Nothing Crazy Happening

Reported as “crazy” and “weird”:

#1 Armies Of Locusts – As I detailed the other day, swarms of locusts the size of major cities have been devouring entire farms in Africa in as little as 30 seconds.  These swarms have also been spreading throughout the Middle East, and now we have learned that they have even reached China…

Oddly enough, I’ve actually seen a swarm of locusts.

It was back in the early 1950s, when I was about 5 years old, and we were living in the city of Asmara in Eritrea. One day the air was filled with a cloud of two or three-inch long locusts, all flying in the same direction, about five feet apart. They made a sort of rattling sound.

I stood in the garden as they flew past me, taking swipes at one or two of them as they passed by, but missing every time. I couldn’t see how far the swarm extended into the sky. But it took an hour or so to pass overhead. So I wouldn’t have been surprised if the swarm had covered most of the city. After it had passed there were quite a few dead or damaged locusts lying on the ground, that had presumably collided with houses or trees.

That particular swarm didn’t stop and eat anything. It was just passing through, probably because cities like Asmara didn’t have that many trees or plants for them to eat.

It’s a vivid childhood memory, along with lots of other vivid childhood memories.

I was told back then that such swarms weren’t uncommon. So it wasn’t “crazy” or “weird”. It’s only weird the first time you see it.

But these days more or less anything that happens gets called “crazy” or “weird” or “unprecedented.

#2 Extremely Bizarre Weather Patterns – It is almost as if virtually all of the old rules have suddenly been thrown out the window.  An all-time record 209 mph wind gust just hit Calfiornia, and absolutely crazy storms are happening all over the planet.  For example, just check out what just took place in Australia…

#3 Unprecedented Flooding – We are seeing unusual flooding all over the world right now, and the flooding that is devastating the southern U.S. at this moment is being called “unprecedented”…

#4 Major Earthquakes – Really big earthquakes are happening with such frequency now that it is very difficult for me to write about them all.  For example, a magnitude 7.7 quake recently struck off of the coast of Jamaica, but I have been so busy writing about other disasters that I have not even mentioned it until now…

#5 Unusual Volcanic Eruptions – Seismic activity has been rising all over the globe, and over the past couple of months we have seen volcanoes all over the world pop off like firecrackers.  One of the most notable eruptions that we have seen in recent days was the most powerful eruption of Mount Merapi in 90 years

Are any of these things really all that unusual?

It connects with my post yesterday, in which I asked if any of my readers has actually seen much climate change happening in their lifetime. Less than 5% said they had.

I think that the first time that anyone sees anything, it’s going to seem strange and unusual, and also memorable. The second time they see it, it will seem perfectly normal.

The first time I saw a swarm of locusts, it was something strange and unusual, and it’s a vivid memory of mine. If another one had come by a week later, I wouldn’t have been interested.

The first time I watched a steam engine pull into a station, yards away from me, its pistons and crankshafts turning the big steel wheels, blowing steam everywhere, it also left a vivid memory. I’m full of memories of things like this. Dead sharks on the beach. A crocodile in the bath. Stick insects. Lizards with two tails. Thunderstorms that blew down trees. Hot air balloons. Snow.

There’s nothing crazy happening. It just seems crazy to someone who has never seen it before.

I Don’t See Any Climate Change Happening

Ashamed of being human:

UK Professor: Only Way to Save Planet Is to ‘Let Humans Become Extinct’

It’s always a professor somewhere or other, isn’t it? What’s the matter with the universities?

Giving birth to a child is “the worst thing you can do” to the climate, says philosophy professor Patricia MacCormack of Anglia Ruskin University.

The professor, author of The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene who describes herself as an “old school goth,” says that the only way to save the planet is to stop having children and allow humans to become extinct.

According to the official description of the book, MacCormack “actively embraces issues like human extinction, vegan abolition, atheist occultism, death studies, a refusal of identity politics, deep ecology, and the apocalypse as an optimistic beginning.”

She would believe in climate change too, wouldn’t she?

“Even Extinction Rebellion only focus on the effect this will have on human life, when climate change is something that will affect every living being on the planet,” she states.

I find it really puzzling that so many people believe that some sort of catastrophic climate change (aka global warming) is actually happening. I can understand it if some climate scientists believe it’s happening, because they actually study climate, and can be expected to have an opinion about it. But Madonna?

Madonna pens song to tackle climate change

Do these people see something happening that I can’t see? Because I don’t see any climate change happening. In the 70+ years of my life, I’ve seen hot years and cold years, wet years and dry years, but I discern no overall trend.

It’s only when I’ve built my own computer simulation model that I get to see any climate change, when snow sheets spread across the Earth in my little model, and then retreat. But it’s just a theoretical model.

But you tell me. I’ll be very interested to know if any of my readers have personally experienced climate change or global warming.

I don’t think anybody sees any more climate change than I do. I think that if they believe that there’s climate change, it’s because they believe the experts who tell them that climate change is happening.

But I don’t believe the experts. I don’t believe that climate scientists know that much about climate. And I have a book by one of them – Principles of Planetary Climate by Raymond Pierrehumbert – in which the author has dozens of Big Questions about climate which have yet to be answered.

It’s because I don’t believe the experts that I’ve been writing my own climate model. I can’t see any other way of getting some idea what’s going on. And 40 years ago I used to build heat flow models, so I have a pretty good idea how to do it.

I guess there are just people who believe experts, and people who don’t. And I’m one of the latter. I tend not to believe experts about anything. I’ll listen to them, of course. But I won’t automatically believe any of them.

I don’t believe what the health experts tell me about smoking, I don’t believe what they tell me about drinking. I don’t believe what they tell me about sugar or salt or fat or obesity.

I don’t believe what the epidemiologists are telling me about the new coronavirus. I don’t think they know anything much about it. My guess is that it’s probably just another flu bug, whose threat they exaggerate like they always exaggerate every other threat.

Shame on so much Pointless Shame

What is the matter with these people?

“I have white advantage. Educational advantage. Straight advantage. Male advantage… I’m not ashamed of those advantages; I’m ashamed of not knowing I had them,” Welby said.

Well, I’ve got all the same advantages. And I’m not in the least bit ashamed. Why should I be ashamed?

But I’ve got one big disadvantage. It used not to be a disadvantage.

I’m a smoker. And that one disadvantage outweighs all the advantages. I’ve been expelled from society. But I’m not ashamed of being a smoker either.

How about this for yet more shame:

Michael Gove declares UK has a ‘moral responsibility’ to lead global Green Industrial Revolution

“As we all know the Industrial Revolution relied – and still relies to a disproportionate extent – on the extraction and use of hydrocarbons,” Gove said. “And we have a moral responsibility on the first in, first out basis to ensure the country that pioneered the Industrial Revolution and played the biggest role in the change in our climate, [has] a responsibility to lead a Green Industrial Revolution.”

The Industrial Revolution has become something to be ashamed of. It filled the air with carbon dioxide. And carbon dioxide causes global warming. And we should be filled with shame.

But I see no cause for shame. I think global warming is a Very Good Thing, and if carbon dioxide is causing it then we need more carbon dioxide.

Why? Because the alternative to global warming is global cooling, and global cooling will bring a new ice age. We’re currently living in an interglacial period that’s lasted about 12,000 years, and during that time we humans have gone through a Bronze Age, an Iron Age, and constructed a high civilisation. And it’s really entirely thanks to the change in climate over the past 12,000 years. A new ice age, covering much of Canada and the USA and Europe and Russia, would be a absolute catastrophe. It would be far worse than any amount of global warming, including the melting of both Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets (which would take about 10,000 years to achieve).

We shouldn’t be ashamed of the Industrial Revolution: we should be proud of it. We should be proud of all those engines and chimneys belching soot and glorious carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Those people were our saviours. But for them we night already have entered a new ice age.

All the things we’re supposed to be ashamed of seem to me to be things that we should be proud of.

The British Empire was something to be proud of. For that empire exported the Industrial Revolution all over the world. It spread technological and scientific innovation everywhere, in a vast global trading empire.

Nor should we be ashamed of having colonies. America was once a colony of Britain (and France and Spain), and it was the beneficiary of this colonialisation. We did a better job of running the country than the backward local people did. We built cities and roads and ports. We raised the standard of living of everybody. And America has gone on to do even better since it became self-governing, building on its colonial heritage (America’s language is the English language, and most of its laws are English law).

Some Americans see America as an “exceptional” country. And in a great many ways it actually is an exceptional country. If nothing else, it’s a new country (along with all the other countries in the America). It’s only been a player on the world stage for less than 500 years, unlike countries like Britain which have been around for thousands of years. And it’s also exceptional by standing apart from the Asian-African supercontinent in which all previous human history was conducted. And it’s exceptional in other ways as well, for example for being a melting pot into which more or less every nation state in Europe has exported their peoples.

But shouldn’t Americans be ashamed of slavery? No. They shouldn’t be ashamed of that either. It’s not as if they invented it. Slavery has existed throughout the entirety of human history. And has always been accepted. For the good thing about slavery is that, by placing the burden of necessary work entirely upon one section of the population (the slaves) it frees up the remainder to innovate and invent and study and learn. But for slavery we would not have had Plato and Aristotle and Euclid and Archimedes and countless other innovators. Slavery made free time for them that they would otherwise have never had. In the short term it was highly inequitable, of course. But in the long term as innovation and invention raised living standards, the slaves were gradually freed, and equity restored.

It’s probably possible to take absolutely any supposedly shameful historical episode, and make it into something to be proud of.

For example, the Jewish Holocaust. One consequence of that was that the Jews at last regained the Jewish state that they lost under the emperor Titus nearly 2000 years before. And that is an extraordinary achievement.

All these things have a minus side to them. They all have something to be ashamed of. But they also always have a plus side. They all have something to be proud of.

Back to global warming. Yes, there’s a minus side to it. Sea levels might rise 70 metres or so over the next 10,000 years. But the plus side is much larger than the minus side. And the plus side is that it will prevent (or at least delay) an ice age which could come into being almost overnight.

The Stuff Of Nightmares

Yesterday on Drudge:

BREAKING: Mike Bloomberg ‘wants Hillary Clinton as his running mate’, sources close to his campaign tell Drudge

It’s the stuff of nightmares: together they’d make a virulently antismoking presidency.

As mayor Bloomberg banned smoking in NYC, purely on his own initiative. As President, he’d ban smoking in America. And he’d be backed by Hillary in doing it.

Michael Bloomberg has set out to buy the US Presidency with his $50 billion fortune. It’s quite shameless. He’s buying ads everywhere. He’s even reported to have already outspent what Hillary Clinton spent in 2016.

And it makes a lot of sense to have Hillary as his running mate. It would boost his candidacy to have someone on his ticket who actually got more votes than Donald Trump back in 2016. The Clintons more or less own the DNC, and if Bloomberg owns Hillary Clinton, he’ll also own the DNC. A Bloomberg-Clinton Democrat combination would win the nomination using super-delegates just like Clinton won it in 2016, despite Crazy Bernie being a lot more popular than her. The same looks set to happen again in 2020.

It would be great for Hillary. It would put her in the White House, where she wanted to be. Of course, she wouldn’t be President, but she’d at least be Vice-President, and just a heartbeat away from the Presidency. Shortly after being elected, Michael Bloomberg might well find himself added to the Clinton Body Count. After all, 78-year-old Bloomberg would be the oldest US President in history (Trump is currently the oldest, 70 when he was elected). How long is he likely to last?

It’s not hard to imagine: Michael Bloomberg would take office in January 2021, and die a month later by accidentally falling down the White House stairs or something, and Hillary Clinton would become President.

But could a Bloomberg-Clinton Democratic ticket beat Donald Trump? Perhaps it could. It would produce a campaign just like the 2016 Clinton campaign, but with Bloomberg’s billions added. Michael Bloomberg might even take a back seat to Hillary: she’d make all the speeches, shake all the hands. He’d just quietly oversee the process, and pay all the bills.

Vanity Fair:

While Bloomberg can claim that he’s a better, even-keeled, more-qualified version of Trump, he’s certainly not a political outsider, nor is he a grassroots hero. He has no natural constituency, besides charter-school Democrats, the set of Morning Joe, and fellow members of the donor class. His stubborn brand of plutocratic centrism, as well as his overzealous use of stop-and-frisk tactics, would likely be a nonstarter for progressives, as well as the blue-collar workers who flipped to Trump in 2016.

With Hillary on the ticket, it doesn’t really matter what Bloomberg’s personal track record is, because it will effectively become another Clinton campaign, and a re-match with Trump, particularly if she’s far more visible than Bloomberg. This could be a presidential campaign in which the vice-presidential candidate is more important than the presidential candidate.

If this political alliance doesn’t happen, Michael Bloomberg may well still become the Democratic presidential candidate, simply by by buying it. But would Americans vote for him purely on his own merits? He has very little charisma. And in NYC he was the Republican mayor of the city, not the Democrat mayor.  To many progressives he’ll probably just look like another old white man, not much different from Trump. They’d wonder which one they hated more.

There’s been no comment about this from either Bloomberg or Clinton. Nor any from Trump either. The Bloomberg campaign has responded::

Michael Bloomberg’s campaign is downplaying a report claiming the billionaire presidential hopeful is considering former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as his vice presidential running mate.

“We are focused on the primary and the debate, not VP speculation,” Jason Schechter, the campaign’s communications director, said in a statement to Deadline Saturday evening.

If nothing comes of it, Trump looks set to win re-election in November. But if Drudge is right, and it’s going to be Bloomberg-Clinton versus Trump-Pence, it could all get very interesting.

 

Nothing Skewed

Somebody suggested to me yesterday that the coronavirus study that appeared to show that smokers had protection from the disease may have been skewed:

Something that may be skewing those figures might be a large number of children who are victims.  The table didn’t seem all that clear about it, but it’s quite possible that the combination of non-smoking women and children could be accounting for most of that 85% – 15% skew.

I don’t see what’s unclear about the table. Here’s the relevant part again:

There were only 9 children out of 1099 people in the study. And only 459 (41.8%) of the people in the study were women. If the numbers are skewed at all, it would seem that they are skewed  against there being large numbers of non-smoking women and children. There isn’t a large number of children in this study. Nor is there a large number of women.

Of course, there may be other unknown factors skewing the study. But at the moment I can’t see what.

…

In other news, after cheering him on to victory a few weeks ago, James Delingpole has now despaired of Boris Johnson:

I can’t believe I’m having to write Britain’s epitaph so soon after the joy and jubilation of Brexit Day but look at what Boris Johnson’s ‘Conservatives’ are offering a bemused nation:
⊕ Higher taxes (Mansion tax, pensions raids, etc)
⊕ An explosion of grand, unaffordable, and pointless infrastructure projects
⊕ A war on motorists
⊕ No more cooking or heating with gas
⊕ Elevation to the House of Lords for MPs who opposed Brexit
⊕ More green levies and regulations
How is any of this nonsense materially different from the ‘fully automated luxury communism’ Britain would have experienced under Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour?
I don’t think it’s any exaggeration to say that Boris Johnson’s Tories are the most extreme left-wing Conservative administration in the party’s history. Under cover of Brexit and in the guise of reaching out to all those working classes voters in the Midlands and the North, the Conservatives are rolling out radical measures so aggressively Socialistic that it makes Tony Blair’s benighted era look like Margaret Thatcher’s heyday.

I can’t say that I’ve despaired of Boris. I simply never had very high hopes in him in the first place. The British political class lives in an introverted world of its own, quite separate from the British people. And it will remain that way until ordinary British people find their way into the British political class, and the political class starts truly representing the British people.

Conservative Websites

Steve Turley has a list of conservative websites that he visits regularly. I’m a regular visitor to Breitbart and ZeroHedge now that I’ve become somewhat conservative, so it could be handy to have a few other sites. Here’s a copy of his list, with his comments.

…

Breitbart Breitbart is my go-to site. Founded by the late Andrew
Breitbart, the site offers perhaps the most thoroughgoing
nationalist populist perspective on the world.

Whatfinger.com One of the best news aggregate alternatives to
DrudgeReport, Whatfinger offers a great overview of headlines
from the conservative web universe.

The Gateway Pundit Jim Hoft has put together a great site
dedicated to exposing the “wickedness of the left.” I check this
site several times a day for headlines.

The Liberty Daily The Liberty Daily is an amazing news aggregate
site that bills itself explicitly as a conservative alternative to
Drudge.

Washington Examiner An excellent online newspaper for
conservatives.

The Daily Caller Originally founded by Tucker Carlson, The Daily
Caller is very much like a conservative alternative to the
Huffington Post.

The Western Journal The Western Journal is a conservative,
libertarian, pro-family site that often has very good articles.

Liberty Nation Good complement to Whatfinger.com

Rantingly A conservative alternative news aggregate to Drudge.
Liberty Nation Good complement to Whatfinger.com.

Gab Trends A news aggregation site based on trends on Gab.com
and the web browser Dissenter.

News Ammo Another very good conservative news aggregator.

Disrn.com Good sight for a summary of conservative articles.

Voice of Europe An excellent resource for the rise of nationalist
populism throughout Europe.

Info Wars Despite being de-platformed, Alex Jones still provides
some very impressive news coverage.

Instapundit Instapundit is an awesome aggregate website run by
Glenn Reynolds, professor of law at the University of Tennessee.
Zero Hedge A good site for both financial and conservative news
and opinion.

Zero Hedge A good site for both financial and conservative news
and opinion.

The Epoch Times An excellent nationalist and traditionalist
newspaper.

FoxNews.com While Fox News has been disappointing of late,
featuring a number of never-Trumper pundits, their website still
remains a valuable go-to resource for conservatives.

Matthew Goodwin’s Twitter @GoodwinMJ Matthew Goodwin is a
political scholar who specializes in the rise of nationalist populism
throughout Europe. He’s an excellent resource for very informative
and enriching articles as well as spot on analysis.

The College Fix A great resource not just on the cultural Marxist
insanity infesting college campuses, but also on the growing
number of colleges closing their doors for good.

The Lid Nice collection of headlines of interest for conservatives,
often with humorous images.

…

Suggestions welcome for additional entries.

 

Seven Weeks

Still no deaths on the Diamond Princess, 24 days after the 80-year-old man boarded the ship, 10 days after he became the first nCoV case.

The passengers are pretty elderly:

As of last Wednesday, about 80 percent of the 2,666 passengers were age 60 or older, with 215 in their 80s and 11 in their 90s.

WUWT:

Should the world be concerned? Perhaps.

Will there be a terrible Wuhan pandemic? Probably not.

Again, the analogy to climate change alarm is striking. Alarm based on lack of underlying scientific knowledge plus unfounded worst case projections

Tobacco smoke alarmism is another example, of course.

The WHO is busy stoking the alarmism:

Killer coronavirus is ‘the worst enemy you can ever imagine’ and may pose a greater global threat than terrorism, World Health Organisation warns

The real crisis may prove to be an economic and political crisis far greater than the original medical crisis. After shutting down much of the Chinese economy, attempts are being made to restart it. But since the virus appears to have spread to all regions of China, the Chinese appear to have lost control of it anyway.

ZeroHedge:

In his 2016 book The Perfect Dictatorship: China in the 21st Century, Norwegian political scientist Stein Ringen describes contemporary China as a “controlocracy,” arguing that its system of government has been transformed into a new regime radically harder and more ideological than what came before. China’s “controlocracy” now bears primary responsibility for the coronavirus epidemic that is sweeping across that country and the world…

The first coronavirus case appeared in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, on December 1, 2019, and, as early as the middle of the month, the Chinese authorities had evidence that the virus could be transmitted between humans. Nonetheless, the government did not officially acknowledge the epidemic on national television until January 20. During those seven weeks, Wuhan police punished eight health workers for attempting to sound the alarm on social media. They were accused of “spreading rumors” and disrupting “social order.”

It would seem that it was during those seven weeks that the epidemic gathered momentum, and spread across China, just when it might have been possible to prevent this happening.

This is what happens with top-down control. The truth is suppressed in order to preserve the appearance of normality.

Having failed to contain the epidemic, the lockdown of Wuhan and multiple other cities is a further example of top-down control.

And with an economic crisis resulting from the lockdown, the attempts to restart the economy are a further example of top-down control.

The top-down controlling Communist Chinese government is blundering from one crisis to another. And the Chinese people are losing confidence in them. So now there’s a political crisis rapidly developing in China. What happens when China is being simultaneously ravaged by a country-wide epidemic, and its industry has ground to a standstill, and the political class are being shown to be incompetent/ineffectual?

What happens when more or less every country in the world then has pretty much the same experience?

And what if there was no real cause for alarm? What if 2019-nCoV turns out to be not much different from a run-of-the-mill flu epidemic. Nobody on the Diamond Princess has yet died.

And isn’t it interesting that much of the news about it all is coming from ordinary people bottom-up posting up their own video reports online, rather than from top-down mainstream news media?