“No one has ever shown that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming… And if it could be shown, then you would have to show that the 97% of emissions which are natural, do not drive global warming. Game over. We are dealing with a fraud.”
Professor Ian Plimer is Australia’s best-known geologist. He is currently professor emeritus of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne and formerly a professor of mining geology at the University of Adelaide and head of geology at the University of Newcastle. Mr Plimer is also the former director of multiple mineral exploration and mining companies and has published more than 120 specific papers on geology. Professor Plimer was also Managing Editor of Mineralium Deposita, president of the Society for Geology Applied (SGA), president of International Association on the Genesis of Ore Deposits (IAGOD), president of the Australian Geoscience Council and sat on the Earth Sciences Committee of the Australian Research Council for many years. He is most famously known for his controversial book Green Murder
I wanted to make sure this WALL STREET JOURNAL article was saved in my feed (Hat-tip to Todd A):
Freedom is the central component of the best problem-solving system ever devised.
By David R. Henderson and Charles L. Hooper
The online Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “anti-vaxxer” as “a person who opposes the use of vaccines or regulations mandating vaccination.” Where does that leave us? We both strongly favor vaccination against Covid-19; one of us (Mr. Hooper) has spent years working and consulting for vaccine manufacturers. But we strongly oppose government vaccine mandates. If you’re crazy about Hondas but don’t think the government should force everyone to buy a Honda, are you “anti-Honda”?
The people at Merriam-Webster are blurring the distinction between choice and coercion, and that’s not merely semantics. If we accept that the difference between choice and coercion is insignificant, we will be led easily to advocate policies that require a large amount of coercion. Coercive solutions deprive us of freedom and the responsibility that goes with it. Freedom is intrinsically valuable; it is also the central component of the best problem-solving system ever devised.
Free choice relies on persuasion. It recognizes that you are an important participant with key information, problem-solving abilities and rights. Any solution that is adopted, therefore, must be designed to help you and others. Coercion is used when persuasion has failed or is teetering in that direction—or when you are raw material for someone else’s grand plans, however ill-conceived.
Authoritarian governmental approaches hamper problem-solving abilities. They typically involve one-size-fits-all solutions like travel bans and mask mandates. Once governments adopt coercive policies, power-hungry bureaucrats often spout an official party line and suppress dissent, no matter the evidence, and impose further sanctions to punish those who don’t fall in line. Once coercion is set in motion, it’s hard to backtrack.
Consider Australia, until recently a relatively free country. Its Northern Territory has a Covid quarantine camp in Howard Springs where law-abiding citizens can be forcibly sent if they have been exposed to a SARS-CoV-2-positive person or have traveled internationally or between states, even without evidence of exposure. A 26-year-old Australian citizen, Hayley Hodgson, was detained at the camp after she was exposed to someone later found to be positive. Despite three negative tests and no positive ones, she was held in a small enclosed area for 14 days and fed once a day. Even the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says quarantine can end after seven days with negative tests. Why didn’t the government let her quarantine at home? And why doesn’t it exempt or treat differently people who can prove prior vaccination or natural infection?
Although U.S. authorities haven’t gone nearly that far, early in the pandemic the Food and Drug Administration used its coercive power to discourage the development of diagnostic tests for Covid-19. The FDA required private labs wanting to develop tests to submit special paperwork to get approval that it had never required for other diagnostic tests. That, in combination with the CDC’s claims that it had enough testing capacity, meant that testing necessitated the use of a CDC test later determined to be so defective that it found the coronavirus in laboratory-grade water.
With voluntary approaches, we get the benefit of millions of people around the world actively trying to solve problems and make our lives better. We get high-quality vaccines from BioNTech/ Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Moderna, instead of the suspect vaccines from the governments of Cuba and Russia. We get good diagnostic tests from Thermo Fisher Scientific instead of the defective CDC one. We get promising therapeutics such as Pfizer’s Paxlovid and Merck’s molnupiravir.
With authoritarian approaches, we get solutions that meet the requirements of those in power, regardless of how we benefit. Consider this hypothetical example:
Policy A ends with 1,000 Covid-19 cases, 5,000 people who have completely lost their liberty for two weeks, 1,000 lost jobs, and 300 missed key family events, such as the funeral of a loved one.
Policy B ends with 1,020 Covid-19 cases, 4,000 who have lost some of their liberty for one week, 1,000 who have completely lost their liberty for two weeks, 300 lost jobs, and 100 missed family events.
The government may prefer Policy A because it is focused on one aspect of the problem. You might prefer Policy B because many aspects of life matter to you—not only coronavirus cases—and B is much better on the other dimensions. But your preferences don’t count.
With coercive solutions, you’ll often deal with an official who will absolve himself of responsibility by pinning the rule on those giving the orders. With voluntary solutions, if it doesn’t make sense, we usually don’t do it. And therein lies one of the greatest protections we have to ensure that the solution isn’t worse than the problem.
The supposed trump card of those who favor coercion is externalities: One person’s behavior can put another at risk. But that’s only half the story. The other half is that we choose how much risk we accept. If some customers at a store exhibit risky behavior, then we can vaccinate, wear masks, keep our distance, shop at quieter times, or avoid the store.
Economists understand how one person can impose a cost on another. But it takes two to tango, and it’s generally more efficient if the person who can change his behavior with the lower cost changes how he behaves. In other words, to perform a proper evaluation of policies to deal with externalities, we must consider the responses available to both parties. Many people, including economists, ignore this insight.
By what principle do we throw out the playbook of the more successful country, ours, and adopt one from less successful, more authoritarian countries? The authoritarian playbook has serious built-in weaknesses, while solutions based on free choice have obvious and not-so-obvious strengths. Freedom is beneficial in good times; it’s even more crucial in challenging times.
Mr. Henderson is a research fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He was senior health economist with President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. Mr. Hooper is author of “Should the FDA Reject Itself?” and president of Objective Insights, whose clients include pharmaceutical companies.
It is not yet clear whether history will remember the 2020s more for an outbreak of a deadly virus, or for an outbreak of mass psychosis. No doubt, both were at play, the former because the virus was novel and deadly, the latter because we had no idea how much so. In March of 2020, the World Health Organization estimated Covid’s case fatality rate to be over 3 percent. Some outlets reported case fatality rates above 10 percent. By comparison, the case fatality rate for the common flu is a mere fraction of a percent.
But the early information ranged from sketchy to biased. In the early days, the number of Covid tests was limited, so physicians only tested those who were sick enough to show up at hospitals. This skewed the early data toward showing Covid as being deadlier than it actually was. With no randomized testing, the actual lethality was impossible to know.
This bias interacted with the media and politicians’ incentives to create a perfect storm of incentives. The media had an incentive to repeat the worst fatality projections and to play down the bias behind the projections because bad news attracts viewers, and viewers attract advertising dollars. Heavy media coverage of the worst Covid projections alarmed voters, and that forced politicians to respond. But the politicians’ incentives were skewed toward a heavy-handed response.
[….]
By late 2020, it became clear that early case fatality rates were overstated, but it was too late for politicians to change course. A feedback loop had ensued wherein the media sold advertising by spotlighting the Covid danger. This made people fearful, and the people pushed politicians to act. Politicians acted and then hid the potential error of unnecessary lockdowns by emphasizing the danger of Covid. This gave the media more material to spotlight and more advertising to sell. Social media then jumped into the fray by anointing itself the arbiter of what was and wasn’t “misinformation.” But social media was as motivated as the mainstream media to attract eyeballs and sell advertising, and so anything that contradicted the official line on Covid was deemed “misinformation.”
The result was mass psychosis in which people’s behaviors toward the real threat of Covid became inconsistent with their behaviors toward other real threats.
[….]
As with all things, lockdowns do not come without tradeoffs. Some people died of cancer, kidney disease, and other non-Covid causes because they were afraid to go to hospitals out of fear of contracting Covid. In Canada, cancer screening was suspended so that hospital resources could be devoted to Covid care. Early estimates show up to a 10 percent increase in cancer deaths as a consequence. In the US in the early days of Covid, there was a 30 percent decline in the number of people seeking initial treatment for kidney disease.
At the start of the pandemic, calls to suicide hotlines spiked across the country, as did instances of domestic violence. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that the total number of deaths in the US was 450,000 larger than it should have been in 2020. That 360,000 of those were directly due to Covid means that the remaining 90,000 were due to Covid only indirectly or due to the lockdowns themselves.
In addition to the lockdowns costing lives, we expended unprecedented resources maintaining them. These came initially in the form of unemployment and business closures, and later in the form of supply chain problems and inflation and higher taxes to pay for massive stimulus spending. In late 2020, economists estimated that, provided it ended by the fall of 2021, the pandemic will cost the United States around $16 trillion over the next decade. That’s around $40 million for every life saved.
But how many more lives might we have saved had we done something different with those resources? Around 660,000 people die each year of heart disease in the US. The National Institutes of Health spends around $5 billion each year researching cures for cardiovascular diseases. Americans spend another $330 billion each year for hospitalization, home health care, medication, and lost productivity associated with cardiovascular diseases.
Suppose that, over the next decade, it turns out that the 2020-21 lockdown saved a total of 1.1 million US lives (including people who may have contracted Covid in 2020-21 but died over the subsequent decade from lingering complications). This is three times the 370,000 the lockdown appears to have saved in 2020 alone. We will have spent $16 trillion in direct costs and lost productivity to save those 1.1 million people. But, over the same decade, 6.6 million people will have died of cardiovascular diseases. To save them, we will have spent $3.3 trillion. We are dedicating one-fifth the resources to fighting a disease that kills six times the number of people. That makes no sense.
Of course, Covid and cardiovascular diseases are very different in that heart disease isn’t contagious. And yet, that criticism cuts both ways: because heart disease isn’t contagious, we can’t develop a herd immunity, and so heart disease will remain with us for generations whereas Covid will not.
[….]
As Omicron looms, and as surely as Pi, Rho, and Sigma will follow, voters should meet their fears with reason, view the media with a skeptical eye, and demand that politicians discuss tradeoffs openly and honestly.
Antony Davies is the Milton Friedman Distinguished Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education, and associate professor of economics at Duquesne University. He has authored Principles of Microeconomics (Cognella), Understanding Statistics (Cato Institute), and Cooperation and Coercion (ISI Books). He has written hundreds of op-eds appearing in, among others, the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, New York Post, Washington Post, New York Daily News, Newsday, US News, and the Houston Chronicle.
(Above video description) Scott Morrison’s Calls For FREEDOM at 2021 U.N. General Assembly. Scott Morrison is an Australian politician who is the 30th and current prime minister of Australia The original file comes from DEADACTIVIST, but forces you to watch it on YouTube which is why I uploaded it to my RUMBLE — not to mention it may be nixed at some point due to YT’s aversion to truth and real evil.
In #Italy, citizens are burning their vaccine passports to protest the government’s authoritarian health mandates. Protests have erupted in 12 cities as people chant slogans such as “Born free and we’ll die free”.pic.twitter.com/INx8KQQ4x2
…and that no one may be able to buy, or to sell, except he who is having [has] the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. (Revelation 19:17)
to buy or to sell. Antichrist’s mark will allow people to engage in daily commerce, including the purchase of food and other necessities. Without the identifying mark, individuals will be cut off from the necessities of life. number of his name. The beast (Antichrist) will have a name inherent in a numbering system. It is not clear from the text exactly what this name and number system will be or what its significance will be. — John F. MacArthur Jr., The MacArthur Study Bible: New American Standard Bible. (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2006), Re 13:17.
Papyrus documents of the first and second centuries were frequently stamped with a seal known as charagma, the very word translated “mark” in this passage. These seals left the name of the ruling Emperor and the date inscribed on the document. Some may have included a likeness of the Emperor’s features as well. They were used as part of the paperwork in buying and selling. There is nothing here about the hand or the forehead. — Lewis Foster, Revelation: Unlocking the Scriptures for You, Standard Bible Studies (Cincinnati, OH: Standard, 1989), 195.
The mark of the beast relates to the purchase of food, and possibly employment. God’s people are not protected from this economic privation. — Robert James Utley, Hope in Hard Times – The Final Curtain: Revelation, vol. Volume 12, Study Guide Commentary Series (Marshall, TX: Bible Lessons International, 2001), 98.
The purpose, (so that; Gk. hina) of the mark is that no-one should engage in trade without it. Could (dynētai) is stronger than ‘hinder’ or the like. It points to a total prohibition, which would make it impossible for people without the mark to buy even necessities like food. It is thus impossible for those who oppose the beast even to live. — Leon Morris, Revelation: An Introduction and Commentary, vol. 20, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1987), 167.
The mark may be, as in the case of the sealing of the saints in the forehead, not a visible mark, but symbolical of allegiance. — Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset, and David Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible, vol. 2 (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1997), 584.
Architype
I got a QR code sent to me shortly after getting the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. A QR code is basically a natural extension of the conventional barcode, but can store up to 7089 digits or 4296 characters, including punctuation marks and special characters, the Code can equally encode words and phrases such as internet addresses. One thing to always keep in mind, especially when it comes to designing the Static QR Codes aesthetic is that the more data is added, the more the size increases and its structure becomes more complex.
SEE FOR INSTANCE THIS CODE:
Even when damaged, the QR Code’s structure data keys include duplications. It is thanks to these redundancies that allow up to 30% of the Code structure to take damage without affecting its readability on scanners.
So a “name” can literally be a part of this image. Or some number to support a world-wide edict.
A CBS reporter grilled White House COVID-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients on vaccine QR codes during a press conference Thursday. This comes as more businesses across the nation began requiring proof of vaccination.
“Now that more entities are requiring more vaccines, is the administration reconsidering something like a QR code or a passport to help verify people’s vaccination status?” the reporter asked. “And if not, what are you doing to stop the proliferation of fake vaccine cards?”
“There are a number of ways people can demonstrate their vaccination status,” Zients replied. “Companies and organizations and the government are taking different approaches. We applaud this innovation.”
However, he was clear that the White House will not get involved in creating vaccination QR codes. “There will be no federal vaccination database,” Zients said. “As with all other vaccines the data gets held at the state and local level.”…..
RED STATE joined the “terror watch list” fray with some video as well. I guess according to Homeland Security, NBC, CNN, YAHOO NEWS, etc, I am on a terror watch list?
Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security just issued a terror threat advisory which is raising some eyebrows.
Listen, as Lester Holt and Pete Williams describe how the “terror threat advisory” isn’t based on any actual threats or plots, but just a lot of “anti-government rhetoric” that includes things like “opposition to COVID measures” like masks and vaccine measures.
MUST WATCH: Homeland Security hasn’t based the new “Terror Threat Alert” off of actual threats or plots… just “anti-government rhetoric” that includes “opposition to COVID measures” … aka FREE SPEECH.
“Extremists may seek to exploit the emergence of Covid-19 variants by viewing the potential re-establishment of public health restrictions across the United States as a rationale to conduct attacks,” the DHS advisory said, adding that “pandemic-related stressors… may contribute to more violence this year.”
So, if there aren’t any actual plots or threats, what they’re really doing is demonizing free speech, as Tim Young observes, or criticism of government action. That’s a dangerous route to go down. It also suggests that the DHS is surveilling people to some degree on this subject, another troubling thought, and definitely a slippery slope to go down.
They’re also continuing to demonize Trump supporters again, by including them in the advisory that isn’t based on any actual threats, with “claims of election fraud, belief Trump can be reinstated.”
Whether you agree or disagree with those thoughts on Trump or on COVID, you’re allowed those thoughts in our allegedly free society under our Constitution. Are they really classifying being critical of the government as a terrorist threat now? Is dissent now terrorism?
Notice in this CNN take that it isn’t criminal actions but “false narratives” that are mentioned as “dangerous.”
The bulletin is part of a concerted effort by DHS to address the issues that led up to January 6 and the beginning of an effort by the department to educate the public about how these false narratives and conspiracy theories “are not just confusing but dangerous,” according to a source familiar.
You’re not allowed to have those thoughts.
Then the NBC piece notes there are concerns about the 9/11 anniversary and “religious holidays,” without defining what “religious holidays” we’re talking about here. What they’re looking at here, without NBC saying it, I think, is radical Islamic terrorism. That’s what the Yahoo News article on the advisory suggests.
But NBC just didn’t want to put that in the graphic. So, it leaves you wondering: are religious holidays now considered a threat as well?………
ACE of SPADES has a post that got my attention. I will add more of the source as I see fit… but this is an amazing turn. And I doubt they mean the person[s] given awards in Obama’s church or celebrated on the front cover of his church’s magazine (that has a 20,000 person reach).
…..Interesting piece by Peter Wood from a couple of days ago: From 9/11 to 1/6:
As the Taliban move in for the kill in Afghanistan, we once again turn away from the hard questions about how to sustain American pride in the face of people who abhor us and what American values mean if the world meets our ideals with contempt. One answer to these questions is a counsel of capitulation. Let us admit that we are now and always have been a rotten nation made up of hateful, conniving people who only pretended to be good.
That answer has always had a few cynics in its corner, but it has become the presiding doctrine of the American left, a development which is itself one of the defining consequences of 9/11. At some point in the months following the attack, as the momentary sense of national unity cleared, the left began to adopt the ‘we-deserved-it’ narrative. Not everyone was as outspoken as Ward Churchill who called the office workers in the World Trade Towers ‘little Eichmanns’ or the Revd Jeremiah Wright who preached a sermon shortly after 9/11 that said of the attack, ‘America’s chickens are coming home to roost’. But in a quieter way, these ideas took hold. President Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq crystalized the left’s narrative that America’s bellicosity was the problem. We had more to fear from domestic mistreatment of innocent Muslims than we had from Muslims bent on mass murder.
This muddled view has birthed a generation that has nothing but misgivings about American virtue and American power. And it lies in the background of a brand new attempt to sacralize a new date: January 6, 2021.
The irony is that the Democrats’ relentless exaggeration of what happened on January 6, 2021 might succeed in giving us the breakthrough realization of what happened on September 11, 2001. We will see that our leftist elite hates America and fears and despises that broad swath of the American people who reject their betters.
At least if you believe the government’s public statements, our intelligence agencies and military totally missed the Taliban’s plans to rapidly take over Afghanistan (along with all that sophisticated military equipment we failed to remove). But they are certainly right about the threats above, don’t you think?
Peter Wood doesn’t think so. He is writing a book.
Random Note:
It was apparently the 500th anniversary of the fall of the Aztecs yesterday. You may recall that the Ethnic Studies folks in California want to revive the Aztec gods to replace the white Christian God, but as woke gods – not as true Aztec gods.
Music
Don’t let them take over your life. Their ideology is not sustainable.
[….]
Here is the important Tweets linked in the above byJAMES LINDSAY:
ENLARGED PORTIONS:
The POST MILLENNIAL notes a recent Joy Reid show, where, Republicans are referred to as terrorists:
In an interview on The Reidout with Joy Reid this week, author Malcom Nance warned that Q-Anon supporters have taken over the Republican Party and are “preparing for civil war.”
“On August 13th or 14th, just a few days from now, the Q-Anon believers, which is now a substantial portion of the Republican base, believe that Donald Trump will be reinstated as president through some magic that they only understand. When that doesn’t happen, then what?” Reid asked.
“Well, nothing is going to happen here in August,” replied Nance, adding that there is a substantial portion of the “gunslinging conservatives base” that does not support Q-Anon.
[….]
“The Republican Party, you know, I used to joke that they were vanilla ISIS, all of these militia men and everything out there. They were like ISIS, they were like Al Qaeda in the sense that they radicalized online. They would meet together in secret, and they did all of these activities, which were very much like a terrorist insurgency,” said Nance.
Nance continued by saying that the Republican Party “is more like Sinn Féin and the relationship between Sinn Féin, the Irish National Party, and the Irish Republican Army – Provisional Irish Republican Army terrorist group.”….
CANARY IN THE COAL MINE
The entire Paul Watson* video can be found at MOONBATTERY:“Australian Covid Dissident Locked in Lunatic Asylum” — also see MOONBAT’S other recent post: “Australia Degenerates Into Biosecurity Police State” FYI >>>
While I like their rants (Paul Watson, Mark Dice, and others) and these commentaries hold much truth in them, I do wish to caution you… he is part of Info Wars/Prison Planet and Summit News network of yahoos, a crazy conspiracy arm of Alex Jones shite. Also, I bet if I talked to him he would reveal some pretty-crazy conspiratorial beliefs that would naturally undermine and be at-odds-with some of his rants. Just to be clear, I do not endorse these people or orgs.
* While I like their rants (Paul Watson, Mark Dice, and others) and these commentaries hold much truth in them, I do wish to caution you… he is part of Info Wars/Prison Planet and Summit News network of yahoos, a crazy conspiracy arm of Alex Jones shite. Also, I bet if I talked to him he would reveal some pretty-crazy conspiratorial beliefs that would naturally undermine and be at-odds-with some of his rants. Just to be clear, I do not endorse these people or orgs.
This is a not-too-well-known subtitle of Charles Darwin’s work. I have an introduction to this idea entitled, “Racism and Evolutionary Thought“. Stephen Jay Gould notes the affects of Darwinism on culture:
“Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1850, but they have increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory”
Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Press, 1977), 127.
Human Zoos tells the shocking story of how thousands of indigenous peoples were put on public display in America in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Above video description:
Often touted as “missing links” between man and apes, these native peoples were harassed and demeaned. Their public display was arranged with the enthusiastic support of the most elite members of the scientific community, and it was promoted uncritically by American’s leading newspapers. This award-winning documentary explores the heartbreaking story of what happened, shows how African-American ministers and other people of faith tried to push back, and reveals how some people today are still drawing on Social Darwinism in order to dehumanize others. The film also explores the tragic story of eugenics in America, the effort to breed human beings based on Darwinian principles.
Human Zoos was an official selection of the African World Documentary Film Festival and has won awards for Best Editing (Oregon Documentary Film Festival), Best in Show (Cinema WorldFest Awards) and Awards of Excellence from the Impact Docs Awards and the Hollywood Independent Documentary Awards.
Be sure to check out these other videos about social Darwinism.
Skull-hunters killed Aborigines and legitimized this act asserting that they were doing it for science. The skulls of the hunted natives were sold to museums after some chemical reactions that would make them look old. The skulls with bullet holes were filled in with utmost attention. According to Creation Magazine published in Australia, a group of observers that came in from South Galler were shocked when they saw that dozens of women, children and men were killed by evolutionists. Forty five skulls were chosen among the killed Aborigines, the flesh of them were set aside and boiled. The best ten were packaged to be sent to England.
Today, thousands of skulls of Aborigines are still in the warehouse of Smithsonian Institution. Some of these skulls belong to the corpses dug from the graves where as some others are the skulls of innocent people killed to prove evolution.
There were also African victims of the evolutionist violence. The most famous one was the pigmy Ota Benga who was taken to the world of the white men to be displayed as a transitional form. Oto Benga was caught in 1904 by a researcher Samuel Verner in Kongo then a colony of Belgium. The native whose name meant friend in his native language, was married and had two kids. Yet he was chained, put into a cage and sent by a boat to the evolutionist scientists who within the same year displayed him in the St. Louis World Fair together with other monkey species as the closest transitional form to humankind. Two years later, he was taken to Bronx Zoo in New York where he was, this time displayed as one of the ancestors of human beings together with a few chimpanzees, a gorilla called Dinah and an orangutan called Dohung. Dr. William T. Hornaday, the director of the zoo who was also a fanatical evolutionist delivered long speeches about how he was proud of having such a precious transitional form. The guests, on the other hand, treated Ota Benga as an ordinary animal. Ota Benga could not bear the treatment he received and committed suicide. (Here is a reggae song dedicated to Oto on A BITTA WORLD by BORROW SHANGO.)
….The many factors motivating Verner to bring Ota to the United States were complex, but he was evidently .much influenced by the theories of Charles Darwin” a theory which, as it developed, increasingly divided humankind into human contrived races (Rymer, 1992, p. 3). Darwin also believed that the blacks were an inferior race’ (Vemer, 1908a, p. 10717). Although biological racism did not begin with Darwinism, Darwin did more than any other man to popularize it among the masses. As early as 1699, English Physician Edward Tyson studied a skeleton which he believed belonged to a pygmy, concluding that this race was apes, although it was discovered that the skeleton on which this conclusion was based was actually a chimpanzee (Bradford and Blume, 1992, p. 20).
The conclusion in Vemer’s day accepted by most scientists was that after Darwin showed “that all humans descended from apes, the suspicion remained that some races had descended farther than others … [and that] some races, namely the white ones, had left the ape far behind, while other races, pygmies especially, had hardly matured at all” (Bradford and Blume, 1992, p. 20). Many scholars agreed with Sir Harry Johnson, a pygmy scholar who stated that the pygmies were “very apelike in appearance [and] their hairy skins, the length of their arms, the strength of their thickset frames, their furtive ways, all point to these people as representing man in one of his earlier forms’ (Keane 1907, p. 99). One of the most extensive early studies of the pygmies concluded that they were “queer little freaks” and
The low state of their mental development is shown by the following facts. They have no regard for time, nor have they any records or traditions of the past; no religion is known among them, nor have they any fetish rights; they do not seek to know the future by occult means… in short, they are… the closest link with the original Darwinian anthropoid ape extant” (Burrows, 1905, pp. 172, 182)….
Remember, last year was the AMAZON FIRES… we are now in the next “big climate event”… thanks to Russell Crowe (actor), with his absent award speech at the Golden Globes (STUFF):
Russell Crowe used his Golden Globes win as a platform to blame climate change for the Australian bushfires.
Jennifer Aniston presented Crowe with the Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actor in a Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television for his performance in The Loudest Voice, but said he wasn’t there to accept because he was “in Australia protecting his family from the devastating bushfires.”
The New Zealand-born actor had, however, sent a message in case he won.
“Make no mistake,” his speech ran, “the tragedy unfolding in Australia is climate change-based.
“We need to act based on science, move our global workforce to renewable energy, and respect our planet for the unique and amazing place it is. That way, we all have a future.”
The message was met with resounding applause from the star-studded ballroom of the Beverly Hilton Hotel….
There have been 24 people charged with deliberately setting fires among 183 facing legal action in the state, according to the New South Wales Police Force.
In addition to those facing the most serious charges of starting fires intentionally, authorities said another 53 people are facing legal action for not complying with the state’s fire ban and 47 people have faced legal action for discarding a lit cigarette or match on land….
New South Wales police charged more than 20 people for deliberately starting fires across Australia as the country beats back wildfires. Activists and celebrities said climate change played a part in the blaze.
The NSW Police Force is taking legal action against 180 people since the end of 2019, according to local reports. Australian fires have killed 18 people and claimed the lives of hundreds of millions of animals….
CLIMATE CHANGE DISPATCH does note that “It’s unclear how many, if any, of the fires started by those charged continue to burn.” But let’s move on to the other big issues related to this “outbreak” of climate….
…We have had an horrific start to the bushfire season, and much is being said about the more than 17 lives lost already, and that smoke has blown as far as New Zealand. Unprecedented, has been the claim. But just 10 years ago, on 9 February 2009, 173 lives were lost in the Black Saturday inferno. On 13th January 1939 (Black Friday), 2 million hectares burnt with ash reportedly falling on New Zealand. That was probably the worst bushfire catastrophe in Australia’s modern recorded history in terms of area burnt and it was 80 years ago: January 13, 1939.
According to the Report of the Royal Commission that followed, it was avoidable.
In terms of total area burnt: figures of over 5 million hectares are often quoted for 1851. The areas now burnt in New South Wales and Victoria are approaching this.
Last summer, and this summer, has been hot in Australia. But the summer of 1938-1939 was probably hotter. In rural Victoria, the summer of 1938-1939 was on average at least two degrees hotter than anything measured with equivalent equipment since, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Mean maximum summer (December, January February) temperatures as measured at Rutherglen in rural Victoria by The Australian Bureau of Meteorology for the period when mercury thermometers were used. Data unadjusted/not homogenised.
The summer of 1938-1939 was probably the hottest ever in recorded history for the states of New South Wales and Victoria. It is difficult to know for sure because the Bureau has since changed how temperatures are measured at many locations and has not provided any indication of how current electronic probes are recording relative to the earlier mercury thermometers.
Further, since 2011, the Bureau is not averaging measurements from these probes so the hottest recorded daily temperature is now a one-second spot reading from an electronic devise with a sheath of unknown thickness. In the United States similar equipment is used and the readings are averaged over five (5) minutes and then the measurement recorded….
WATTS UP WITH THAT notes the “fule load” issue that is compounded via environmentalists (eco-fascists):
Liberal MP Craig Kelly has defended Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s handling of the bushfire crisis during a television interview in Britain that descended into chaos after the hosts savaged the self-proclaimed climate sceptic.
The backbencher was called a “disgrace” and told to “wake up” during the combative encounter that threatens to undermine Morrison’s efforts to reassure Australians that his government accepts the link between climate change and extreme weather events.
. . . .
Nodding in agreement as he was introduced to viewers as a climate sceptic, Kelly argued the fire crisis was caused by high fuel loads and the drought.
He also claimed there was “simply no” long-term trend to back up the widespread conclusions of scientists and other experts that the Australian climate was warming.
“To try to make out as some politicians have to hijack this debate, exploit this tragedy and push their ideological barrow, that somehow or another the Australian government could have done something by reducing its carbon emissions that would have reduced these bushfires is just complete nonsense,” Kelly said.
….As for Craig Kelly’s claim about fuel load, I can confirm this by personal observation. My local area, much of the region along the road from my hometown to the Queensland state capital Brisbane is a vast tinderbox of dry, scrubby bush and dry grass growing on the ground between the trees, overlaid with flammable eucalyptus deadwood ranging from twigs to fallen tree trunks, all ready to be ignited by the slightest spark (see the image at the top of the page).
Eucalypts, the dominant tree type in the Australian bush, shed tremendous quantities of dead branches and leaves. In the absence of frequent controlled burns the dead plant material rapidly self assembles into near perfect fire starting structures, with lightweight material laced with flammable eucalyptus oil at the bottom, tough spindly branches which ensure lots of airflow, all mixed in with heavier branches which consolidate any fire which starts in the lightweight material.
Hardly anybody in Australia dares to clear the bush and trees away from their houses, an obvious safety precaution in a bushfire area. People who make their homes or properties safe from fire risk financial ruin under laws based by urban green politicians, if the government catches them clearing native vegetation. Nobody, no matter how remote, is safe from the scourge of potentially lethal government bullying; Aussie state governments use satellites and AI to target and prosecute people trying to keep their properties safe from bushfires.
I am not personally at risk from bushfire, but I know people in my area who could lose their homes if it all ignites.
JAMES DELINGPOLE has a great addition to this discussion as well that blows the narratvive out of the water (also, NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW was referenced in the article):
One should note as well that a viral pic is not based in fact, satellites, and is MUCH exaggerated (3-D imaging):
This is one of the many convos on SANTA CLARITA COMMUNITY’S Facebook Page about a meeting to “Stop Gun Violence: SCV’s Message to Mitch McConnell”
(ME) Stop gun violence, health insurance for all, free college, etc., etc. All these Utopian ideals are just that. Fiction.
(SANDRA RC) Hey Sean, not fiction as it works in other countries. Are you saying that we’re sub-standard?
(ME)Sandra RC mmm no, it doesn’t work in other countries. There is a myth about Australia. The first being that there are more guns now owned in Australia than before the 1996 massacre (3.2 million vs. 3.6 million).
…Here is the actual data from Australia. First note that gun ownership exhibits a very interesting pattern that isn’t often acknowledged. There was a large gun buyback in 1996 and 1997 that reduced gun ownership from 3.2 to 2.2 million guns. But immediately after that gun ownership increased dramatically and is essentially back to where it was before the buyback. Why is that important? Well, if it is the number of guns that is important, you should initially see a large drop in suicides or crimes and then see it increasing. Yet, in none of these data series do you observe that pattern.
For example, homicides didn’t fall until eight years after the laws. It is not clear what theory they have for why the long delay would occur. Nor can I even find an acknowledgment of that long lag in the cited literature. A more natural explanation for the drop at the eight year point would be the substantial increases in police forces that occurred at that time…
In places like the UK, Jamaica, and the like, violent robbery and home invasions while the occupants are home are VERY high. It is a dangerous place to live in, and many wish they could protect their loved ones.
And of course there is this moving testimony of one of the patrons at Luby’s Massacre:
(STILL ME)Sandra RC — in other words, they [the countries you are thinking of] are sub-standard. Or the purported beliefs about what they have done and accomplished with gun control — those beliefs are sub-standard.
Got that? Gun ban in 1996. The government flat out confiscated weapons. It was mandatory. A gun grab. Now more people than ever have guns. Gun crime has not gone up. Because gun bans totally work…NOT….
Fact: Homicides were falling before the Australian firearm ban. In the seven years before and after the Australian ban, the rate of decline was identical (down to four decimal places). Homicides dropped steeply starting in 2003, but all of this decline was associated with non-firearm and non-knife murders (fewer beatings, poisonings, drownings, etc.). 33
Fact: Crime has been rising since enacting a sweeping ban on private gun ownership. In the first two years after the ban, government statistics showed a dramatic increase in criminal activity. 34In 2001-2002, homicides were up another 20%. 35
From the inception of firearm confiscation to March 27, 2000, the numbers are:
Firearm-related murders were up 19%
Armed robberies were up 69%
Home invasions were up 21%
The sad part is that in the 15 years before the national gun confiscation:
Firearm-related homicides dropped nearly 66%
Firearm-related deaths fell 50%
Fact: Gun crimes have been rising throughout Australia since guns were banned. In Sydney alone, robbery rates with guns rose 160% in 2001, more than in the previous year. 36
Fact: A ten-year Australian study has concluded that firearm confiscation had no effect on crime rates. 37A separate report also concluded that Australia’s 1996 gun control laws “found [no] evidence for an impact of the laws on the pre-existing decline in firearm homicides” 38and yet another report from Australia for a similar time period indicates the same lack of decline in firearm homicides. 39 Fact: Despite having much stricter gun control than New Zealand (including a near ban on handguns) firearm homicides in both countries track one another over 25 years, indicating that gun control is not a control variable. 40
MYTH: THE AUSTRALIAN GUN BUYBACK REDUCED MASS HOMICIDES
Mass Homicides in Australia Before/After 1990s Gun Control Initiative
Incidents
Deaths
22-years
Total
Average
Total
Average
Before
0.13
0.08
0.13
0.08
After
0.09
0.10
0.09
0.10
Per 1,000 Population
Fact: The number of mass homicides and the number of people killed in mass homicides in Australia has gone up since the gun control initiatives of the mid 1990s.
(33)Australia Institute of Criminology, AIC NHMP 1989/90 to 2011-12 (34)Crime and Justice – Crimes Recorded by Police, Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2000 (35)Report #46: Homicide in Australia, 2001-2002, Australian Institute of Criminology, April 2003 (36) Costa targets armed robbers, The Sydney Morning Herald, April 4, 2002 (37) Gun Laws and Sudden Death: Did the Australian Firearms Legislation of 1996 Make a Difference?, Dr. Jeanine Baker and Dr. Samara McPhedran, British Journal of Criminology, November 2006. (38) Austrian firearms: data require cautious approach, S. McPhedran, S. McPhedran, and J. Baker, The British Journal of Psychiatry, 2007, 191:562 (39)Australian firearms legislation and unintentional firearm deaths a theoretical explanation for the absence of decline following the 1996 gun laws Public Health, Samara McPhedran, Jeanine Baker, Public Health, Volume 122, Issue 3 (40) Firearm Homicide in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand: What Can We Learn From Long- Term International Comparisons?, Samara McPhedran, Jeanine Baker, and Pooja Singh, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, March 16, 2010
The American Spectator has this great information that sets the record clear by giving guidelines to the debate:
Type “mass shootings” and “common” into a search engine and you’ll get all sorts of breathless commentary that might lead one to believe there Americans face a genuine epidemic of shooting rampages. A few headlines:
Vox: “Mass shootings on campus are getting more common and more deadly.”
ThinkProgress: “Mass Shootings Are Becoming More Frequent.”
NPR: “Study: Mass Shootings Are On The Rise Across U.S.”
Washington Post: “Why are mass shootings becoming more common?”
[….]
Homicide in America is far more common than it ought to be. But mass shootings — defined as four or more murders in the same incident — constitute a minuscule share of the total, as I discuss in “The Shooting Cycle” in the most recent edition of the Connecticut Law Review…
I want to break here and post something Mother Jones said in trying to define what a Mass Shooting is… “she” says this:
Broadly speaking, the term refers to an incident involving multiple victims of gun violence. But there is no official set of criteria or definition for a mass shooting, according to criminology experts and FBI officials who have spoken with Mother Jones.
Mother Jones then goes on to quote the definition — after being ambiguous about it — as four or more [excluding the shooter]. Wikipedia says this:
The FBI defines mass murder as murdering four or more persons during an event with no “cooling-off period” between the murders. A mass murder typically occurs in a single location where one or more people kill several others.
Aggrawal A. (2005) Mass Murder. In: Payne-James JJ, Byard RW, Corey TS, Henderson C (Eds.) Encyclopedia of Forensic and Legal Medicine, Vol. 3, Pp. 216-223. Elsevier Academic Press, London
“Serial Murder – Federal Bureau of Investigation”. Fbi.gov. Retrieved 2012-03-07.
It is odd to me why Mother Jones would be ambiguous about it while at the same time use the accepted FBI terminology/definition. At any rate, I HIGHLY suggest reading this Debunking of Mother Jones’ “10 Pro-Gun Myths,” worth the read.
Obama recently praised Australian gun-control.
ANN COULTER tackles this “Australian Stat” often mentioned. She quotes the New York Times’ Elisabeth Rosenthal as saying this:
Rosenthal also produces a demonstrably false statistic about Australia’s gun laws, as if it’s a fact that has been carefully vetted by the Newspaper of Record, throwing in the true source only at the tail-end of the paragraph:
“After a gruesome mass murder in 1996 provoked public outrage, Australia enacted stricter gun laws, including a 28-day waiting period before purchase and a ban on semiautomatic weapons. … Since, rates of both homicide and suicide have dropped 50 percent … said Ms. Peters, who lobbied for the legislation.”
…Here is the actual data from Australia. First note that gun ownership exhibits a very interesting pattern that isn’t often acknowledged. There was a large gun buyback in 1996 and 1997 that reduced gun ownership from 3.2 to 2.2 million guns. But immediately after that gun ownership increased dramatically and is essentially back to where it was before the buyback. Why is that important? Well, if it is the number of guns that is important, you should initially see a large drop in suicides or crimes and then see it increasing. Yet, in none of these data series do you observe that pattern.
For example, homicides didn’t fall until eight years after the laws. It is not clear what theory they have for why the long delay would occur. Nor can I even find an acknowledgment of that long lag in the cited literature. A more natural explanation for the drop at the eight year point would be the substantial increases in police forces that occurred at that time…
…This is actually pretty amazing given the threat that the government could actually again try to confiscate guns in the country. That imposes a real potential tax on gun ownership.
A University of Sydney study has shown there has been a steady increase in guns imported into the country over the past decade, with the number of privately owned guns now at the same level as 1996. . . .
Weirdly, gun control advocates are claiming that the buy back is lowering suicides at the same time that they are upset that gun ownership is back to it pre-buy back levels. One doesn’t need a semi-auto to commit suicide. While Australia’s population grew by 20 percent between 1997 and 2011, apparently its gun ownership rate grew by 45 percent. If they are right, the pattern should have been clear: suicides with guns should have plunged in 1997 and then quickly grown after that. Obviously that pattern wasn’t what was observed….
Crime is dropping recently in Australia, but this can be attributed to gun ownership rising back up to the previous rates before the ban. GAY PATRIOTcomments on the before mentioned Obama quote about Australia:
I reiterate the two hidden rules of “Common Sense Gun Laws:”
1. “We only want to keep guns away from dangerous persons.”
2. “Anyone who owns a gun is a dangerous person.”
NATIONAL REVIEW also makes the point that in order to praise Australian “success,” one is praising anti-Constitutional actions:
Let me be clear, as Obama likes to say: You simply cannot praise Australia’s gun-laws without praising the country’s mass confiscation program. That is Australia’s law. When the Left says that we should respond to shootings as Australia did, they don’t mean that we should institute background checks on private sales; they mean that they we should ban and confiscate guns. No amount of wooly words can change this. Again, one doesn’t bring up countries that have confiscated firearms as a shining example unless one wishes to push the conversation toward confiscation.
[….]
Obama gave the impression that gun-violence is on the increase. This is false. As both Pew and the Department of Justice recorded last year, the majority of Americans believe that gun violence is proliferating when it is in fact dropping. This year marked a 20-year low. More than anything, America has a copycat problem in its schools.
…The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that from 2002-2011, 95 percent of total homicide incidents involved a single fatality, 4 percent involved two victims, 0.6 percent involved 3 victims, and only .02 percent involved four or more victims. Another study performed between 1976 and 2005 yields similar results — that less than one-fifth of 1 percent all murders in the United States involved four or more victims. In other words, the bottom line is that out of every 10,000 incidents of homicide, roughly two are mass killings.
Further, contrary to what the zeitgeist may suggest, mass shootings are not on the rise. Prominent criminologist James Alan Fox has found “no upward trend in mass killings” since the ’70s. Take campus statistics as an example: “Overall in this country, there is an average of 10 to 20 murders across campuses in any given year,” Fox told CNN (and roughly 99 percent of these reported homicides were not mass shootings). “Compare that to over 1,000 suicides and about 1,500 deaths from binge drinking and drug overdoses.” Mass shootings on college campuses lag far, far behind many much more prevalent social and mental health problems.
The rare nature of these incidents also holds true for safety in K-12 schools, which garnered a significant amount of attention in the wake of the tragedies in Columbine and Newtown. According to two reports by the Centers for Disease Control, the probability of a child “dying in school in any given year from homicide or suicide was less than one in 1 million between 1992 and 1994 and slightly greater than one in 2 million between 1994 and 1999.”
Of course any story like the above needs a positive one added to it. The Blaze has this:
Two armed criminals reportedly put a gun to a 17-year-old girl’s head on Monday night as she was outside retrieving something from a car. The man, whose intentions still aren’t entirely clear, then ordered the teenager to take them into her house — a decision that would prove to have deadly consequences.
Peering out the window of the St. Louis home were the girl’s mother and father, each prepared to protect their daughter with deadly force. There was also a 5-year-old boy in the house, though his relationship to the family wasn’t known on Tuesday.
The girl’s father, a 34-year-old man, reportedly observed the men walking towards his home while holding a gun to his daughter’s head, a sight that no father ever wants to see. He quickly retrieved his firearm and his wife did the same.
The brave dad then confronted the two criminals and opened fire, hitting both suspects with accurate shots…
