virus and that the negative physical, mental health and educational impact of school closures on children outweighed any benefits. Nor is there any evidence of teachers being at particular risk – in fact they are at considerably less risk than other occupations who have had to keep working.)

Cases did keep falling but Johnson overruled Gavin Williamson and kept the schools closed until at least March 8. And mark my words, the schools will not open then. I believe they will push it back until after Easter. These is no public health reason to close the schools. None. ‘Pupils in that age group are “resistant” to wider coronavirus trends and play a small role in spreading infection, a series of comprehensive studies has concluded.’ So why has Johnson kept them closed? Why has he done this despite knowing of the devastating impact this lockdown will have on children? What he is doing will break children and their families.

 One mother of an autistic son was so broken by the first lockdown that she killed him. But to the government this son and this family were expendable and disposable.

Further: ‘Professor Russell Viner, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, perhaps put it most clearly when he told MPs on the Education Select Committee earlier this month: “When we close schools we close their lives”.’

And: ‘At the opposite end of the age spectrum, health visitors, who support parents and babies during the early years, are worried about the impact on new-borns.’

 Finally, children with disabilities have essentially been imprisoned.  ‘Dame Christine Lenehan, director of the Council for Disabled Children, says in some cases children have ended up “incarcerated” in their homes. “There are some who have barely had any formal education since lockdown began”.’

Destroying the lives of children, slowing the development of babies, isolating new mothers and inflicting incarceration conditions on children with disabilities, is all for nothing. It is not needed to ‘control the virus’. So what is the point, dear reader? The point is the cruelty. Boris Johnson is recklessly inflicting these cruelties on the most vulnerable children and their families. And what do the public do? Go along with it. Shame on you all who do.

Let’s analyse what Covid is supposed to be doing. We know that is not accurate to say 100,000 people have died of Covid; that figure is fake news, as James Delingpole has pointed out in TCW. Once adjusting for age and population the mortality figures were worse in 2008 than 2020. The ‘Annual number of deaths, crude and age-standardised mortality rates, deaths registered in England and Wales, 1838 to 2019 (final) and 2020 (provisional)’ shows that the age-standardised mortality rate in 2020 of 1,043.5 deaths per 100,000 of the population was surpassed not only in 2008 (with 1,091.9 deaths per 100,000), but also in 2007 (1,091.8), in 2006 (1,104.3), 2005 (1,043.8), 2004 (1,163.0), 2003 (1,232.1), 2002 (1,231.3), 2001 (1,236.2) and 2000 (1,266.4).

Mark Ellse’s analysis of age standardised mortality rates on TCW likewise shows how similar 2020 deaths (taking Government statistics at face value) are to previous years and how few people of good health have been affected by Covid.

We know that they are over-counting Covid deaths and that the PCR test is not fit for purpose. Covid is not the great killer they say, but lockdowns are.

... As I have always said, lockdowns fail on every test: they are immoral, they are unethical, they are disproportionate and they even fail on utilitarian grounds. They break families, they target the vulnerable, children and children with disabilities the most. Johnson has needlessly kept schools closed and dangled hope for reopening in the future, always the not-too-distant future that never seems to come.

If he and his henchmen followed the science they would see how damaging lockdown was. They would know how cruel and evil it was. But they don’t care. For some reason they are doubling down, probably to save their political lives and the propaganda media, many bought and paid for by the Tories, and their corporations are enforcing this wicked dictatorial regime and manufacturing the public’s consent.

One day I hope people will understand what they have done: that they have collaborated with this tyranny that is inflicting inhuman and degrading treatment on the sickest and most vulnerable. Justice will be done, in this life or the next. Of this at least I am sure. (read more)

Bystander at the Switch: The Moral Case Against COVID Lockdowns

Do you remember the moral riddle taught in grade school called the "Bystander at the Switch" (also known as the Trolley Problem)? It was a story about a runaway train hurtling towards a cluster of people stuck on the tracks ahead. But you have the option to pull the switch and send the train down another track with a smaller number of people on it. You have the option of saving some lives by sacrificing a smaller number of others. Do you pull the switch?

In grade school the riddle was posed as a moral dilemma. But it's not. There was only ever one correct choice. We invented universal human rights to make it clear that no person or government has the right to pull the switch to send the train down another track towards a sacrificial group of victims.

In December of 1948, in the aftermath of the human rights violations committed during the Second World War, the member states of the United Nations formally adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It explicitly forbids government from treating some people as worth less than others. It forbids government from sacrificing some people for the benefit of others. It forbids government from knowingly imposing harm on some individuals in order to serve an alleged greater good. And it forbids government from imposing a hierarchy of rights on their citizens.

Lockdowns during COVID pose the exact same question as the Bystander at the Switch. But it's not a game; once again there are real lives at stake. Yet in direct violation of the principles of universal human rights, governments around the world are choosing to pull the switch by imposing lockdowns "for our safety." In doing so they have given themselves the authority to play God with our lives.

Are you essential or non-essential? Each category now has different rights and freedoms and different levels of individual autonomy. Some have the right to earn a living. Others do not. Some have the right to choose how to balance the risks and priorities in their lives. Others do not. How can any job that feeds a family not be essential?

What about the collateral damage caused by lockdowns? Mandatory lockdowns are leading to the deaths of countless individuals through cancelled/delayed medical operations, suicides, drug overdoses, loneliness and isolation in nursing homes, and more. None of these deaths would happen without lockdowns. Government is throwing one group of people onto the tracks with the goal of saving another.

How much misery and suffering is government allowed to impose on other people "for your safety"? How many jobs is the government allowed to destroy "for your safety"? How many people will lose their homes "for your safety"? How many people will lose their life savings, have their marriages broken, suffer bankruptcy, lose their careers, have their children's education irreparably damaged, or have their mental health destroyed because of actions taken by the government "for your safety"?

And how many people is the government allowed to force into poverty and starvation "for your safety"? Visitors to food banks are not just soaring here at home. We live in an interconnected world. What we do in one part of the world sets precedents and causes economic ripples that reach the farthest corners of the globe. Do those lives matter?

... Let's be clear, this unfolding horror is not because of COVID, it is because of the government's response to COVID. By crossing the line from making recommendations to imposing laws that take away the people's right to decide for themselves how to balance their risks and priorities, economies are grinding to a halt and millions are being forced into starvation. And the carnage doesn't miraculously end when the virus fades away. The slow-moving forces set in motion will be with us for a long time and in the meantime the bodies will just keep piling up. Should they be asked to pay this price "for your safety"? Or perhaps they don't matter since the media isn't counting them and can't leverage them into click-bait to exploit your feeling of vulnerability to the virus?

The first principle in medicine is the Hippocratic Oath, which says, "First do no harm." One consequence of this rule is that you're not allowed to protect one group of people by harming another. Empathy for one group doesn't give you the right to trample another. In the Trolly Problem, it's completely unethical (medical malpractice) for any doctor to pull the switch.

Yet health authorities imposing lockdowns are nevertheless inflicting horrific harms on those least at risk from the virus (the young and healthy) with the excuse that this is justified to protect those most at risk (the very old, especially those with pre-existing health conditions). This is a direct violation of the Hippocratic Oath. And it's completely nonsensical. If you're unwilling to risk exposure to the virus, stay home. Your risk as you shelter at home is exactly the same whether I'm at home in lockdown or whether I'm at work to feed my family or visiting my loved ones to protect my (or their) mental health.

The right to individual autonomy was specifically invented to allow free people to weigh their risks and priorities. For most of us there are many risks in our daily lives (like being unable to feed our families) that are far more dangerous than a virus that even the US CDC says has an infection survival rate of 99.997% for those under 20 years of age, 99.98% for 20 to 49 year olds, 99.5% for 50 to 69 year olds and 94.6% for anyone over the age of 70. To put that in perspective, Dr. John Ioannidis, professor of epidemiology and biomedical statistics at the University of Stanford, has calculated that for people under the age of 65, the COVID death risk is "equivalent to the death risk of driving from between 9 miles per day (in Germany) and 415 miles per day (in New York City)."

... By trying to "flatten the curve", lockdowns only extend the amount of time it takes for the rest of the population to acquire herd immunity, which increases the amount of time that the most vulnerable are at risk of being exposed to others carrying the virus. Instead of self-isolating for a month while the virus runs its course among the rest of the population (like influenza does every winter) they have now been at risk of catching COVID from the rest of us for almost 10 months - 10 months during which many have been forcibly stuck in isolation, separated from their loved ones!

In other words, if you don't pull the switch, the vulnerable are at risk. But if you do pull the switch, the risk increases to the most vulnerable while also putting everyone else in harm's way.

... And that brings up the other problem with lockdowns. Quite apart from the crime of sacrificing innocent people for the benefit of others, there is also the hubris of government assuming they have all the information to predict all the unintended consequences and collateral damage caused by their actions. They never do. It's impossible. Government claims to be able to predict the number of lives that will be saved when it pulls the switch, but in reality, there are always countless more lives destroyed that nobody foresaw just around the bend. Poverty, hunger, children orphaned by a bankrupted parent's suicide, educational opportunities destroyed with lifelong consequences, and the list of unintended consequences goes on, and on, and on. The collateral damage caused by government hubris is yet another of the many reasons why the concept of universal human rights was invented to deny government having that much authority over our lives.

But once the government pulls the switch, politicians and bureaucrats must justify their actions to avoid being held accountable for their mistakes. Poverty, suicide, delayed surgeries, mental health issues, and countless other horrors become irrelevant to these state planners so long as government can show it's fighting to reduce cases "for our safety", all the while blaming its failures on the behaviours of its citizens and becoming increasingly authoritarian in its enforcement. And so, while the motivations may differ, the consequences of abandoning universal human rights once again lead to suffocating and deadly authoritarianism, a Frankenstein resurrection of precisely the thing that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was meant to prevent. "Blood and Soil" has been replaced by "Crush the Curve" and "COVID-Zero", but once again one group of people is being sacrificed for another's "benefit".

There is no moral dilemma for the Bystander at the Switch; there is no riddle to be solved. "For your safety" is never an excuse to extinguish someone else's rights. Not for COVID, nor for anything else. The end never justifies the means. But history shows that there are Nuremburg Trials for those who ignore other people's universal human rights and especially for those who delude themselves into thinking that they can engineer a more compassionate society by pulling the switch. Let's not let it come to that.

Are you prepared to allow the government to throw you in front of the train to save someone else? If not, then demand that the government stop doing it to somebody else! (read more)

Reader Comment: "The entire western world has based its response on the initial actions of a totalitarian dictatorship, who has since lied about its effectiveness and 'cases'. If you think that's 'normal' then I think we are without hope..."

Sweden’s figures DO show that lockdowns are a crime

For a large part of 2020 anti-lockdown proponents argued that Sweden’s death figures showed that Covid-19 wasn’t anywhere near as dangerous as the lockdown fanatics were making out. Such claims were met by an avalanche of trolls who shouted “WHAT ABOUT NORWAY” and “SWEDEN IS A DISASTER AREA”. The trolls’ angry shouts led people to believe that Sweden, whose scientists refused to follow most of the rest of the world in requiring lockdowns and social distancing and masks, was a killing field, with mass deaths caused by murderously reckless scientists.

Even six months ago an objective look at Sweden’s figures showed this take to be arrant nonsense. Their all-cause death numbers over spring (the worst months for Covid), were completely normal by the country’s historical standards, and nowhere near even being the worst months in the last few decades for Sweden, let alone in the last hundred. Here, for example, is a graph showing that the period January to April in Sweden was completely normal when compared to the same January to April period in the past thirty years. (All graphs can be clicked to enlarge.)

... You will see that April 2020, supposedly the worst month for the world in hundred years outside wartime, in fact had lower deaths than about twenty other months in Sweden in just the last thirty years.

Most governments, scientists, and media outlets have inexcusably ignored these facts for over half a year, and when forced to look at Sweden they have continued to spin the line that Sweden is a charnel house.

Now, ten months since the Western world went mad, the overall figures for Sweden’s all-cause mortality for 2020 are available. And it is time we had a proper look at these figures and stopped taking this lunatic mania for lockdowns seriously.

... Because not only was there not a holocaust in Sweden in 2020, there wasn’t much of anything in Sweden in 2020. There were a few more deaths than in the last five to six years, but 2020 was in fact one of the least grim years for mortality that Sweden has ever seen. Far from being a once-in-a-century disaster, 2020 saw less deaths than 2012. And less deaths than over 90% of the previous 168 years – far less, in most of these cases.

2020 was supposed to be the year the world faced the worst killer disease for a century, yet if you go back a century to 1919 on this graph you can see a spike sticking out of the data above all the other years. That was a bad year, especially seeing as many of the lives lost in that year (to the Spanish flu) were those of young people, which is most definitely not the case with Covid. Is 2020 anything like 1919? No, not remotely. Anyone who tells you different is either woefully ignorant, and if they continue to tell you that after seeing this chart then they’re a liar.

We have seen a multitude of graphs on all sorts of Covid and lockdown-related matters over the last ten months. But this is the one graph that kills the case for lockdowns and all the other restrictions stone dead. Sweden’s government did not enforce social distancing, it did not enforce mask-wearing, it did not lock people up in their own homes, all the things that most other governments insisted were totally necessary to avoid mass death, and which had to be enforced with massive fines (recently two young men from Leeds were given fines of £10,000 each for starting a snowball fight). Yes, Sweden had a few restrictions, such as closing high schools at various points (which we know makes very little difference to Covid spread), and in recent weeks some more restrictions have (totally pointlessly) been brought in, but generally Sweden has been free of lockdowns, restrictions and masks. Yet far from seeing any sort of disaster, Sweden saw only slightly elevated death levels compared to recent years, and a death rate less than almost every year in their history before 2012. This tells us that Covid is about as dangerous as a very bad flu, but no more. And no-one in their right mind thinks we should shut the world down indefinitely for a bad flu.

You can also see on this graph the fact that Sweden had an exceptionally low death rate in the year 2019. It was, in fact, easily the lowest year in Sweden’s recorded history. And this was after a number of years of lower rates. We can surmise, then, that Sweden was building up a number of very elderly people who were near the end of their life and who would be vulnerable to a nasty flu-type virus. It is very rare for any country to have continual decline in their annual death rate for more than a decade; usually the numbers go back upwards again for a few years as those people eventually die. The contrast between 2019 and 2020 is nothing unusual, and when we average them together we end up with a death rate for that two-year period that is completely in line with the recent average.

Nor is it true, as is often claimed, that all Swedes voluntarily stayed at home and practiced social distancing around other people like the British did, despite it not being required by the government. First of all, we can compare Google’s mobility data between the two countries to see that while there was some amount of this happening in Sweden, it was not happening to anything like the same extent as in Britain, especially during the worst spring months.

... Further evidence that there was no de facto lockdown comes from the numerous videos posted by Swedish people showing normal life going on in Swedish cities, with no social distancing and no masks, as well as documentary footage made by people such as Sean Collins and Simon Dolan who visited Sweden with a film crew.

... Unfortunately pressure has been brought to bear upon the Swedish establishment from the rabid members of various international bodies, and through false media depictions of the country, which has meant that Sweden, despite its amazing success, is now starting to introduce restrictive measures, although generally the country remains relatively free of restrictions (Dr Sebastian Rushworth, a Swedish GP and lockdown sceptic, tweeted a picture of the rush-hour trains in Stockholm few days ago and said “Few masks. The claims of a Swedish lockdown are greatly exaggerated”. The fact that some Swedish politicians and royalty are starting to call for more restrictions in response to this pressure doesn’t provide any sort of justification at all for lockdown, and the data shows that it is totally unnecessary. Sweden was a shining beacon of freedom and rationality in 2020, and it should stay that way, and we should join them, rather than them joining us in our miserable, pitiful, and ruinous state. (read more)

Here’s a graph they don’t want you to see

Here’s a graph that doesn’t get shown in the mass media, and that I’m sure all those who want you to stay fearful of covid don’t want you to see. It shows the share of the tested population with antibodies to covid in Sweden week by week, beginning in the 28th week of 2020 (the first week for which the Swedish Public Health Authority provides data on the share of tests coming back positive).

(see graph)

There is so much that is interesting about this graph. Like I said, it begins in week 28, in other words in early July, which is around the time the first Swedish covid wave was bottoming out. At the time, I personally thought this was due to enough of the population having developed immunity to covid, but we now know that was wrong. Rather, it was due to seasonality – in other words, summer caused covid to disappear.

The proportion testing positive for antibodies was 15% in early July. It remained stable for a few weeks, and then started to drop, as we would expect, given that the rate of new infections was very low at the time. Your body generally doesn’t keep producing antibodies forever after an infection, rather they wane. Of course, this doesn’t mean immunity is waning, as I discussed on this blog a while back. Although the actively antibody producing cells disappear, memory cells remain, ready to be activated at short notice if you get re-exposed to the pathogen.

After an initial reduction, the proportion with antibodies stabilized at around 10% in August, and stayed that way until October, when it started to rise, in line with the beginning of the second wave. And it’s literally kept rising by a percentage point or two, every week, all autumn and winter so far. In the second week of January 2021, 40% of those tested in Sweden had antibodies to covid.

Funnily enough, mainstream media has so far shown relatively little interest in publicizing this astounding fact. I’ve been getting most of my statistics from SVT, the Swedish public broadcaster. They had been providing data on the share with antibodies in Stockholm up to a month or two back, when that information discretely disappeared from their website. I wonder why.

I know some of you will respond that 40% doesn’t mean anything, because the data isn’t taken from a random sample. If all we had was one number, then that would be a valid point. But we don’t just have one number. We have the number for every week stretching back six months. Any bias due to people preferentially getting tested after a respiratory infection that applies now, when 40% are testing positive, also applied three months ago, when 10% were testing positive. The trend is real, and cannot be denied.

Apart from that, there is another form of bias that will tend to make the proportion with antibodies seem lower than it really is. This is the fact that people who already know they’ve had covid generally don’t keep re-testing themselves to confirm it. This group gets bigger and bigger as more and more people get covid, and this will eventually make the proportion with antibodies seem lower than it really is. So at some point, there is an inflection point. In the early pandemic, a larger share of those being tested will have antibodies than you would get from a random sample. In the late stages of the pandemic, a smaller share of those being tested will have antibodies than you would see in a random sample.

In the last few weeks the number of people being treated for covid in hospitals in Sweden has been dropping rapidly, as has the share of PCR-tests that are coming back positive. There is much discussion in the media about what the cause might be. Everyone seems to be very surprised. Is it because people are better at working from home? Or because people aren’t traveling as much? Or because more people are wearing face masks?

... That’s why the fear mongers don’t want you to see that graph. And that’s why I hope you will help me spread it far and wide. (read more)

Black Lives Matter 13 Guiding Principles

D.C. Area Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action

1. Restorative Justice
We are committed to collectively, lovingly and courageously working vigorously for freedom and justice for Black people and, by extension all people. As we forge our path, we intentionally build and nurture a beloved community that is bonded together through a beautiful struggle that is restorative, not depleting.

2. Empathy
We are committed to practicing empathy; we engage comrades with the intent to learn about and connect with their contexts.

3. Loving Engagement
We are committed to embodying and practicing justice, liberation, and peace in our engagements with one another.

4. Diversity
We are committed to acknowledging, respecting and celebrating difference(s) and commonalities.

5. Globalism
We see ourselves as part of the global Black family and we are aware of the different ways we are impacted or privileged as Black folk who exist in different parts of the world.

6. Queer Affirming
We are committed to fostering a queer‐affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking or, rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual unless s/he or they disclose otherwise.

7. Trans Affirming
We are committed to embracing and making space for trans brothers and sisters to participate and lead. We are committed to being self-reflexive and doing the work required to dismantle cis-gender privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially Black trans women who continue to be disproportionately impacted by trans-antagonistic violence.

8. Collective Value
We are guided by the fact all Black lives matter, regardless of actual or perceived sexual identity, gender identity, gender expression, economic status, ability, disability, religious beliefs or disbeliefs, immigration status or location.

9. Intergenerational
We are committed to fostering an intergenerational and communal network free from ageism. We believe that all people, regardless of age, show up with capacity to lead and learn.

10. Black Families
We are committed to making our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children. We are committed to dismantling the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work “double shifts” that require them to mother in private even as they participate in justice work.

11. Black Villages
We are committed to disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, and especially “our” children to the degree that mothers, parents and children are comfortable.

12. Unapologetically Black
We are unapologetically Black in our positioning. In affirming that Black Lives Matter, we need not qualify our position. To love and desire freedom and justice for ourselves is a necessary prerequisite for wanting the same for others.

13. Black Women
We are committed to building a Black women affirming space free from sexism, misogyny, and male‐centeredness. [Exempting rap and hip hop lyrics that call women "hos" and "bitches, and describe sexual violence committed by black males against black women.] (read more)

Biden's White House Press Corps Admit Covid Was Fake On A Hot Mic

As usual, the hypocrites admit the truth when they think no one is watching. Biden's white house press corps admit covid was fake on a hot mic. (watch video)

A Tsunami of Hate

There is one party that seeks to demonize, criminalize and extinguish dissent.

Everybody agrees that our country is in crisis –  and agrees that it is the worst crisis since the Civil War. But at the same time, we tell ourselves a comforting tale about the source of the crisis that perpetuates the problem instead of providing a path to ending it. We say our politics are “divisive” and talk about “unity and healing” as though that would miraculously be achieved if everybody stopped … what? Disagreeing? All politics is divisive. That’s the healthy basis of our constitutional order: the freedom to disagree. To suppress disagreement, to outlaw it - as many Democrats and their Big Tech and media allies are demanding these days - is to end democracy as we know it.

The problem is not that we disagree. We are not suffering as a nation from healthy disagreement. We are suffering from a Tsunami of Hate emanating from the Democrat Party that seeks to demonize, criminalize and extinguish dissent from the 75 million supporters of Donald Trump. It is now official Washington dogma that to question an election result – something the congressional Democrats have done in the face of every Republican presidential victory since 2000 - is now “insurrection” and “domestic terrorism,” or the incitement thereto, and needs to be prosecuted and suppressed.

You can’t have a democracy if this is the attitude of a party that controls all three branches of government, is enabled by a corrupt and compliant media, and is determined not just to defeat, but to humiliate, destroy and expunge from the record an ex-president who is supported by a greater segment of the American electorate than any American leader before him.

There is Democrat-sponsored legislation pending that would prevent any public building or artifact, even a “bench” from being named after the 45th president of the United States. There is a farcical witch-trial to impeach the same villain even though he has left office and is now a private citizen. There is even Democrat talk of stripping Trump of his pension, despite the fact that he gave his entire $1.6 million salary as president to the American people - something no president before him has done. If ever there was a public lynching, short of stringing the victim from the nearest tree – and there are no lack of leftwing calls for that – the Democrats’ unrelentingly vindictive assault on the defeated Donald Trump down to the last petty detail is it.

But what is in effect a total war is not merely a war to cancel Donald Trump. If it were, it would be reprehensible enough, but not a threat to the nation itself. This demonic hate directed by the Democrat Party towards Trump is also hate for the 75 million Americans who voted for him. And there is no shortage of reminders of that. Ordinary Americans in all walks of life who happen to think that Trump’s presidency – which included record employment and record economic growth, delivered benefits for all Americans, particularly American minorities, secured America’s borders, defeated America’s terrorist enemies and led to an unprecedented reconciliation between Arab nations and the State of Israel – was a worthy achievement are treated as social pariahs, have their careers destroyed and (shades of the Kremlin) are regarded as mentally unfit and in need of deprogramming.

In a March 2020 interview with Axios, James Clyburn – the third ranking Democrat in the House and the political figure most responsible for Biden’s primary victory - raised the specter of Hitler when speaking about Trump, calling the president a racist and likening modern-day America to Germany during the Nazi Party’s rise to power. “I used to wonder how could the people of Germany allow Hitler to exist,” said Clyburn. “But with each passing day, I’m beginning to understand how. And that’s why I’m trying to sound the alarm.”

A Tsunami of Hate – not “divisiveness” – is the root cause of our political crisis and the most existential threat we have faced since the war to end slavery.

The fact that the threat posed by the Democrats’ Tsunami of Hate is not just to Trump and his supporters, but to America itself, was evident in one of Biden’s first directives as president, declaring that a war on America’s “systemic racism” would be a priority of his administration: “The fact is systemic racism touches every facet of American life.”

This is one of the Big Lies that have become articles of faith for Democrats, and is easily refuted. The 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawed “systemic racism.” Here is the Wikipedia description of the law:

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Pub. L. 88–352, 78 Stat. 241, enacted July 2, 1964) is a landmark civil rights and labor law in the United States that outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, and later sexual orientation and gender identity. It prohibits unequal application of voter registration requirements, racial segregation in schools and public accommodations...

If systemic racism or institutional racism were a serious problem in America – let alone touched “every facet of American life,” - as Biden says, what do you think would happen? Assume, as Biden and woke Democrats generally seem to think that all white people are racists, there are thousands of black attorneys, attorneys general, prosecutors, judges, legislators and occupiers of the highest seats of government. If there was a scintilla of truth in this statement there would be thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lawsuits filed under the Civil Rights Act. There are no such lawsuits. The claim that “systemic racism touches every facet of American life” is itself a racist lie, whose evident target is white people, since according to the woke, “people of color” can’t be racist.

Not surprisingly, one of Biden’s first week initiatives was a systemically racist plan to provide financial assistance to small businesses whose owners were black, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American. Only whites were excluded. But Asian Americans as an ethnic group have higher incomes than white Americans. So what rationale for this policy is there but anti-white racism?

How virulent is the anti-white and anti-American racism of the Democrat Party? Consider this unhinged but also unchallenged statement by Vice President Kamala Harris defending the Black Lives Matters rioters whose “protests” caused billions in property damage, led to 25 deaths and injured 2000 police officers in the summer of 2020: “The reality is that the life of a black person in America has never been treated as fully human… It’s no wonder people are taking to the streets [to protest]. And I support them.”

In other words, the 44th president of the United States, the “most admired man in America” for over a decade wasn’t treated as “fully human,” or Martin Luther King – the only American with a national holiday in his honor (courtesy of President Ronald Reagan). This lunatic hatred of white America is now not only acceptable in the Democrat Party but the hateful creed of its leaders.

To be fair, there are two main areas of systemic racism in America today, but both are supported and enforced by the Democrat Party which is why they exist. The first is the systemic racism that traps inner city children – mainly ethnic minorities – in inferior schools that for fifty years and more have failed to provide 80 percent of them with the skills that are necessary to succeed. Every year 40% of inner city children drop out of school without graduating, and 40% of those who do, are functionally illiterate. The Democrat teacher unions – the same which went on strike during the pandemic with full pay at the expense of children who could not afford to miss school – exert absolute control over these school systems and have stifled all attempts at reforms. They are unalterably opposed to every alternative to their racist policies from charter schools to vouchers give inner city kids the same privilege as their middle-class counterparts, which would allow their parents to enroll them in schools that will teach them.

The other nationwide systemic racism is affirmative action programs which discriminate against all ethnic groups but those designated “oppressed” – a convenient leftist fiction used to justify all manner of injustice. If you’re black or Pacific Islander or Hispanic, go to the head of the line for a job, a promotion, a place at Harvard, a coveted training position to become a surgeon or other medical specialist. If you’re white or an ethnic minority whose community supports educational values and scores well on exams, like Asians, forget that place at Harvard, you’re screwed.

How racist is that? And how readily is this racism supported by a president and an administration, which like our most dedicated foreign enemies thinks America is a nation of slavers and racist oppressors, while at the same time our borders are under siege by black, brown and Asian minorities desperate to become citizens of the most tolerant, inclusive and egalitarian society on earth.  (read more)

You Will Be Made to Believe Implausible Things

In George Orwell’s masterpiece 1984, he said, “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
 
To guide you along this path, I bring to your attention implausible things you are expected to believe this week.

1.Things that are not graft.

Outrageously generous book deals to present and former officials.

The Obamas’ $65 million book advances still lead the way to the most lavish, though the notion that even Democrat politicians’ relatives, like Chelsea Clinton, would offer ghostwritten pap worth anything is something you just have to believe.

Generous speaking fees.

The $25 million the Clintons garnered for just six months of speeches in 2014 and 2015, you must regard not as bribes for access and influence, but as well-earned compensation for minutes worth of pearls of wisdom. Not just former presidents and would-be presidents are the recipients of such largesse.  Janet Yellen, the Biden pick for Secretary of the Treasury, for example, raked in $7.2 million in speaking fees from Wall Street and large corporations like Citi, Goldman Sachs, Google, City National Bank, UBS, Citadel LLC, Barclays, and  Credit Suisse...

Charitable Shakedowns.

You must ignore the suggestion that plea bargains in which the government gives a settlement payment to a bureaucrat’s favorite nonprofit constitutes anything unethical. Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions halted this practice. If the new administration reverses this ban, avert your eyes from bad thinking. If the government claims a corporation ripped off yourself and fellow citizens illegally, you should be grateful they have to pay up to the agency head’s alumni association or some left-wing advocacy outfit. Why should you be compensated for the harm done to you? And from the viewpoint of the defendant, why not grease the palms of the prosecution’s favorites with some small amount rather than go through the expense and aggravation of defending?

Congressional Stock Trading.

If you believed Hillary Clinton made so much money investing shrewdly in cattle futures and not out of some manipulation, you will certainly agree that speaker Nancy Pelosi’s $1 million investment in Tesla stock call options shortly before the Biden administration announced it planned to make the federal automobile fleet (645,000 cars) electric was just another example of stock trading genius by a high-ranking politician.

There’s certainly no graft in providing lucrative deals for politicians’ families...

2. You can Trust Dr. Fauci

Governor Andrew Cuomo’s handling of the China Virus was appropriate even though he placed the virus carriers in nursing homes and ignored the presence of the USNS Solace, the Javits Center, and Samaritan’s Purse hospitals which were fully staffed and ready to assist.

Dr. Fauci was right to praise him. Ignore the New York Attorney General Letitia James, who investigated and announced this week that the Cuomo administration failed to report thousands of COVID-19 deaths of nursing home residents after forcing these homes to admit COVID-19 patients. And you know you can ignore James’s report and credit Dr. Fauci’s praise of Cuomo’s performance because Joe Biden said “Dr. Fauci isn’t just one of our foremost experts on combating viruses -- he is a good man and a tireless public servant.... Our administration, and our country, will be stronger because of his guidance.”

Dr. Fauci is one of our foremost experts on combating viruses and is totally nonpartisan. Ignore his waffling and misstatements...

3. All the White House efforts on the China virus are based on sound science, not politics

So when the White House calls for Florida restaurants and bars to close their doors, contrary to Governor Ron DeSantis’ directives to stay open, you must ignore Richard Grenell’s criticism of Governor Gavin Newsom and its application to the White House plan for Florida. Logic is now banned thinking...

4. Show trial and Impeachments are the Way to Unity

Daniel Greenfield explains, for those who are slow learners. Questioning an election is now sedition and incitement. A Capitol wrapped in barbed wire and with streets filled with National Guardsmen is not using a fake state of emergency, friends.

... Any day now I expect the publishers who toss favors at Democrat officeholders to print and distribute gratis Biden’s Little Red Book for us to memorize, or redo paintings of him as they did in Russia of the doddering fool Brezhnev bedecked with dozens of  medals. (read more)

The Trump Comeback Begins: The Plan to Make Trump and America Great Again

Many critics think Trump’s winning streak ended with a presidential loss. I disagree. I know the man, I understand the man, I know what comes next. It may be Trump’s greatest chapter yet.

Simply because Trump is relentless. He may be the most relentless human in world history. The secret to Trump’s success is “the Art of the Comeback.” Every time he is given up for dead, he makes the biggest comeback yet. He never gives up, or gives in. He finds a way to turn lemons into lemonade. You can’t beat someone like that. You can’t bet against someone like that. As I always say “NBAT: Never Bet Against Trump.”

Before I get to the details of the comeback, let’s define “winning.” Trump’s critics think he just lost, therefore he’s no longer a “winner.” Not true. Back in 2016 Trump won the biggest upset in political history. This time around he added 11 million new votes. His 74 million votes were the most votes for any incumbent president in America’s history. Trump also received more votes than any Republican in history.

Sorry Trump haters, but that’s called “winning” at super human levels.

Nonetheless, Trump lost and Biden won. Democrats, RINOS and the fake news media all believe Trump is finished. So, now it’s time for the greatest comeback in history- for Trump and America.

Here’s my game plan for how Trump can make Trump and America great again.

First, Trump must become the kingmaker of the GOP. The Trump Army is 74 million strong. The Republican Party belongs to Trump. He should remake the party in his image.

In some ways, his defeat was empowering. As president, Trump couldn’t get rid of RINOS and “Never-Trumpers” because he needed their votes. But from the outside, he can remake the party, elect Trump allies, and end the careers of the GOP traitors who stabbed him in the back. Are you listening Liz Cheney?

Trump should recruit, endorse and campaign for Trump Republicans in each GOP primary against RINOS, Never-Trumpers and backstabbers. 74 million Trump voters will vote for Trump’s chosen candidates in GOP primaries. By 2022 the GOP will be remade 100% in Trump’s image.

Secondly, Trump should spend the next four years fixing “voter fraud” at the state level. Trump should recruit his billionaire buddies to put up hundreds of millions to attack this problem. Trump’s goal should be to reform election law in just the handful of states that cost him the election: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona.

If Trump spends his time, money and focus on reforming election laws in those six states, the GOP is back in business in 2022 and 2024.

Thirdly, Trump needs to raise billions from his billionaire backers to build TMN: “Trump Media Network.” That should include a national cable TV network, national talk radio network, the new version of Drudge (called “Trump Report),” and conservative versions of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Conservatives will never again have to depend on the mainstream media or Silicon Valley to get our news and opinions out.

Only Trump has the money, brand and fundraising ability to change the media and social media landscape like this. And think of the amazing bonus- not only will 74 million Trump voters have permanent places to communicate, but if we all move away from mainstream media and social media, they will collapse. Trump will cripple his enemies and put many of them out of business.

Lastly, here’s one more idea for Trump. Run for Congress in 2022. Pick any GOP friendly district in Florida, where you’re loved. Primary a RINO who stabbed you in the back. You’ll win the primary by a landslide. Since it’s a GOP district, you’re guaranteed victory in the general election. Once in Congress, with the GOP regaining control in 2022, and most of the candidates loyal to you, you’ll be elected Speaker of the House. From that platform, Trump can lead the impeachment of President Biden.

Let the Trump comeback begin. 74 million of us can’t wait. (read more)