Monthly Archives: March 2024

This Time I Disagree with Bjorn Lomborg

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But only a little bit. Lomborg (among other things, Copenhagen Consensus President), in his Tuesday Wall Street Journal op-ed, writes absolutely correctly about the need for climatistas (my term, as is “doomsayers” below) to consider much more than their simple claim of climate change and the imminent destruction from their claimed change. Lomborg, though, concentrated on the economic destruction the doomsayers’ policies would inflict even as those worthies ignore technological advances that would mitigate their claims’ outcome, even were their claims in any way accurate.

Where I disagree is in the lack of discussion of the larger, and more important, context within which today’s alleged climate disaster is supposedly developing.

From the subheadline of Lomborg’s piece:

Climate policy needs to take into account the costs of draconian measures….

The doomsayers need to do more than that. They need to reconcile their claims of impending disaster with some facts that provide longer range context. Facts like Earth, 11k years after the last Ice Age, still is cooler than our planet’s geologic warming trend line (noisy as the data around the trend line are). Facts like there have been a number of epochs in our past where Earth was much warmer than it is now, and life was lush; there have been a number of epochs in our past where atmospheric CO2 was much higher than it is now, and life was lush; and those sets of epochs do not correlate with each other.

Some other facts: our climate changes do correlate, roughly, with orbital changes (small) and rotation axis precession (relatively dramatic). Beyond that, we’re about halfway through the current axial tilt from one direction to the opposite, and we tilt—our northern hemisphere, where most of the oceans are—toward the sun in winter and away from the sun in summer. How do the doomsayers plan to deal with the situation in a few thousand years (roughly equivalent to half the time that has passed since that last Ice Age, and a bit shorter than the time since we started our first civilizations) when our northern hemisphere tilts toward the sun in summer, away from the sun in winter, and the seasons get dramatically more extreme as a result?

Lies of Progressive-Democratic Party Politicians…

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…and their supporters. Here’s the latest batch, via Just the News.

  • FBI agents took allegations from Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the midst of the 2016 presidential election and provably misled a court [the FISA Court] by omitting key information, in one case even doctoring evidence.

The FBI as a supporter of one political party? Yes, the agency has chosen a side and abandoned the requirement for it to be a coldly objective investigator of criminal behavior regardless of the behaver.

  • Fifty-one intelligence experts who derived their credentials from American taxpayers signed a letter cheered on by Joe Biden’s campaign to falsely portray Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation when the FBI had already corroborated it as authentic.
  • An official congressional select committee [the J-6 Committee, for those following along at home] concluded a White House aide’s third-party hearsay account that Donald Trump tried to violently commandeer his presidential SUV on January 6 was more credible than the Secret Service driver’s firsthand account—which it suppressed—that such an event never happened.
  • A White House official [Ian Sams, White House Office of Counsel to the President] used the power of the bully pulpit to insist it was a “significant error” for journalists to report Joe Biden “willfully” kept and disseminated classified information when in fact that is exactly what the Biden Justice Department’s appointed special counsel had concluded.

And this one from Party’s communications arm, the press guild:

…”[ABC News‘ George] Stephanopoulos said 10 times, on 10 separate occasions, Donald Trump was found ‘liable for rape’ in the E Jean Carroll case. He specifically said that the jury found Trump ‘liable for rape’—now that’s important. In fact, the jury specifically found Trump not liable for rape,” [Washington Examiner chief political correspondent Byron] York told Fox News Digital.”
…
“[I]t’s just a fact that the court asked the jury, ‘Do you think Miss Carroll proved by preponderance of the evidence that Donald Trump raped her?’ And they said, ‘No.'”

This is what’s a stake this fall. Will we be reigned over by an intrinsically dishonest political syndicate, or will we succeed in electing a Conservative government that would be markedly less dishonest, if not itself precisely lily-pure?

Soviet Canada

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Now the Justin Trudeau government that’s reigning over Canada wants to lock Canadian citizens away for the crime of speculating—thinking—in ways Prime Minister Justin Trudeau finds personally objectionable.

On February 26 Mr Trudeau’s Liberal government introduced Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act, which targets so-called hate speech on the internet. One of its provisions would enable anyone, with the consent of the federal attorney general, to “lay an information before a provincial court judge if the person fears on reasonable grounds that another person will commit” an offense. The judge could then issue a “peace bond” imposing conditions, including house arrest and electronic monitoring, on the defendant merely because it’s feared he could commit a hate crime.

Enhancing this attack on Canadian citizens’ liberty, Trudeau wants to pay individuals for denouncing their neighbors.

The commission [the Canadian Human Rights Commission, the central government arm charged with enforcing the Denouncement Law] would have the power to levy [fines] of up to 20,000 Canadian dollars (around US $15,000), payable to the complainant, not the treasury.

Is Trudeau moving to reduce Canada’s Provinces to the status of soviets under the control of the central committee?

On the other hand, given Trudeau’s…thought processes…maybe some concerned citizens might lay an information before an Ontario judge, provide the Ontario Provincial Police with the peace bond for enforcement, and see Trudeau confined to 24 Sussex adorned with an electronic monitoring device.

Nah. With his government determining what constitutes unacceptable thinking, Trudeau is proof against enforcement. Laws are only for the disdained bourgeoisie.

Trump Wasn’t the First

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Since NATO’s creation, the European nations have, in the main, been shirking their obligations to the alliance and with that betraying their fellow alliance members. Then-President Jack Kennedy (D) was among the first American government officials to grow tired of that shirking and to object to it out loud.

John F Kennedy in 1963 told his National Security Council that “we cannot continue to pay for the military protection of Europe while the NATO states are not paying their fair share.”

Then it was then-Deputy Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci in 1981 in front of the Munich Security Conference:

[T]he United States cannot be expected to improve and strengthen US forces in Europe, unless other allies increase their own contribution to the combined defense effort.

With the end of the Cold War almost 35 years ago,

NATO asserts that almost half its members won’t spend 2% of their gross domestic product on defense this year, a decade after the alliance affirmed that baseline expectation.

But those were just a bunch of polite noises.

Nor is Trump the only one objecting to European NATO members’ sloth and perfidy today, although today’s Progressive-Democratic Party politicians are standing silently on the sidelines in a reversal (repudiation?) of their Democrat predecessors.

[I]ncreasingly prominent voices in the US think “the time has come for Europe to stand on its own feet,” as Senator JD Vance (R, OH) put it recently.

Trump still is right, and it’s been his sharp rhetoric as opposed to those 50 years of “pretty please” that has gotten more NATO members—but not all of them, shamefully—to start honoring their fiscal and equipment commitments to NATO.

US Is Even More Vulnerable

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The mostly unfettered inflow of “refugees” from—pick a source, but mostly the Middle East—into Europe is beginning to awaken Europe’s western and central nations to the terrorist risk they face from that flow (eastern Europe’s nations have long been well aware). That relatively uninhibited flow, with its sample that have been caught, should be clanging alarm bells for us, too.

Authorities in Europe say they have foiled several terror plots, some involving suspects posing as refugees, raising alarm about a growing array of threats from extremists.

Threats from terrorists, I’ll say, since The Wall Street Journal‘s news personalities are too timid to call the spade a spade. Examples of those terrorists’ plots—those that have been discovered—abound.

German and Dutch investigators…arrested four people for allegedly receiving the order from Hamas to open a secret cache of weapons and attack Jewish targets in Berlin and elsewhere in Western Europe.
German prosecutors said Hamas had buried the weapons underground in Europe years ago but that the suspects, all longstanding Hamas members involved in the group’s overseas operations, wouldn’t reveal where.
Investigators found pictures of Jewish and Israeli targets in Europe on some of the suspects’ mobile phones….

And

…arrest late last year of a group of Tajik nationals suspected of planning attacks on the Cologne Cathedral in Germany and St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna around Christmas. Both churches fill with hundreds of visitors for the holiday season.

And

Italian authorities said they had detained three Palestinians suspected of being members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, designated as a terror group by the US and the European Union. The three were preparing to attack civilian and military targets in Europe, the Italian National Police said.

And on and on. That bit about pre-caching weapons for later retrieval and use is especially troubling, or should be, for us in the US and for our government. Europe doesn’t seem to be getting the large inflow of PRC military-age single men that we are, although Russia’s penchant for exporting little green men for sabotage and battlespace shaping is well enough known, as is the difficulty of detecting them before they go operational. Among those PRC young men flowing so freely into our nation could well be PLA special forces operators; an outcome of the PLA’s broad and rapid buildup, including its special operations units.

Nor can we in our nation say how many Iranian/Iranian-backed terrorists have come in over our borders, unchecked, unhindered in any way, perhaps at a time of their choosing to link up with the weapons other illegal aliens have secreted for them.

This is the risk—in spades—that Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden is creating for us with his deliberately opened borders policy and the associated wholly unfettered flood of illegal aliens. It’s the risk from the upwards of 1.5 million illegal aliens coming in every year whose entry would be codified in the shameful Border Insecurity bill which the Senate enacted.