Rumble by the way is the new alternative to Youtube minus censorship and they only take a 10% cut unlike youtube’s 30% cut thus as it grows, is userbase will be richer compared to youtube’s. They don’t have livestream or video purchase yet, but as youtube squeezes, it will just become another movie streaming service while content creators go to Rumble, Locals, and Gab which don’t rape them.
Big Tech is dying and is bringing down the system with it. Short sell them. They deserve to be wrecked after helping steal the election and preventing people from hearing about early treatment options for Covid-19.
Open source, block chain, and crypto is how we bring the Establishment down and bury those warmongering bastards in an unmarked grave where no one will care about them.
Isn’t Breitbart funded by the Mercers? I thought Robert made most of his money as a hedge fund manager. And then the other guy, Solov, wants the government to regulate big tech because he thinks they’re being mean to Breitbart. Sounds like yet another episode of Conservative Frankenstein, where the monster is only bad when it tries to eat its creator.
Expecting right-wingers to have any honesty or consistency is foolish. When dealing with right-wingers, always remember one fundamental rule: an accusation is always a confession. When right-wingers accuse someone else of doing something bad, there is a 100% chance that they are doing that very same thing themselves.
People who divide media outlets and talking heads into 2 or 3 boxes, one of which is “right wing”, are ignoramuses in this area, at best. Their persistence suggests they are more nefarious than this – either fanatics, or unpaid shills, or paid shills. Well, nowadays, we could also assume the possibility of a bot.
I’ve also come across a couple of “climate change” proponents, who sort of spoke to my comments, but didn’t actually show evidence that they had read them for meaning, as they gave seemingly intelligent comments (not necessarily true ones, though) to something I obviously hadn’t said. I had the impression that they were humans, who were working from essentially a set of climate talking points, that they misapplied, because they were either lazy, or else ignorant, but eager to earn some sort of pay, anyway. Al Gore had some sort of app for info-warriors, for correcting us so-called “climate change deniers”, but I don’t know any details.
Noam Chomsky does SERIOUS analysis of media filters in “Manufacturing Consent”, and Michael Parenti is worth reading and listening to in “Inventing Reality”. Both are considered on the left.
There are also filters that come about because, ultimately, there are intelligence and other secretive agencies that have placed agents amongst their ranks, and $$ in their coffers, and they want to steer the public away from certain areas. See archived versions of leftgatekeepers.com, at the wayback machine. You have to go back a few years.
Breitbart does gatekeeping of its own. E.g., they published front page articles basically supporting Trump’s 2 bombings of Syria, because “animal Assad” had gassed his own people. This was laughable on it’s face, and violated OPCW treaty obligations, but as a destabilized or, better yet, disintegrated Syria is in Israel’s national security interest, certain “right wing” entities failed to notice this. These “right wing” entities include breitbart, Ben Shapiro, and Mark Levin. Both Shapiro and Levin are very intelligent, but when they are acting as filters, they instead appear as idiotic as some of the serial commenters on this blog. IIRC, Shapiro and maybe Levin have also supported suppression of BDS movements.
IMO right now Redditors are just being stupid by holding onto GME past Friday. There is still a short squeeze, and over 100% of GME shares are still being shorted and coming due over the next couple weeks or so. However, too much time has passed, which would have allowed hedge funds to have worked on all kinds of chicaneries behind-the-scene — including working with GameStop to issue new shares, enough to cover all the short position, and just wipe out everyone.
The most shared article on the UK Guardian is touting a book claiming Trump was an Russian asset for 40 years, cultivated for his vulnerable personality and willingness to say anti-American things. Absolutely absurd tripe.
This from the same neoliberal rag that threw Assange under the bus.
The merry-go-round is spinning wildly, isn’t it? Ever see “Strangers on a Train”? The climactic scene at the carnival? Who’d a thought we’d be living through such a thing? And yet here we are.
Dems are pretty much bewildered by the blizzard of EOs out of the (still largely empty) White House. The hostility of Dems in Congress to their “good friends” and “colleagues on the other side,” confuses even the Rs at this point. Momma’s mad, get it?
The arrogance! No wonder they want to hide under Daddy’s overcoat.
We have quite a way to go before any of this settles. The chaos will continue, now because it must. It will affect everything, no?
Better strap in if you haven’t already. The ride is getting bumpier.
Who would have thought that the scrotums of grapes are a highly coveted delicacy in America. I didn’t ever stop to think that grapes had biological genders let alone scrotums. My guess is Jake Chansley likes grape scrotums so long as they are organic, although I can’t imagine what would constitute an inorganic grape scrotum. Aren’t grape scrotums inherently organic?
Better strap in if you haven’t already. The ride is getting bumpier.
Yes, and make sure you use your bootstraps since we all apparently have them and yet most don’t use them, at least according to Ayn Rand and Uncle Milty Friedman and Joe Biden.
The red scare (the Palmer raids after WWI, the cold war after WWII followed by HUAC) comes riding on its trusty horse as the establishment faces threats from what the populace wants. Now after the challenge by the Sanders wing, the Democratic establishment has lined up with full-throated cries for blood. People who genuinely think of themselves as liberal in the good sense, who have some history as anti-war and pro-welfare, now support a bigger surveillance state and more power for the FBI and CIA.
Right-wingers fundamental rule: an accusation is always a confession.
Exactly. I just got done talking with a religious conservative who values religion above all else, who repeatedly proclaimed that climate science is a religion.
Especially amusing was that time a climate change denier told us they wouldn’t discuss their climate change denial with anybody here who they’d deemed to not be an expert in the topic.
Yeah. The utter lack of self-awareness is truly amazing. They cannot understand that they just proclaimed their layman self as being more expert than thousands of career experts.
Not to worry and not all is lost, there is still an ample supply of Fig Newtons available. Similar to Wheaties, Grape-Nuts is the breakfast of QAnon champions. They love the smell of Grape-Nuts in the morning. As much as the smell of Trump-Nuts, in fact.
Just because you’re afraid of being called a Russian asset, doesn’t mean the Clintons or even the Russians aren’t out to make you into one. I’d think it’d be smarter to accurately itemize all the things Trump did, or did not do, for or against his own country. By keeping it as factual and simple as possible, we should be able to accurately place Trump’s executive deeds overall, onto the correct position on the Overton window.
Dear Commenters: I am trying to find a post Ian wrote in which he talked about how everything we know was given to us by someone else. I’ve tried all types of searches here and can’t locate it. Thanks to anyone who can point me to the post.
Being a right winger nowadays is tough. The fascist President they worship loses. They start an insurrection, and people get soooo critical. It’s gotten so bad now right wingers don’t even want to be called right wingers. And they really don’t want to be called fascist either. At the same time, they have doubled down on the election was stolen because A) Only they are allowed to win elections and B) Black and brown people were allowed to vote. What’s up with that? You think you got problems? Just try to be a white supremacist and know that Jewish space lasers are out there trying to get you.
I want to start a pool on when Joe Biden starts losing to Trump in head-to-head matchups for the 2024 election. I’m guessing before the end of the year.
Counting on the Dems losing 80 seats in the House in 2022 and we start the impeachment in early 2023.
And speaking of fascists and Hugh and NR are always speaking of fascists and fascism so…it’s an ever present segue.
________________
When I google something political I get a set of answers that are exclusively neoD and/or rump-R/3-letter chaff intended to drown proles [without enough historical background] in a sea of deceit and lies.
When I duck-duck the same something political I get a set of answers that are vastly different, many from sources not authorized by the secret-state. Indeed, 3-letter agency approved media has to wait while more relevant sources are pushed to the front of the queue.
Kinda weird, kinda like comparing the 1960’s Friday edition of the Chicago Daily News with Pravda – English version. Yes kids, the USA had such faith in it’s people that we allowed the english version of Pravda and Investia in public libraries. Of course back then FDRism was still part of the now deceased Democratic party…and I add, the Republican party as well.
How long Duck-Deeing will be allowed to show results that differ from 3-letter agency approved media is questionable but, for now, you would be well advised to duck-dee when searching for historical data that may have present day political overtones or, when searching present day political news.
WARNING: The above message has not been approved by the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Readers are advised to disregard any information that is not directly from 3-letter agency approved media. Please see our resident minders, Hugh or NR, for the state approved interpretation of factual data not directly attributable to 3-letter agency approved media.
A congressman back in the day described mass-produced cereal as ‘little pieces of cardboard” and said that he’d be damned if he’d let these companies sell it to his constituents.
seriously, Willy? You think the Overton Window applies to Trump?!
the most salient things about Trump as a politician was that he
1.) did not seem to know much about how to make politics work in the sense of policy mechanisms and the groups and institutions organized by and around policy, and he did not know because he had never really cared nor was he curious; pushed on anything, he just responded with teh stupid.
2.) he did seem to have a great deal of basic cunning when it came to “Politics: the TeeVee Show” — he had insight and “skills” of a kind, because he had always cared about being famous and had learned a lot about that. It helped that he had few real convictions and was basically willing to say anything to a crowd and keep on rambling until he got an audience reaction. He seems to have really believed any publicity is good publicity; being talked about was all that mattered, what was said mostly did not (to him at least).
the most important revelations of the Trump era were never about Trump. Trump was always much more noise than signal. As a personality disorder in motion, he did not carry much of an ideology or a policy agenda of his own. Others with various ideological or policy or personal agendas tried to latch onto him, with varying degrees of success.
An Overton Window implies both normal political ambivalence distributed across a shared or common social “space” (elite or otherwise grouping) combined with some common eschewing of “corrupt” self-seeking (with possibly varying or contradictory views of what constitutes “corruption”).
With Trump having no strong ideology or philosophy or policy agenda, it all came down to his own corruption and tolerance for corrupt associates. The weird and revealing thing about the political discourse in opposition to Trump was how it twisted itself out of shape to seemingly avoid an effective attack on Trump’s affinity for corruption. “Corruption” overlaid on the Overton Window should be one-part “everyone agrees this is bad” and one-part private definitions convenient to one side or faction.
We got some of that with controversy over electoral manipulation, with both Parties pursuing the means of corrupting voting processes and calling the legitimacy of elections into question, but in different ways. But notice how the pre-requisites of an Overton Window bounding acceptable discourse were being undermined as corruption became normal and neither Party was willing to embrace electoral integrity, even cynically, let alone agree with the opposition on even nominal reform.
Foreign policy was another area where the impossibility of an Overton Window was shown. Trump, weak and ineffectual, occasionally showed a reluctance to start a war or continue a costly occupation or even pretend that perpetual war was a sensible policy. He would be attacked and ridiculed from all sides. Trump’s belligerant buffoonery did confuse many, but politicians, pundits, the Blob, military and intelligence agency officials were always unanimous in closing out the possibility of a settlement or withdrawal pretty much anywhere.
do you have some egregious examples for illustration purposes.
i have certainly experienced frustration trying to get Google to cough up political history.
If I am trying to workaround an issue in Windows 10, Google will happily put a Q&A from 2011 top of the page, but try to find a famous quote from, say, Al Gore circa 2003 and forget about it.
The difference is one almost of tone, but very definite and not at all subtle. I seem to get many of the same sources as links, but on Google almost all the synopses on the first page of results run to the same side of the question.
Google no doubt knows me as a Dem and a leftish — my email for comments is a gmail address and the same email is linked to a WordPress account and avatar I have used for many years. Of course, one would think they would also know of my ambivalence concerning the Congressional Dems.
“I’ve also come across a couple of “climate change” proponents, who sort of spoke to my comments, but didn’t actually show evidence that they had read them for meaning, as they gave seemingly intelligent comments (not necessarily true ones, though) to something I obviously hadn’t said. I had the impression that they were humans, who were working from essentially a set of climate talking points, that they misapplied, because they were either lazy, or else ignorant, but eager to
earn some sort of pay, anyway. Al Gore had some sort of app for info-warriors, for correcting us so-called “climate change deniers”, but I don’t know any details.”
These people you describe sound like perfectly awful people. Or bots. Could you give us some copy-paste examples to illustrate in a detailed way the comments you are referring to? Could you name and shame some of the commenters here who did such a nasty thing to your comments?
Obamacare solidified the preeminence of “the market” in the lucrative field of healthcare. This latest usurpation of the public sector is quite maddening. I was looking around for an essay about this neoliberal takeover of our pandemic response but didn’t find any. If you’re interested, here’s some info I’ve dug up.
In 1982 “The Social Transformation of American Medicine,” presciently forewarned that this reprivatization would “accelerate the movement toward an entirely new system of corporate medical enterprise”.
via KTLA:
“Health insurance giant Blue Shield of California will be the outside administrator tasked with ramping up coronavirus vaccinations, which to date has been slow, stilted and plagued by confusion, the state health agency said in a statement Wednesday.”
When you hobble government and their ability to deal with problems, you lend credence to the claim that private business can do things better and more efficiently. When you starve the government’s delivery system for heath response, shit happens. California allocated $3.4 billion — about 2.8 percent of its $119 billion budget — for the public health agency in its 2009-2010 financial blueprint. A decade later, Newsom allotted the same amount of money, now 1.5 percent, in his current $215 billion budget.
From Neoliberal Capitalism and the Evolution of the U.S. Healthcare System:
We know ten people who have had it. Three have died, one yesterday. All of those who died were in their 80s; most of those we know who had it but lived were in their 20s and 30s.
Ms. Ché has had her first vaccination. Myself, not yet.
My pulmonologist told me on Thursday that the last 2 1/2 months have been hell for her as she treats Covid and ICU patients and she’s never seen anything like it. Thankfully, the worst seems to be in the past. She says the vaccines are making a definite difference.
Re: Propaganda
Sometimes TG gives off distinct “Peter” vibes (some may remember the “Peters” from way back when.) It’s the same sort of pro-Trump, Trump-can’t-fail can only be failed, Trump must be protected at all costs nonsense that we encountered (over and over again) c.2015-2016.
Re: Rs and mania
Looks like state parties have decided to go all in with Trump and the insurrectionists. OK then.
Power is a strong narcotic, and they sense their power now and in the future is to be found on the margins, the fringes of politics. In revolt. Wish I could say they’re wrong.
In the mean time, the Republican Party as such is in its death throes. Will political parties as we’ve known them survive this period? If not, what will replace them?
“These people you describe sound like perfectly awful people. Or bots. Could you give us some copy-paste examples to illustrate in a detailed way the comments you are referring to? Could you name and shame some of the commenters here who did such a nasty thing to your comments?”
No, I can’t. The specific references to commenters who would make seemingly intelligent replies, to a comment I never wrote, was about other blogs. Primarily, if not exclusively, firedoglake. I think the diaries that were transplanted from fdl to shadowproof didn’t carry over the comments, so it’s not like I can go trawling for them, even if I was so inclined.
BTW, on the slack channel for progressive coders network, somebody talked about work on a bot that would waste conservatives’ time. At least when I was involved with it, this was the only project of theirs that I thought was unethical. It’s an easy transition to make a bot that posts hateful comments. Some of the low investment spew one finds amongst breitbart commenters might well be the working of bots, or maybe a semi-automated process.
You can see the sorts of project done under the auspices of prog coders network at: http://www.progcode.org/#projects, though their ‘more projects’ link is broken. Hmmmm.
Well, for all I know, metamars could be exactly correct. If he offers all the relevant quotes from various threads on this blog . . . and offers his relevant comments to which these other comments he alludes to were replying . . . . and if he offers a detailed forensic analysis of his quotes and their quotes to explain in linear step-by-step detail how the quotes demonstrate what he is accusing some commenters of . . . . then I will take the time to skim-read his piece, and if it seems on point, I will take more time and read it more thoroughly.
And as to the charge that some of the commenters were being paid by Gore or the Gore Group . . . if he can show copies of checks signed by Gore to these people, or if he can show their invoices to the Gore group for trolling services rendered; then I will have to believe that, too.
Oh look. Peter Strzok – the guy who started the RussiaGate bullshit about Trump – you’ll be surprised to learn that his wife was just promoted over at the SEC Reward for a job well done?
Back to survival and gardening. I have been reading the permies.com forums again, still not totally happy with them (a lot of wishful thinking plus antisocial types, and the average knowledge isn’t particular deep, but it’s good resources to research specific topics.
After years of avoiding youtube, I was helping my parents set up YouTube on their SmartTV the other week and found a couple channels that I really liked. One is Fraser Valley Rose Farm, which covers plant propagation very quickly and clearly. Another is Charles Dowding’s no till channel. He has a couple ideas that I’m going to try on a weedy patch (or rather, extremely exuberant beebalm growth) this spring. I am no till in my community garden plots and has significant less weed pressure than just about all other plots (except one neighbor who is a combo no till with sensible weed management. It’s amazing that people still rototill every spring and then let weeds overgrow their plot during the summer, and will end up with hardpan underneath in a couple years.
“Take a bow “liberals”, “pregressives” and “lefties” your media-manufactured hatred is being harnessed to destroy everything you claim to care about..while you clap politely.”
Over the past four years bootlicking authoritarians who, in an ironical twist, call themselves “liberals”, “pregressives” and “lefties” joined hands with the National Security State [NSS]. Today “liberals”, “pregressives” and “lefties” pretend not to have been used…the same way they pretended that Obama was an enlightened soul as he repeatedly waged wars of aggression, was a cheerleader the biggest upward theft of wealth and codified Bush [the 2nd] worst [NSS] excesses into law. And yeah, compared to the crimes of the Bush/Obama administration [singular intended], the Trump Administration was saintly. And yeah, I get it, our nation’s elitist-courtiers [and the wannabees] prefer having a high level sociopath inflicting our empires cruelties…with a soothing voice and demeanor. The Bush/Obama administration was the worst [and apparently unrecoverable] in US history. It disgusts me to listen to “liberals”, “pregressives” and “lefties” whitewash the 16 years between 2000-2016 using Trump as the whipping boy for the faults that are clearly those of the Bush/Obama administration [singular intended].
WARNING: This message contains content that has not been approved by your Ministry of Public Enlightenment; until further notice, refrain from reading/understanding it’s contents. Please remember to EXCLUSIVELY use our extensive network of media outlets to inform yourself of all your thoughts & opinions. Remember, it’s your duty as a quisling lickspittle, to report ALL thoughts and ideas outside of our strictly enforced guidelines to your nearest media control center. Be assured, we, at the Ministry of Public Enlightenment already know the fall of every sparrow but remember, your abject unquestioning obedience to power is the surest path to a higher status life.
Trump has lost most of his impeachment defense team. In one way, Trump doesn’t need them. He can just bank on the cowardice of Republicans to assure he won’t be convicted. One prospective defense/justification/CYA I’ve heard from some of these Republicans is that they don’t want to establish a precedent for impeaching someone after they are out of office. This is funny. First, it is factually wrong. In the 1876 impeachment of William Belknap, Grant’s Secretary of War, he was impeached and tried after he had resigned and out of office. Second, the idea of Republicans or a lot of Democrats for that matter standing on principle is laughable. And third, precedent? Anyone remember Mitch McConnell’s “Let the voters decide” in denying a vote on Obama’s choice for Supreme Court Justice 8 months before the 2016 election and then turning around and doing the exact opposite, rushing through Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination a week before the 2020 election?
Meanwhile ten “moderate” “Let them eat dust” Senators, led by the odiously unctuous Susan Collins, are countering Biden’s $1.9 trillion covid relief plan with a $600 billion plan of their own. These are prime examples of why bipartisanship is a sick, vicious joke.
In my haste to bang out a comment, clarity does tend to become an issue.
accurately place Trump’s executive deeds overall, onto the correct position on the Overton window
should be
“accurately place the sum total of Trump’s presidential excrement correctly on the Communist
Fascist spectrum scale.”
My bad. I was thinking of all the swamp creatures Trump had hired. Then fired then hired and fired and hired then quit. Somewhere in all that mess, were many judges who are pretty conservative, and many secretaries in fields like education, environment, labor who worked hard to conservatize/devolve those institutions. Trump’s hallmark legislation was of course that tax cut for the wealthy at the expense of the not wealthy. His hallmark action was attempting a coup with supplicants so loyal they made Thulsa Doom’s look like Jimmy Carter’s.
As you remember, after Doom got ousted, proving his mortality, his people methodically extinguished all their torches and quietly left to proceed with the rest of their lives. All that’s happened to Trump’s supplicants after his ousting was that most of em just kept following each other around in circles like broken robot toys. Now that’s brainwashing! Every single Trumpist I’ve seen in videos hates “the left”, the media, and especially antifa. Seems pretty fascist to me.
Thank you for taking the time to reply to my comment. Global warming concernists should not have to resort to botting or other bad practices. If our understanding of earth-surfacesphere processes is correct, then events will keep unfolding as predicted. If so, the increasingly-proven predictive power of “warmism” will win more support for “warmist theory”.
If not, then “warmism” will lose support and then interest, and other theories will be crafted and tested.
@Astrid,
When various venues open back up in our post-covid future ( if there is one), then I will have more computer screen-time at these venues and I can do my part in posting survival valuable information here on our informal ” Survival Saturday in-the-making”. In the meantime, I have seen some of the discussions and entries on parts of “permies” and while some are superficial, if they inspire or increase interest in people who did not have it before, they may open a gateway for some of those people to move on to better deeper more granularly detailed information. So the “permies” site is a good thing.
Here is an interesting post from a site called ” Permaculture Reflections”. It is called
“Top 10 Fuel Trees for Zone 5 and Above
Your best firewood choices”
and here is the link.
Given your level of knowledge and sense of the value of sites and sources, you will be able to decide if this site gives better deeper information and detail than some of what you found lacking at Permies. If it does, then good. If it does not, then I tried anyway.
“If our understanding of earth-surfacesphere processes is correct, then events will keep unfolding as predicted. If so, the increasingly-proven predictive power of “warmism” will win more support for “warmist theory”.”
They don’t give out Nobel Prizes in physics for quantitative theories that are only qualitatively ‘correct’. In fact, the most accurate IPCC GCM models are out of Russia, which predict the least amount of warming. So, if a climate model scientist gets the Nobel prize, it’ll be the Russian dudes. From Patrick Michaels on thehill.com:
But one of the models actually works. According to University of Alabama’s John Christy and his colleagues, only the Russian model, designated INM-CM4, gets things right. So why not weight heavily on the model that is working? Perhaps because it has less global warming in it than all the other U.N. models?
Its successor, INM-CM5, is so good that it is the only one that diagnoses the “pause” in warming from 2002 to 2014. That the “pause” was real is obvious in the global surface temperature record that the that the IPCC relies upon most heavily, from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
If you don’t know that, you are likely partly a victim of deceptive propaganda.
Having said that, if Obama can get a peace prize for basically nothing, then all bets are off.
BTW, I spoke to Patrick Michaels about the Russian models, and asked him what was different about them. He said something along the lines of using higher heat capacities for the oceans.
I beg to differ. While this may be an OK proxy for real physical effects, the heat capacity of water is accurately measured, in laboratory settings.
The real physical effects the Russians have sort of finessed, I believe, is heating FROM BELOW. Why else would be see ocean levels rise more or less steadily, even during multi-year periods of global cooling? The surface may be cooling, but if the oceans are rising, than sub-surface is a different story.
iceagenow.info has carried posts about underseas volcanism being underestimated. I don’t want to search for them, but have at it. I’ll just note, with amusement, that so-called “climate change deniers” who have made GCM and non-GCM models ignore subterranean sources of heat, just like the crackpot true blue believers in catastrophism.
At the very least, the Russian specific heat estimations should be investigated. Maybe they have, but I’ve no knowledge of that.
I did not like Trump’s tax bill because it took away my most important deductions [GSA-schedule per diem by zip-code]. When I work a contract in a different state I can no longer deduct the expenses, hotel/lodging, restaurant-meals etc. All these extra work related expenses are now mine to bear under Trump’s tax policy.
That said, this is written by somebody that can’t handle numbers and/or reality:
“Trump’s hallmark legislation was of course that tax cut for the wealthy at the expense of the not wealthy” – Willey
Briefly:
“[The] reason high earners share of the tax burden increased is that the TCJA reduced the itemized deductions they were able to claim. High earners generally benefit more from itemizing deductions. Lower earners generally benefit more from the standard deduction.
In total, the TCJA cut the amount taxpayers claimed for itemized deduction in half from $1.3 trillion in 2017 to about $650 billion in 2018.
The TCJA’s elimination of the deduction for state and local taxes (SALT) alone was responsible for $240 billion or 37 percent of that decrease. The SALT deduction primarily benefits high earners in high tax blue states. Despite claiming that he wants to increase taxes on high earners, Biden supports restoring the SALT deduction — which would reduce them.”
There was no pause in global warming from 2002-2014. The top several hundred feet of a hundred million square miles of ocean kept right on taking in heat and warming right along. Glaciers and ice fields and ice-cap edges kept right on melting. It takes net-heat input to melt ice features like that. And that’s what those ice features got and that’s what they did in response.
I don’t care about who gets or doesn’t get a Nobel Prize. I care about who predicts or doesn’t predict the trend of events. And so far the warmists have predicted the ongoing trend of events.
Those Russian predictors predicted wrong. They can pretend to be right by ignoring the heat buildup in the ocean top layers and the ongoing meltback of surfacespheric ice features during that 2002-2014 period. I am not impressed with their sophistry.
Did they predict the ongoing thawdown of the permafrost or the opening up of those crater sinkholes all over Siberia? A lot of Russian money is tied up in Arctic Infrastructure and the Build Environment. They have a lot of money at stake in getting their predictions right. Let Darwin decide if that Russian model you cite is the best or not. And let Darwin judge people by what model and set of predictions they choose to accept and base their future planning and actions upon.
I’ve long since retired from arguing, or attempting to argue, actual science of climate science. I could spend a few hours, or even a few days, ripping apart your claims, but why bother? It’s really not worth it, to me, and I’m sorry I invested so much time this subject years ago, even if it was fascinating from both a scientific and psychological POV. If somebody wants to debate these things in detail, you can probably get takers in the comment sections of wattsupwiththat.com and judithcurry.com.
Similarly, I don’t invest any significant amount of time delving into research reports on therapeutics against covid. Hydroxychloroquine/ivermectin/vitamin D/etc. deniers aren’t interested in facts and honest debate, and, in general, neither are CO2 catastrophists. I did delve into specific papers this past years, and correct some people here, but I’ve more pressing things to do, nowadays.
I have some references to climate change in my vanity sub-reddit bad_science_culture. One of them listed is a book by Dr. Tim Ball, “The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science”. That is a good place to start, to grasp what I am getting at by “meta science” and “bad science culture”.
If I WAS to consider climate debates worth my time, in any significant way, I’d first try to judge the rationality and honesty of who I was debating. So, they’d have to pass sanity tests regarding what I call “meta-science”. If they either can’t grasp, or else pretend otherwise, that the human institutions, group sociological dynamics, financial and career pressures don’t influence what even working scientists (who should know better than clueless and lazy journalists, e.g.) say about their field, well, there’s no point “casting pearls to the(se) pigs”. They’re simply not interested in the truth, for any number of possible reasons.
Having said that, if you want to amuse us, why don’t you tell us precisely WHICH IPCC GCM’s have been updated to account for “The top several hundred feet of a hundred million square miles of ocean kept right on taking in heat and warming right along.”, and whether or not these corrected models subsequently made more accurate predictions/postdictions of surface temperatures than INM-CM5. I’ve read claims by Hanson saying “I was right, all along”, but never saw any QUANTITATIVE demonstration of this. I was left with the impression that he was just hand-waving.
Actually, before you do that, why don’t you write something that demonstrates that you know the difference between a quantitative prediction, and a qualitative one. If you can’t pass that sanity test, don’t bother posting about a superior model to INM-CM5, unless you provide references. (Though you should provide references, anyway, if you want me to take your claim seriously.)
I take my claim seriously and I don’t care whether you personally take my claim seriously or not.
You will make your personal life-plans and preparations based on what you think is real, and I will make my personal life-plans and preparations based on what I think is real. And let Darwin take the hindmost.
I’m glad that you have such a wonderful self esteem that you think you’re worth anybody’s time with that ridiculous ask, while not actually responding to any of the substance of a pretty substantive direct response to your query. Excellent bit of bad faith argumentation on display.
If you’re in fact the bot built to drive liberals to the edge of sanity ( and beyond), as I always suspected you to be, I must applaude them for doing an excellent job this day!
I have stated, unequivocally, that the most accurate IPCC climate models are the Russian ones. different clue says “Those Russian predictors predicted wrong.”
Allow me to clarify, though I don’t think it should be necessary.
I have stated, unequivocally, the that most accurate IPCC climate models are the Russian ones, AND THESE ARE QUANTITATIVE MODELS, AS ARE THE REST OF THE IPCC GCM MODELS. different clue says “Those Russian predictors predicted wrong”. I take this to mean that different clue believes that there are other, non-Russian IPCC QUANTITATIVE MODELS which are actually more accurate. (Presumably, having been corrected by data reflecting “The top several hundred feet of a hundred million square miles of ocean kept right on taking in heat and warming right along.”)
This would flatly contradict the graphs of said models, graphed in the same plot, that I saw presented by Patrick Michaels in a debate in NJ I attended, say about 2 years ago. Ah, but perhaps different clue is not blowing smoke, but actually knows what he’s talking about. Perhaps there has been a development in the last 2 years supporting his claim. Or perhaps Michaels’s plot was fraudulent, or mistaken. I.e., it was never true.
Perhaps quite a few things have resulted in me getting this wrong.
So, different clue was invited to post the SPECIFIC IPCC model which is more accurate than the Russian one, with references, if he wants me to take him seriously.
He has so far failed to do so. So, I am not taking him seriously, and he doesn’t seem to care about that.
So be it. But this exchange – so far, anyway – underscores why it’s pointless to try and have reasonable scientific debates with somebody who can’t, or won’t.
Patrick Michaels over 30 years started out as a climate change denier and when that became untenable, a climate change contrarian minimizing the effects of climate change. His work has been funded by the fossil fuel industry and he was a senior fellow at the libertarian Koch-funded Cato Institute. Researchers in the field, including James Hansen, have said he cherrypicked and misrepresented their work to the point of fraud.
I am fairly competent that other clowns in the climate change clown car, who comment in this blog, will similarly FAIL to produce a reference to an IPCC model which is more accurate than INM-CM5. Gee whiz, we can see this FAIL spreading its tentacles, already.
The “new” Biden policy is a continuation of the Trump policy but with some lipstick, a pretty bow and…an ever increasing US Troop levelin Syria. The neoD’s on this blog ought to love the plan. And what’s not to love, as the author comments [in brackets], it’s a reprise of the 90’s early 00’s preclude to the Iraq invasion.
________________________________
1] the release of political prisoners [the US-favored ‘moderates’ no doubt, now known to be in many cases Islamist fanatics],
2] dignified reception for returning refugees [meaning no checks for returning jihadis], civilian protection [what lurks behind this elastic concept?],
3] unhindered, countrywide humanitarian access [i.e. supplying jihadi-controlled Idlib], the removal of remaining chemical weapons [here we go again! Iraq WMD redux, a tailor-made excuse to withhold sanctions relief], and political as well as security sector reforms [i.e., pave the way for regime change], including good-faith participation in the U.N.’s Geneva process and greater decentralization [partition].
metamars, you are making a fundamental error. You can drop INM-CM5 like some talisman, but it is just a model. The model needs to match the data before it is much use for prediction. One main measure of climate change is GMST (global mean surface temperature). There are complications with this. First, modern historical records only go back to about 1850. Second, increases in the GMST are not nicely linear. There was a period of stabilization in it from 1950-1970, a period of rapid increase from 1980-2000, and another period of stabilization from 2000-2014. The previous model CM4 showed a period of too gradual a rise in GMST from 1950-2014. So the current CM5 model does a better job at describing these changes. CM5 does somewhat less well describing the loss of Arctic ice, and longer-term temperature oscillations in the Atlantic and Pacific seem outside its scope.
Well, to further clarify, the Russian models are the most accurate in terms of global temperature. The graph that I saw plotted the global temperature pre/post-dictions of the various IPCC models against each other.
Feel free to educate us as to whether there is any IPCC model which has more accurately predicted global temperature than the Russian ones; and which one or ones they specifically are.
When I Duckduck searched up “Russians climate change” I got endless pages of articles about permafrost, methane, effects, mandates, etc, etc. and a couple of articles about how Russia is going to come out ahead because of the increased agriculture and arctic sea ports going ice free.
So I switched to Google and found even more of the same kind of tripe. Does anybody know of a search engine where my confirmation bias can be more accurately supported?
Thomas Golladay
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2021/01/28/youtube-deletes-videos-of-senate-hearing-from-sen-ron-johnsons-channel/
Rumble by the way is the new alternative to Youtube minus censorship and they only take a 10% cut unlike youtube’s 30% cut thus as it grows, is userbase will be richer compared to youtube’s. They don’t have livestream or video purchase yet, but as youtube squeezes, it will just become another movie streaming service while content creators go to Rumble, Locals, and Gab which don’t rape them.
Big Tech is dying and is bringing down the system with it. Short sell them. They deserve to be wrecked after helping steal the election and preventing people from hearing about early treatment options for Covid-19.
Open source, block chain, and crypto is how we bring the Establishment down and bury those warmongering bastards in an unmarked grave where no one will care about them.
Willy
Isn’t Breitbart funded by the Mercers? I thought Robert made most of his money as a hedge fund manager. And then the other guy, Solov, wants the government to regulate big tech because he thinks they’re being mean to Breitbart. Sounds like yet another episode of Conservative Frankenstein, where the monster is only bad when it tries to eat its creator.
NR
Willy,
Expecting right-wingers to have any honesty or consistency is foolish. When dealing with right-wingers, always remember one fundamental rule: an accusation is always a confession. When right-wingers accuse someone else of doing something bad, there is a 100% chance that they are doing that very same thing themselves.
NR
And by the way, the right’s new darling in Congress believes that the California wildfires were started by Jewish space lasers:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/marjorie-taylor-greene-qanon-wildfires-space-laser-rothschild-execute.html
The American right is completely batshit insane.
metamars
People who divide media outlets and talking heads into 2 or 3 boxes, one of which is “right wing”, are ignoramuses in this area, at best. Their persistence suggests they are more nefarious than this – either fanatics, or unpaid shills, or paid shills. Well, nowadays, we could also assume the possibility of a bot.
I’ve also come across a couple of “climate change” proponents, who sort of spoke to my comments, but didn’t actually show evidence that they had read them for meaning, as they gave seemingly intelligent comments (not necessarily true ones, though) to something I obviously hadn’t said. I had the impression that they were humans, who were working from essentially a set of climate talking points, that they misapplied, because they were either lazy, or else ignorant, but eager to earn some sort of pay, anyway. Al Gore had some sort of app for info-warriors, for correcting us so-called “climate change deniers”, but I don’t know any details.
Noam Chomsky does SERIOUS analysis of media filters in “Manufacturing Consent”, and Michael Parenti is worth reading and listening to in “Inventing Reality”. Both are considered on the left.
There are also filters that come about because, ultimately, there are intelligence and other secretive agencies that have placed agents amongst their ranks, and $$ in their coffers, and they want to steer the public away from certain areas. See archived versions of leftgatekeepers.com, at the wayback machine. You have to go back a few years.
Breitbart does gatekeeping of its own. E.g., they published front page articles basically supporting Trump’s 2 bombings of Syria, because “animal Assad” had gassed his own people. This was laughable on it’s face, and violated OPCW treaty obligations, but as a destabilized or, better yet, disintegrated Syria is in Israel’s national security interest, certain “right wing” entities failed to notice this. These “right wing” entities include breitbart, Ben Shapiro, and Mark Levin. Both Shapiro and Levin are very intelligent, but when they are acting as filters, they instead appear as idiotic as some of the serial commenters on this blog. IIRC, Shapiro and maybe Levin have also supported suppression of BDS movements.
KT Chong
IMO right now Redditors are just being stupid by holding onto GME past Friday. There is still a short squeeze, and over 100% of GME shares are still being shorted and coming due over the next couple weeks or so. However, too much time has passed, which would have allowed hedge funds to have worked on all kinds of chicaneries behind-the-scene — including working with GameStop to issue new shares, enough to cover all the short position, and just wipe out everyone.
bruce wilder
The most shared article on the UK Guardian is touting a book claiming Trump was an Russian asset for 40 years, cultivated for his vulnerable personality and willingness to say anti-American things. Absolutely absurd tripe.
This from the same neoliberal rag that threw Assange under the bus.
Ché Pasa
The merry-go-round is spinning wildly, isn’t it? Ever see “Strangers on a Train”? The climactic scene at the carnival? Who’d a thought we’d be living through such a thing? And yet here we are.
Dems are pretty much bewildered by the blizzard of EOs out of the (still largely empty) White House. The hostility of Dems in Congress to their “good friends” and “colleagues on the other side,” confuses even the Rs at this point. Momma’s mad, get it?
The arrogance! No wonder they want to hide under Daddy’s overcoat.
We have quite a way to go before any of this settles. The chaos will continue, now because it must. It will affect everything, no?
Better strap in if you haven’t already. The ride is getting bumpier.
Stirling S Newberry
No #Grapenuts ah well.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/business/grape-nuts-shortage.html
Plague Species
Who would have thought that the scrotums of grapes are a highly coveted delicacy in America. I didn’t ever stop to think that grapes had biological genders let alone scrotums. My guess is Jake Chansley likes grape scrotums so long as they are organic, although I can’t imagine what would constitute an inorganic grape scrotum. Aren’t grape scrotums inherently organic?
Plague Species
Yes, and make sure you use your bootstraps since we all apparently have them and yet most don’t use them, at least according to Ayn Rand and Uncle Milty Friedman and Joe Biden.
nihil obstet
The red scare (the Palmer raids after WWI, the cold war after WWII followed by HUAC) comes riding on its trusty horse as the establishment faces threats from what the populace wants. Now after the challenge by the Sanders wing, the Democratic establishment has lined up with full-throated cries for blood. People who genuinely think of themselves as liberal in the good sense, who have some history as anti-war and pro-welfare, now support a bigger surveillance state and more power for the FBI and CIA.
Willy
Right-wingers fundamental rule: an accusation is always a confession.
Exactly. I just got done talking with a religious conservative who values religion above all else, who repeatedly proclaimed that climate science is a religion.
Especially amusing was that time a climate change denier told us they wouldn’t discuss their climate change denial with anybody here who they’d deemed to not be an expert in the topic.
Yeah. The utter lack of self-awareness is truly amazing. They cannot understand that they just proclaimed their layman self as being more expert than thousands of career experts.
Plague Species
Not to worry and not all is lost, there is still an ample supply of Fig Newtons available. Similar to Wheaties, Grape-Nuts is the breakfast of QAnon champions. They love the smell of Grape-Nuts in the morning. As much as the smell of Trump-Nuts, in fact.
Willy
Just because you’re afraid of being called a Russian asset, doesn’t mean the Clintons or even the Russians aren’t out to make you into one. I’d think it’d be smarter to accurately itemize all the things Trump did, or did not do, for or against his own country. By keeping it as factual and simple as possible, we should be able to accurately place Trump’s executive deeds overall, onto the correct position on the Overton window.
Preston
Dear Commenters: I am trying to find a post Ian wrote in which he talked about how everything we know was given to us by someone else. I’ve tried all types of searches here and can’t locate it. Thanks to anyone who can point me to the post.
Hugh
Being a right winger nowadays is tough. The fascist President they worship loses. They start an insurrection, and people get soooo critical. It’s gotten so bad now right wingers don’t even want to be called right wingers. And they really don’t want to be called fascist either. At the same time, they have doubled down on the election was stolen because A) Only they are allowed to win elections and B) Black and brown people were allowed to vote. What’s up with that? You think you got problems? Just try to be a white supremacist and know that Jewish space lasers are out there trying to get you.
edmondo
I want to start a pool on when Joe Biden starts losing to Trump in head-to-head matchups for the 2024 election. I’m guessing before the end of the year.
Counting on the Dems losing 80 seats in the House in 2022 and we start the impeachment in early 2023.
S Brennan
And speaking of fascists and Hugh and NR are always speaking of fascists and fascism so…it’s an ever present segue.
________________
When I google something political I get a set of answers that are exclusively neoD and/or rump-R/3-letter chaff intended to drown proles [without enough historical background] in a sea of deceit and lies.
When I duck-duck the same something political I get a set of answers that are vastly different, many from sources not authorized by the secret-state. Indeed, 3-letter agency approved media has to wait while more relevant sources are pushed to the front of the queue.
Kinda weird, kinda like comparing the 1960’s Friday edition of the Chicago Daily News with Pravda – English version. Yes kids, the USA had such faith in it’s people that we allowed the english version of Pravda and Investia in public libraries. Of course back then FDRism was still part of the now deceased Democratic party…and I add, the Republican party as well.
How long Duck-Deeing will be allowed to show results that differ from 3-letter agency approved media is questionable but, for now, you would be well advised to duck-dee when searching for historical data that may have present day political overtones or, when searching present day political news.
WARNING: The above message has not been approved by the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Readers are advised to disregard any information that is not directly from 3-letter agency approved media. Please see our resident minders, Hugh or NR, for the state approved interpretation of factual data not directly attributable to 3-letter agency approved media.
Tiny Pebbles with Milk for Breakfast
A congressman back in the day described mass-produced cereal as ‘little pieces of cardboard” and said that he’d be damned if he’d let these companies sell it to his constituents.
bruce wilder
seriously, Willy? You think the Overton Window applies to Trump?!
the most salient things about Trump as a politician was that he
1.) did not seem to know much about how to make politics work in the sense of policy mechanisms and the groups and institutions organized by and around policy, and he did not know because he had never really cared nor was he curious; pushed on anything, he just responded with teh stupid.
2.) he did seem to have a great deal of basic cunning when it came to “Politics: the TeeVee Show” — he had insight and “skills” of a kind, because he had always cared about being famous and had learned a lot about that. It helped that he had few real convictions and was basically willing to say anything to a crowd and keep on rambling until he got an audience reaction. He seems to have really believed any publicity is good publicity; being talked about was all that mattered, what was said mostly did not (to him at least).
the most important revelations of the Trump era were never about Trump. Trump was always much more noise than signal. As a personality disorder in motion, he did not carry much of an ideology or a policy agenda of his own. Others with various ideological or policy or personal agendas tried to latch onto him, with varying degrees of success.
An Overton Window implies both normal political ambivalence distributed across a shared or common social “space” (elite or otherwise grouping) combined with some common eschewing of “corrupt” self-seeking (with possibly varying or contradictory views of what constitutes “corruption”).
With Trump having no strong ideology or philosophy or policy agenda, it all came down to his own corruption and tolerance for corrupt associates. The weird and revealing thing about the political discourse in opposition to Trump was how it twisted itself out of shape to seemingly avoid an effective attack on Trump’s affinity for corruption. “Corruption” overlaid on the Overton Window should be one-part “everyone agrees this is bad” and one-part private definitions convenient to one side or faction.
We got some of that with controversy over electoral manipulation, with both Parties pursuing the means of corrupting voting processes and calling the legitimacy of elections into question, but in different ways. But notice how the pre-requisites of an Overton Window bounding acceptable discourse were being undermined as corruption became normal and neither Party was willing to embrace electoral integrity, even cynically, let alone agree with the opposition on even nominal reform.
Foreign policy was another area where the impossibility of an Overton Window was shown. Trump, weak and ineffectual, occasionally showed a reluctance to start a war or continue a costly occupation or even pretend that perpetual war was a sensible policy. He would be attacked and ridiculed from all sides. Trump’s belligerant buffoonery did confuse many, but politicians, pundits, the Blob, military and intelligence agency officials were always unanimous in closing out the possibility of a settlement or withdrawal pretty much anywhere.
bruce wilder
@ S Brennan
do you have some egregious examples for illustration purposes.
i have certainly experienced frustration trying to get Google to cough up political history.
If I am trying to workaround an issue in Windows 10, Google will happily put a Q&A from 2011 top of the page, but try to find a famous quote from, say, Al Gore circa 2003 and forget about it.
S Brennan
Try:
Impeachment of Trump after he has left office
bruce wilder
Re: search
The difference is one almost of tone, but very definite and not at all subtle. I seem to get many of the same sources as links, but on Google almost all the synopses on the first page of results run to the same side of the question.
Google no doubt knows me as a Dem and a leftish — my email for comments is a gmail address and the same email is linked to a WordPress account and avatar I have used for many years. Of course, one would think they would also know of my ambivalence concerning the Congressional Dems.
Joan
@Preston, I remember reading that post but I can’t find it either.
bruce wilder
Perhaps not as you remember it
https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-perversion-and-senesence-of-great-ideas/
bruce wilder
Also, not as you remember it
https://www.ianwelsh.net/how-we-are-conditioned-to-be-slaves/
different clue
@metamars,
When you say . . .
“I’ve also come across a couple of “climate change” proponents, who sort of spoke to my comments, but didn’t actually show evidence that they had read them for meaning, as they gave seemingly intelligent comments (not necessarily true ones, though) to something I obviously hadn’t said. I had the impression that they were humans, who were working from essentially a set of climate talking points, that they misapplied, because they were either lazy, or else ignorant, but eager to
earn some sort of pay, anyway. Al Gore had some sort of app for info-warriors, for correcting us so-called “climate change deniers”, but I don’t know any details.”
These people you describe sound like perfectly awful people. Or bots. Could you give us some copy-paste examples to illustrate in a detailed way the comments you are referring to? Could you name and shame some of the commenters here who did such a nasty thing to your comments?
different clue
@bruce wilder,
Trump just had fun throwing bricks through the Overton Window.
rangoon78
Obamacare solidified the preeminence of “the market” in the lucrative field of healthcare. This latest usurpation of the public sector is quite maddening. I was looking around for an essay about this neoliberal takeover of our pandemic response but didn’t find any. If you’re interested, here’s some info I’ve dug up.
In 1982 “The Social Transformation of American Medicine,” presciently forewarned that this reprivatization would “accelerate the movement toward an entirely new system of corporate medical enterprise”.
https://read.dukeupress.edu/jhppl/article/44/5/812/139046/The-Social-Transformation-of-American-Medicine-The
via KTLA:
“Health insurance giant Blue Shield of California will be the outside administrator tasked with ramping up coronavirus vaccinations, which to date has been slow, stilted and plagued by confusion, the state health agency said in a statement Wednesday.”
When you hobble government and their ability to deal with problems, you lend credence to the claim that private business can do things better and more efficiently. When you starve the government’s delivery system for heath response, shit happens. California allocated $3.4 billion — about 2.8 percent of its $119 billion budget — for the public health agency in its 2009-2010 financial blueprint. A decade later, Newsom allotted the same amount of money, now 1.5 percent, in his current $215 billion budget.
From Neoliberal Capitalism and the Evolution of the U.S. Healthcare System:
Further reading: 12-18-2020
Neoliberal Capitalism and the Evolution of the U.S. Healthcare System
Samantha Sterba
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3071&context=dissertations_2
—————
https://ktla.com/news/california/blue-shield-of-california-tasked-with-ramping-up-states-coronavirus-vaccine-delivery-system/ https://www.sacbee.com/news/coronavirus/article241237666.html
rangoon78
“When this whole thing starts to resolve, we need to stop and look at our public health infrastructure and decide where we need to invest to protect us from the inevitable next time.”
https://www.sacbee.com/news/coronavirus/article241237666.html
“Through fiscal cutbacks and structural changes, Reagan’s federalism assaulted the ethos of public health.“
https://read.dukeupress.edu/jhppl/article-abstract/18/4/821/28023/Restructuring-Federalism-The-Impact-of-Reagan
After 8 years of Reagan: Remington cited AIDS as an example of a threat the system was not well equipped to handle. “I think we’re going to be treated to more of the same and worse,” he said. “Who knows which environmental problem will explode next?”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1988/09/08/study-finds-public-health-system-in-disarray/68ef5fca-beb7-48ab-9f1b-c91b8e6190f1/
Ché Pasa
Re: Covid
We know ten people who have had it. Three have died, one yesterday. All of those who died were in their 80s; most of those we know who had it but lived were in their 20s and 30s.
Ms. Ché has had her first vaccination. Myself, not yet.
My pulmonologist told me on Thursday that the last 2 1/2 months have been hell for her as she treats Covid and ICU patients and she’s never seen anything like it. Thankfully, the worst seems to be in the past. She says the vaccines are making a definite difference.
Re: Propaganda
Sometimes TG gives off distinct “Peter” vibes (some may remember the “Peters” from way back when.) It’s the same sort of pro-Trump, Trump-can’t-fail can only be failed, Trump must be protected at all costs nonsense that we encountered (over and over again) c.2015-2016.
Re: Rs and mania
Looks like state parties have decided to go all in with Trump and the insurrectionists. OK then.
Power is a strong narcotic, and they sense their power now and in the future is to be found on the margins, the fringes of politics. In revolt. Wish I could say they’re wrong.
In the mean time, the Republican Party as such is in its death throes. Will political parties as we’ve known them survive this period? If not, what will replace them?
metamars
@different clue
“These people you describe sound like perfectly awful people. Or bots. Could you give us some copy-paste examples to illustrate in a detailed way the comments you are referring to? Could you name and shame some of the commenters here who did such a nasty thing to your comments?”
No, I can’t. The specific references to commenters who would make seemingly intelligent replies, to a comment I never wrote, was about other blogs. Primarily, if not exclusively, firedoglake. I think the diaries that were transplanted from fdl to shadowproof didn’t carry over the comments, so it’s not like I can go trawling for them, even if I was so inclined.
BTW, on the slack channel for progressive coders network, somebody talked about work on a bot that would waste conservatives’ time. At least when I was involved with it, this was the only project of theirs that I thought was unethical. It’s an easy transition to make a bot that posts hateful comments. Some of the low investment spew one finds amongst breitbart commenters might well be the working of bots, or maybe a semi-automated process.
You can see the sorts of project done under the auspices of prog coders network at: http://www.progcode.org/#projects, though their ‘more projects’ link is broken. Hmmmm.
NR
different clue,
Big Climate has all kinds of $$$ to spend on bots, dontcha know.
different clue
@NR,
Well, for all I know, metamars could be exactly correct. If he offers all the relevant quotes from various threads on this blog . . . and offers his relevant comments to which these other comments he alludes to were replying . . . . and if he offers a detailed forensic analysis of his quotes and their quotes to explain in linear step-by-step detail how the quotes demonstrate what he is accusing some commenters of . . . . then I will take the time to skim-read his piece, and if it seems on point, I will take more time and read it more thoroughly.
And as to the charge that some of the commenters were being paid by Gore or the Gore Group . . . if he can show copies of checks signed by Gore to these people, or if he can show their invoices to the Gore group for trolling services rendered; then I will have to believe that, too.
Chuck Mire
Let us, er, I mean them, prey…
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/01/29/trump-antipope-president-mar-a-lago-463238
Thomas Golladay
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1DktydhIAs&pbjreload=101&ab_channel=TheJimmyDoreShow
Big Tech is giving people the rope to hang them with. Short sell them. Gab is the future.
edmondo
Oh look. Peter Strzok – the guy who started the RussiaGate bullshit about Trump – you’ll be surprised to learn that his wife was just promoted over at the SEC Reward for a job well done?
Nothing will fundamentally change.
Plague Species
Trash to the left of me and trash to the right. Meet the perception managers. The social controllers. An unholy alliance. All of them are scum.
https://bostonreview.net/archives/BR37.2/bill_ayers_tucker_carlson_andrew_breitbart_dinner.php
Astrid
Back to survival and gardening. I have been reading the permies.com forums again, still not totally happy with them (a lot of wishful thinking plus antisocial types, and the average knowledge isn’t particular deep, but it’s good resources to research specific topics.
After years of avoiding youtube, I was helping my parents set up YouTube on their SmartTV the other week and found a couple channels that I really liked. One is Fraser Valley Rose Farm, which covers plant propagation very quickly and clearly. Another is Charles Dowding’s no till channel. He has a couple ideas that I’m going to try on a weedy patch (or rather, extremely exuberant beebalm growth) this spring. I am no till in my community garden plots and has significant less weed pressure than just about all other plots (except one neighbor who is a combo no till with sensible weed management. It’s amazing that people still rototill every spring and then let weeds overgrow their plot during the summer, and will end up with hardpan underneath in a couple years.
Jason
Living Energy Farm has some good information:
https://livingenergyfarm.org/
Cooking With Renewable Energy:
https://livingenergyfarm.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/cook4.pdf
A Chinese Biogas Manual:
https://www.tngun.com/wp-content/uploads/A-Chinese-Biogas-Manual.pdf?06fa68&06fa68
Don’t feel like writing much today. Just thought I’d pass along some info for those who might be interested.
S Brennan
To T Golladay;
Hilarious Youtube* from Jimmy Dore:
“Socialist Group Cheering Censorship Gets Banned From Facebook w/Glenn Greenwald”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1DktydhIAs&pbjreload=101&ab_channel=TheJimmyDoreShow
…as I said the other day:
“Take a bow “liberals”, “pregressives” and “lefties” your media-manufactured hatred is being harnessed to destroy everything you claim to care about..while you clap politely.”
Over the past four years bootlicking authoritarians who, in an ironical twist, call themselves “liberals”, “pregressives” and “lefties” joined hands with the National Security State [NSS]. Today “liberals”, “pregressives” and “lefties” pretend not to have been used…the same way they pretended that Obama was an enlightened soul as he repeatedly waged wars of aggression, was a cheerleader the biggest upward theft of wealth and codified Bush [the 2nd] worst [NSS] excesses into law. And yeah, compared to the crimes of the Bush/Obama administration [singular intended], the Trump Administration was saintly. And yeah, I get it, our nation’s elitist-courtiers [and the wannabees] prefer having a high level sociopath inflicting our empires cruelties…with a soothing voice and demeanor. The Bush/Obama administration was the worst [and apparently unrecoverable] in US history. It disgusts me to listen to “liberals”, “pregressives” and “lefties” whitewash the 16 years between 2000-2016 using Trump as the whipping boy for the faults that are clearly those of the Bush/Obama administration [singular intended].
WARNING: This message contains content that has not been approved by your Ministry of Public Enlightenment; until further notice, refrain from reading/understanding it’s contents. Please remember to EXCLUSIVELY use our extensive network of media outlets to inform yourself of all your thoughts & opinions. Remember, it’s your duty as a quisling lickspittle, to report ALL thoughts and ideas outside of our strictly enforced guidelines to your nearest media control center. Be assured, we, at the Ministry of Public Enlightenment already know the fall of every sparrow but remember, your abject unquestioning obedience to power is the surest path to a higher status life.
Hugh
Trump has lost most of his impeachment defense team. In one way, Trump doesn’t need them. He can just bank on the cowardice of Republicans to assure he won’t be convicted. One prospective defense/justification/CYA I’ve heard from some of these Republicans is that they don’t want to establish a precedent for impeaching someone after they are out of office. This is funny. First, it is factually wrong. In the 1876 impeachment of William Belknap, Grant’s Secretary of War, he was impeached and tried after he had resigned and out of office. Second, the idea of Republicans or a lot of Democrats for that matter standing on principle is laughable. And third, precedent? Anyone remember Mitch McConnell’s “Let the voters decide” in denying a vote on Obama’s choice for Supreme Court Justice 8 months before the 2016 election and then turning around and doing the exact opposite, rushing through Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination a week before the 2020 election?
Meanwhile ten “moderate” “Let them eat dust” Senators, led by the odiously unctuous Susan Collins, are countering Biden’s $1.9 trillion covid relief plan with a $600 billion plan of their own. These are prime examples of why bipartisanship is a sick, vicious joke.
Willy
@bruce
In my haste to bang out a comment, clarity does tend to become an issue.
accurately place Trump’s executive deeds overall, onto the correct position on the Overton window
should be
“accurately place the sum total of Trump’s presidential excrement correctly on the Communist
Fascist spectrum scale.”
My bad. I was thinking of all the swamp creatures Trump had hired. Then fired then hired and fired and hired then quit. Somewhere in all that mess, were many judges who are pretty conservative, and many secretaries in fields like education, environment, labor who worked hard to conservatize/devolve those institutions. Trump’s hallmark legislation was of course that tax cut for the wealthy at the expense of the not wealthy. His hallmark action was attempting a coup with supplicants so loyal they made Thulsa Doom’s look like Jimmy Carter’s.
As you remember, after Doom got ousted, proving his mortality, his people methodically extinguished all their torches and quietly left to proceed with the rest of their lives. All that’s happened to Trump’s supplicants after his ousting was that most of em just kept following each other around in circles like broken robot toys. Now that’s brainwashing! Every single Trumpist I’ve seen in videos hates “the left”, the media, and especially antifa. Seems pretty fascist to me.
different clue
@metamars,
Thank you for taking the time to reply to my comment. Global warming concernists should not have to resort to botting or other bad practices. If our understanding of earth-surfacesphere processes is correct, then events will keep unfolding as predicted. If so, the increasingly-proven predictive power of “warmism” will win more support for “warmist theory”.
If not, then “warmism” will lose support and then interest, and other theories will be crafted and tested.
@Astrid,
When various venues open back up in our post-covid future ( if there is one), then I will have more computer screen-time at these venues and I can do my part in posting survival valuable information here on our informal ” Survival Saturday in-the-making”. In the meantime, I have seen some of the discussions and entries on parts of “permies” and while some are superficial, if they inspire or increase interest in people who did not have it before, they may open a gateway for some of those people to move on to better deeper more granularly detailed information. So the “permies” site is a good thing.
Here is an interesting post from a site called ” Permaculture Reflections”. It is called
“Top 10 Fuel Trees for Zone 5 and Above
Your best firewood choices”
and here is the link.
https://www.permaculturereflections.com/top-10-fuel-trees-for-zone-5-and-above/
Given your level of knowledge and sense of the value of sites and sources, you will be able to decide if this site gives better deeper information and detail than some of what you found lacking at Permies. If it does, then good. If it does not, then I tried anyway.
metamars
@different clue:
“If our understanding of earth-surfacesphere processes is correct, then events will keep unfolding as predicted. If so, the increasingly-proven predictive power of “warmism” will win more support for “warmist theory”.”
They don’t give out Nobel Prizes in physics for quantitative theories that are only qualitatively ‘correct’. In fact, the most accurate IPCC GCM models are out of Russia, which predict the least amount of warming. So, if a climate model scientist gets the Nobel prize, it’ll be the Russian dudes. From Patrick Michaels on thehill.com:
If you don’t know that, you are likely partly a victim of deceptive propaganda.
Having said that, if Obama can get a peace prize for basically nothing, then all bets are off.
BTW, I spoke to Patrick Michaels about the Russian models, and asked him what was different about them. He said something along the lines of using higher heat capacities for the oceans.
I beg to differ. While this may be an OK proxy for real physical effects, the heat capacity of water is accurately measured, in laboratory settings.
The real physical effects the Russians have sort of finessed, I believe, is heating FROM BELOW. Why else would be see ocean levels rise more or less steadily, even during multi-year periods of global cooling? The surface may be cooling, but if the oceans are rising, than sub-surface is a different story.
iceagenow.info has carried posts about underseas volcanism being underestimated. I don’t want to search for them, but have at it. I’ll just note, with amusement, that so-called “climate change deniers” who have made GCM and non-GCM models ignore subterranean sources of heat, just like the crackpot true blue believers in catastrophism.
At the very least, the Russian specific heat estimations should be investigated. Maybe they have, but I’ve no knowledge of that.
S Brennan
I did not like Trump’s tax bill because it took away my most important deductions [GSA-schedule per diem by zip-code]. When I work a contract in a different state I can no longer deduct the expenses, hotel/lodging, restaurant-meals etc. All these extra work related expenses are now mine to bear under Trump’s tax policy.
That said, this is written by somebody that can’t handle numbers and/or reality:
“Trump’s hallmark legislation was of course that tax cut for the wealthy at the expense of the not wealthy” – Willey
Briefly:
“[The] reason high earners share of the tax burden increased is that the TCJA reduced the itemized deductions they were able to claim. High earners generally benefit more from itemizing deductions. Lower earners generally benefit more from the standard deduction.
In total, the TCJA cut the amount taxpayers claimed for itemized deduction in half from $1.3 trillion in 2017 to about $650 billion in 2018.
The TCJA’s elimination of the deduction for state and local taxes (SALT) alone was responsible for $240 billion or 37 percent of that decrease. The SALT deduction primarily benefits high earners in high tax blue states. Despite claiming that he wants to increase taxes on high earners, Biden supports restoring the SALT deduction — which would reduce them.”
different clue
@metamars,
There was no pause in global warming from 2002-2014. The top several hundred feet of a hundred million square miles of ocean kept right on taking in heat and warming right along. Glaciers and ice fields and ice-cap edges kept right on melting. It takes net-heat input to melt ice features like that. And that’s what those ice features got and that’s what they did in response.
I don’t care about who gets or doesn’t get a Nobel Prize. I care about who predicts or doesn’t predict the trend of events. And so far the warmists have predicted the ongoing trend of events.
Those Russian predictors predicted wrong. They can pretend to be right by ignoring the heat buildup in the ocean top layers and the ongoing meltback of surfacespheric ice features during that 2002-2014 period. I am not impressed with their sophistry.
Did they predict the ongoing thawdown of the permafrost or the opening up of those crater sinkholes all over Siberia? A lot of Russian money is tied up in Arctic Infrastructure and the Build Environment. They have a lot of money at stake in getting their predictions right. Let Darwin decide if that Russian model you cite is the best or not. And let Darwin judge people by what model and set of predictions they choose to accept and base their future planning and actions upon.
metamars
@different clue
I’ve long since retired from arguing, or attempting to argue, actual science of climate science. I could spend a few hours, or even a few days, ripping apart your claims, but why bother? It’s really not worth it, to me, and I’m sorry I invested so much time this subject years ago, even if it was fascinating from both a scientific and psychological POV. If somebody wants to debate these things in detail, you can probably get takers in the comment sections of wattsupwiththat.com and judithcurry.com.
Similarly, I don’t invest any significant amount of time delving into research reports on therapeutics against covid. Hydroxychloroquine/ivermectin/vitamin D/etc. deniers aren’t interested in facts and honest debate, and, in general, neither are CO2 catastrophists. I did delve into specific papers this past years, and correct some people here, but I’ve more pressing things to do, nowadays.
I have some references to climate change in my vanity sub-reddit bad_science_culture. One of them listed is a book by Dr. Tim Ball, “The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science”. That is a good place to start, to grasp what I am getting at by “meta science” and “bad science culture”.
If I WAS to consider climate debates worth my time, in any significant way, I’d first try to judge the rationality and honesty of who I was debating. So, they’d have to pass sanity tests regarding what I call “meta-science”. If they either can’t grasp, or else pretend otherwise, that the human institutions, group sociological dynamics, financial and career pressures don’t influence what even working scientists (who should know better than clueless and lazy journalists, e.g.) say about their field, well, there’s no point “casting pearls to the(se) pigs”. They’re simply not interested in the truth, for any number of possible reasons.
Having said that, if you want to amuse us, why don’t you tell us precisely WHICH IPCC GCM’s have been updated to account for “The top several hundred feet of a hundred million square miles of ocean kept right on taking in heat and warming right along.”, and whether or not these corrected models subsequently made more accurate predictions/postdictions of surface temperatures than INM-CM5. I’ve read claims by Hanson saying “I was right, all along”, but never saw any QUANTITATIVE demonstration of this. I was left with the impression that he was just hand-waving.
Actually, before you do that, why don’t you write something that demonstrates that you know the difference between a quantitative prediction, and a qualitative one. If you can’t pass that sanity test, don’t bother posting about a superior model to INM-CM5, unless you provide references. (Though you should provide references, anyway, if you want me to take your claim seriously.)
different clue
@metamars,
I take my claim seriously and I don’t care whether you personally take my claim seriously or not.
You will make your personal life-plans and preparations based on what you think is real, and I will make my personal life-plans and preparations based on what I think is real. And let Darwin take the hindmost.
Astrid
Metamar,
I’m glad that you have such a wonderful self esteem that you think you’re worth anybody’s time with that ridiculous ask, while not actually responding to any of the substance of a pretty substantive direct response to your query. Excellent bit of bad faith argumentation on display.
If you’re in fact the bot built to drive liberals to the edge of sanity ( and beyond), as I always suspected you to be, I must applaude them for doing an excellent job this day!
metamars
I have stated, unequivocally, that the most accurate IPCC climate models are the Russian ones. different clue says “Those Russian predictors predicted wrong.”
Allow me to clarify, though I don’t think it should be necessary.
I have stated, unequivocally, the that most accurate IPCC climate models are the Russian ones, AND THESE ARE QUANTITATIVE MODELS, AS ARE THE REST OF THE IPCC GCM MODELS. different clue says “Those Russian predictors predicted wrong”. I take this to mean that different clue believes that there are other, non-Russian IPCC QUANTITATIVE MODELS which are actually more accurate. (Presumably, having been corrected by data reflecting “The top several hundred feet of a hundred million square miles of ocean kept right on taking in heat and warming right along.”)
This would flatly contradict the graphs of said models, graphed in the same plot, that I saw presented by Patrick Michaels in a debate in NJ I attended, say about 2 years ago. Ah, but perhaps different clue is not blowing smoke, but actually knows what he’s talking about. Perhaps there has been a development in the last 2 years supporting his claim. Or perhaps Michaels’s plot was fraudulent, or mistaken. I.e., it was never true.
Perhaps quite a few things have resulted in me getting this wrong.
So, different clue was invited to post the SPECIFIC IPCC model which is more accurate than the Russian one, with references, if he wants me to take him seriously.
He has so far failed to do so. So, I am not taking him seriously, and he doesn’t seem to care about that.
So be it. But this exchange – so far, anyway – underscores why it’s pointless to try and have reasonable scientific debates with somebody who can’t, or won’t.
Hugh
Patrick Michaels over 30 years started out as a climate change denier and when that became untenable, a climate change contrarian minimizing the effects of climate change. His work has been funded by the fossil fuel industry and he was a senior fellow at the libertarian Koch-funded Cato Institute. Researchers in the field, including James Hansen, have said he cherrypicked and misrepresented their work to the point of fraud.
metamars
I am fairly competent that other clowns in the climate change clown car, who comment in this blog, will similarly FAIL to produce a reference to an IPCC model which is more accurate than INM-CM5. Gee whiz, we can see this FAIL spreading its tentacles, already.
S Brennan
An interesting link from b at MOA.
Syria: A new policy is needed, but not this one – by Peter Ford
https://justworldeducational.org/2021/01/syria-a-new-policy-is-needed-but-not-this-one/
The “new” Biden policy is a continuation of the Trump policy but with some lipstick, a pretty bow and…an ever increasing US Troop levelin Syria. The neoD’s on this blog ought to love the plan. And what’s not to love, as the author comments [in brackets], it’s a reprise of the 90’s early 00’s preclude to the Iraq invasion.
________________________________
1] the release of political prisoners [the US-favored ‘moderates’ no doubt, now known to be in many cases Islamist fanatics],
2] dignified reception for returning refugees [meaning no checks for returning jihadis], civilian protection [what lurks behind this elastic concept?],
3] unhindered, countrywide humanitarian access [i.e. supplying jihadi-controlled Idlib], the removal of remaining chemical weapons [here we go again! Iraq WMD redux, a tailor-made excuse to withhold sanctions relief], and political as well as security sector reforms [i.e., pave the way for regime change], including good-faith participation in the U.N.’s Geneva process and greater decentralization [partition].
S Brennan
A link for those who still claim ignorance of what down in Syria under O-Bomba
http://themillenniumreport.com/2017/07/timber-sycamore-the-cias-illegal-syrian-regime-change-operation/
Hugh
metamars, you are making a fundamental error. You can drop INM-CM5 like some talisman, but it is just a model. The model needs to match the data before it is much use for prediction. One main measure of climate change is GMST (global mean surface temperature). There are complications with this. First, modern historical records only go back to about 1850. Second, increases in the GMST are not nicely linear. There was a period of stabilization in it from 1950-1970, a period of rapid increase from 1980-2000, and another period of stabilization from 2000-2014. The previous model CM4 showed a period of too gradual a rise in GMST from 1950-2014. So the current CM5 model does a better job at describing these changes. CM5 does somewhat less well describing the loss of Arctic ice, and longer-term temperature oscillations in the Atlantic and Pacific seem outside its scope.
metamars
Well, to further clarify, the Russian models are the most accurate in terms of global temperature. The graph that I saw plotted the global temperature pre/post-dictions of the various IPCC models against each other.
Feel free to educate us as to whether there is any IPCC model which has more accurately predicted global temperature than the Russian ones; and which one or ones they specifically are.
Willy
When I Duckduck searched up “Russians climate change” I got endless pages of articles about permafrost, methane, effects, mandates, etc, etc. and a couple of articles about how Russia is going to come out ahead because of the increased agriculture and arctic sea ports going ice free.
So I switched to Google and found even more of the same kind of tripe. Does anybody know of a search engine where my confirmation bias can be more accurately supported?