Category: Science

Lies, Damned Lies, and COVID-19

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After watching people spend two days arguing about a statistical factoid wielded by David Frum, it occurred to me: “What is the source of that statistic?” Apparently, nobody else had thought of this question, and so let’s quote David Frum’s article in The Atlantic:

The American right sacrificed its supporters to its COVID-era delusions and lies. Right-wing politicians and media influencers disparaged masking. They derided safety advice against indoor gatherings. They spread crazy lies about COVID vaccines once those became generally available. Many conservative Americans who made the mistake of trusting their political and media leaders paid with their life.
Pew Research Center compared the 20 percent of the U.S. population who lived in the country’s most pro-Trump counties with the 20 percent who lived in the most pro-Biden counties. The most pro-Trump counties suffered nearly 70,000 more COVID deaths than the most pro-Biden counties did.

THE PEW RESEARCH CENTER? You’re making arguments about medical policy based on work by a polling company? Because that’s really the meat-and-potatoes of what Pew does. The fact that they’re a 501(c)3 non-profit doesn’t really change the reality that Pew Research began as a polling operation, founded by the former president of Gallup.

At various times, I have seen Pew Research publish studies about demographic trends that were very informative, but that doesn’t allay my skepticism about their March 2022 article, “The Changing Political Geography of COVID-19 Over the Last Two Years.” We may begin by saying, if you were still afraid of COVID-19 in March 2022, you must be some kind of extreme hypochondriac, the type of person who wore a mask while driving alone in your car. Taylor Lorenz, basically.

Some people are herd animals by nature, and these were the people most eager to comply with the crazy lockdown rules of “15 Days to Slow the Spread,” without ever questioning the logic of those rules.

In case you’ve forgotten, the original rationale of the first COVID-19 lockdown was that the virus was spreading so rapidly that hospitals would soon be overwhelmed with victims, that there would be a shortage of medicine, equipment and personnel to treat patients. This was what “15 Days to Slow the Spread” was about and, when that ended, it was “Six Weeks to Flatten the Curve” — in other words, a total of two months of lockdown, to prevent the medical system from collapsing under the burden of the pandemic. In other words, by mid-May 2020, it would be safe to let life return to normal, but OH DEAR GOD WE CAN’T LET THAT HAPPEN, Democrats and the media collectively screamed, once the initial two months of COVID-19 lockdown were over.

What ensued after that was more about the psychology of mass hysteria than it was a question of public health policy, and the COVID-19 hysteria had very clear political outlines. By mid-2020, we had enough data about hospitalizations and deaths from the virus to know that, unless you were over 70, or obese, or had some other condition that impaired your immune system, COVID-19 wouldn’t kill you. For the vast majority of healthy younger Americans, COVID-19 was just a nasty variety of flu.

Something else that had become apparent by mid-2020 was that statistics about the pandemic were being manipulated to exaggerate the threat, as an excuse for extending lockdowns indefinitely.

In hindsight, this was all insanity. Florida, which with its large population of retirees was home to a disproportionate number of those most vulnerable to the virus, was basically wide open from the summer of 2020 onward. They did this by focusing their attention on protecting senior citizens, while letting everybody else, especially school children, go about their daily lives. Meanwhile, public schools were shut down for the entire 2020-2021 school year in many Democrat-controlled parts of the country. Despite the evidence that Florida’s strategy was correct — the sky didn’t fall when Florida reopened — liberals refused to reconsider their permanent-lockdown mentality, which is the most obvious reason why, in March 2022, Pew Research felt the need to publish an article claiming that GOP-dominated areas had a higher COVID-19 death toll.

Go look at the nifty charts, which claim to show that, while the Democrat-leaning counties had the highest death tolls up until October 2020, the GOP-leaning counties came roaring back thereafter, and were particularly hard hit by the “Delta” and “Omicron” variants of COVID-19 that struck after August 2021. Where were they collecting this data? You have to click a link to see the “Methodology” section, which doesn’t do anything to allay my skepticism about the findings. The article includes a chart pointing out that pro-Biden counties had higher COVID vaccination rates (over 75% in those that Biden won by more than a 25-point margin) than pro-Trump counties (less than 60% in counties that Trump won by more than a 25-point margin), while also mentioning that the data on COVID deaths doesn’t distinguish between the vaccinated and unvaccinated. Which is kind of important, because the vaccines were what the big arguments were really all about after Biden got elected.

The vaccines didn’t work — vaccinated people still got the virus — and they didn’t prevent the virus from spreading. This was especially true once new variants like Delta and Omicron appeared in 2021. You don’t have to be any kind of crazy anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist to see that the vaccines were an expensive failure. I got the vaccine in August 2021 just because I realized that politicians were trying to use data about vaccination rates as an excuse for more lockdowns, and I didn’t want to be used as a statistic in their propaganda: “White guys in Appalachia are the problem!” But just because I’m not dead doesn’t mean the vaccine saved my life, which is what David Frum is trying to use this Pew Center study to prove, yet even Pew doesn’t claim it shows anything about vaccines and death rates. And excuse my skepticism about the entirety of the Pew Center’s methodology on this study.

By the way, as Frum notes, the Pew study claims to show a gap of nearly 70,000 total deaths between the 20% of the population in the most pro-Trump counties (238,791 deaths total) and the 20% in the most pro-Biden counties (170,084 deaths total). Practically all of that difference is attributable to the Delta/Omicron “surges” from August 2021 to the end of February 2022. Am I the only one scratching my head, trying to remember thousands of people who allegedly were dying of COVID in February 2022? Because I’ll be darned if I recall any such thing.

All of this, however, is really just part of Frum’s defense of Anthony Fauci, whose dishonesty is now proven beyond all doubt. Most of us have moved on from all that — I am not sitting around nursing any grudges over what happened five or six years ago — but the Trump-haters can’t stand that Saint Anthony of the Blessed Science might be held accountable, and they’re using dubious statistics to defend him.



 

Tim Walz Lies About Everything

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Before we talk about Tim Walz’s latest “gaffe” (which is what the media call it when a Democrat gets caught lying) can we first talk about the underlying issue? Human reproduction is not complicated, and requires no medical assistance. Generations of our ancestors, stretching back to the dawn of history, successfully reproduced without any more help than could be obtained with a bottle of wine to set the mood. To this day, getting pregnant remains so simple that it is easily accomplished by 10th-graders in the backseat of a Dodge. So when you hear Democrats talk about “reproductive health,” you know that some kind of deception is being practiced. “Reproductive health” is usually just liberal code-speak for abortion, except when it’s about handing out contraceptives to minors at taxpayer expense (and without parental consent), but in general, “reproductive health” is a misleading euphemism in that what is really being discussed is preventing the normal, healthy function of the reproductive system. (By the way, as a father of six myself, I’d be happy to explain “the normal, healthy function” to anyone who doesn’t understand it, but you’ll have to pay me for that educational seminar.)

All of this is preamble to the abnormal and unhealthy governor of Minnesota and his wife, who apparently are on the losing side of the Darwinian competition, and thus required medical assistance to accomplish what 10th-graders so easily do in the backseat of a Dodge.

Do I mean to scoff at the unfortunate experiences of so many people who experience similar difficulties? No, but I’m not the one trying to turn this whole subject into an agenda in a presidential campaign. It’s Democrats who are doing that, and then double-dog-daring us to criticize their policies, so they can then turn around and accuse us of trying to impose some kind of Handmaid’s Tale authoritarian dystopia on the nation. When you decide to turn your personal narrative into a political argument, you thereby invite scrutiny of the details of your life and if, in the resulting discussion, other people’s feelings get hurt — whose fault is that? Not mine. So spare me your crybaby antics, please.

In 1994, then 30-year-old Tim Walz married then-27-year-old Gwen Whipple. “The Walzes underwent fertility treatment at Mayo Clinic for seven years before their children were born in 2001 and 2006,” Wikipedia tells us, implying that as soon as they got married, they went directly from the wedding to the Mayo Clinic. What was the underlying medical problem? Was Tim suffering from a low sperm count? Was there something wrong with Gwen’s fallopian tubes? But excuse my Calvinistic perspective in saying that, if you can’t get pregnant without seven years of treatment at the Mayo Clinic, you might want to contemplate the possibility that parenthood is not part of God’s will for your life.

See what I mean about turning personal narratives into political agendas? I’m not the one who decided that America should have a “national conversation” about the pros and cons of medical interventions in the reproductive process, requiring me to ask questions about the specific details of the Walz’s personal problems. Democrats initiated this discussion with the intent of exploiting it for political advantage, and imagine they can decide the exact terrain on which the resulting battle should be fought, but here I’ll invoke Sherman’s famous reply to Hood: “Talk thus to the marines, but not to me.” Those who choose to inaugurate conflict are entirely responsible for the consequences, and have no right to impose limitations upon those they have attacked.

Tim Walz tried to turn his personal problems into a political attack on Republicans, claiming that somehow Donald Trump would shut down the Mayo Clinic or whatever, and I’m not going to be limited in how I respond. You see, there’s two ways to look at this “reproductive health” thing — science or religion — and either of those perspectives raises profound questions. Let’s start with the scientific view.

According to liberals, The Science™ is Darwinian evolution. Anyone who doubts the evolution narrative is denounced as a dimwitted bigot, but what does Darwinism suggest about “assisted reproductive technology”?

We are encouraged to believe that evolution is synonmous with progress — the species literally improving, becoming better through “survival of the fittest” — which is why those of us who are skeptical of Darwinism are regarded as such reactionaries, since we are portrayed as opponents of this evolution-as-progress scheme. But proponents of The Science™ are remarkably inconsistent in their interpretations of what “progress” should mean. It would seem self-evident, for example, that reproductive failure in any organism is a sort of evolutionary verdict, and yet advocates of The Science™ neverthless defend “assisted reproductive technology” as an evasion of this verdict. Unable to conceive offspring by natural means — disqualified from the “survival of the fittest” — the genetic misfits are provided with artificial meddling to enable them to pass along their bad genes, producing another generation of maladapted mutants.

Undoubtedly, some people’s feelings would be hurt by such a blunt description of what The Science™ of Darwinism implies in regard to infertility, and the medical efforts to treat infertility through IVF (in vitro fertilization) and other such interventions. If your feelings are hurt, however, don’t blame me, blame Tim Walz, who tried to score political points by claiming his wife got IVF (she didn’t, she got intrauterine insemination, which is something else), a lie intended to leverage his personal narrative in accusing Republicans of trying to ban IVF.

“Those bigots are against PROGRESS!”

Perhaps you see why I take General Sherman’s attitude toward these miscreants — if you start a war with me, don’t complain about how I choose to finish the war. We’re at the “March to the Sea” phase now.

Having made the Darwinian argument against “assisted reproductive technology” (i.e., allowing defective people to propogate their inferior genes), I’ll remind readers that I have never believed in Darwinism. Instead, I’m a biblical fundamentalist of Calvinist inclination, and as such, believe in the ultimate sovereignty of God. We pray for God’s blessings, and pray also to escape God’s curses.

“See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil . . . I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.”
— Deuteronomy 30:15, 19 (KJV)

That’s God’s promise, and also His warning. Should we depart from our faith, and fail to “choose life,” we are responsible for the consequences, which are clearly predicted — the alternative to life is death.

We may wish to think we are no longer judged by the law which Jehovah imparted to a nomadic tribe of former Egyptian slaves, but here’s the thing: If God actually does exist, our unbelief doesn’t alter that fact; His existence is not dependent upon our belief, and He remains sovereign despite our impudent infidelity. God’s judgment may be witheld, and our destruction thus delayed, for reasons which we cannot fathom, as the divine will is beyond our comprehension. But we are, at all times, “sinners in the hands of an angry God,” as Jonathan Edwards famously preached, and ought to be cognizant of and grateful for God’s mercy.

There are those — even some Christians — who think Christianity is all about the afterlife, trying to enter Heaven or avoid Hell, as if God never rewards or punishes behavior in the here and now, as if the court of divine justice has been adjourned until Judgment Day. Well, just who do you think God is, anyway?

“The Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.”
— Exodus 34:6-7 (KJV)

Thus spake God to Moses, and these verses have attracted widespread attention for the idea of “generational curses,” in which we may suffer for the wrondoing of our ancestors, or that our own iniquity may visit a curse upon our descendants. Some deceivers (wolves in sheep’s clothing) have used this to exploit the superstitions of the ignorant, so that you have certain preachers who tell their flocks that they can achieve freedom from a “generational curse” for a fee, more or less — the suggestion that generosity in offerings will purchase the desired result.

My dear brothers and sisters, that’s not how it works.

If it is the case that “the iniquity of the fathers” should be the cause of our sufferings, then we ought to accept the divine chastisement gratefully. Should it appear to us that we are somehow cursed, that misfortune haunts our footsteps, it is vain, foolish and sinful to imagine that God is not righteous in His judgment. If God has ordained our fate, who are we to say that we somehow deserve better than the portion allotted to us? However great our suffering may be, shouldn’t we consider the possibility that it could be worse, and therefore be thankful for God’s mercy?

Well, I leave aside that sermon, and let the reader find his own conclusion, but my point is, you cannot cheat God. And that is what seems to me to be involved with “assisted reproductive technology.”

As a Christian, I view children as a blessing from God, and am grateful for my numerous progeny — a blessing I owe to grace, rather than to any merit I may claim, for I am surely nothing but a wretched sinner. When I behold those who have been less favored by God in such matters, it gives me pause, because how is it that somehow God judged me worthy of such a blessing, which He has denied to others who, by all appearances, are much better people than I am? Whatever the explanation, I thank God that I didn’t need seven years of treatment at the Mayo Clinic.

Perhaps there are those who, researching Tim Walz’s background, will point to the fact that he is a lapsed Catholic, now affiliated with the “woke” ECLA, and conclude that God is wise in all His judgments. And I further suppose that many readers, whether religious or secular, will look at how Tim Walz lied about the treatment he and his wife got at the Mayo Clinic, and conclude that Walz’s word simply cannot be trusted.

We are approaching what Ronald Reagan once famously called “A Time for Choosing,” Oherwise nobody would care about the formerly obscure governor of Minnesota who, by his attempted deception, has provoked a public discussion of “assisted reproductive technology” that is long overdue. Walz’s effort to score political points by falsely accusing Republicans of seeking to ban IVF should direct our attention to the criticism of such procedures as unethical — a criticism I’m sure most Americans have never considered. Contemplate what Michael Crichton was trying to tell us in his novel Jurassic Park, with the line from Dr. Ian Malcolm: “God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates Man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs . . .”

You cannot cheat God. Mankind’s efforts to evade the divine will are foolish and sinful, and the consequences are always bad.



 

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And on the Eighth Day, God Said, ‘Everybody Should Buy Evan Sayet’s Book’

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“Not liking something doesn’t mean that that something doesn’t exist. If it did, then there’d be no such thing as a Jennifer Aniston movie.”
— Evan Sayet, from his new book

Ten years ago, I credited Evan Sayet with having written “the most important book since Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type,” and now he’s topped even that achievement with his comprehensive demolition of the Darwinian worldview, Magic Soup, Typing Monkeys, And Horny Aliens From Outer Space: The Patently Absurd Wholly Unsubstantiated and Extravagantly Failed Atheist Origin Myth.

Evan and I go way back. It was at CPAC 2007 that I was wandering through the lobby of the Omni Shoreham Hotel after midnight and happened upon Evan in the company of a fellow I recognized, Andrew Breitbart, who had not then ascended to his status as the world’s most famous Internet provocateur. Because I knew that Breitbart was Matt Drudge’s right-hand man, and because I worked at The Washington Times — where getting Drudge links to our stories was essential to maintaining our profile — I immediately insinuated myself into this group, which also conveniently happened to have picked up a 12-pack of beer. So I ended up spending the night in their hotel room, where Evan tried to sleep while I listened to Andrew tell his amazing stories. Was this meeting a matter of mere chance? Was it a random accident? Or was it destiny — fate, kismet, or dare I say, the will of God in action?

Dear friends, there are no coincidences, and the same divine force that put me in that hotel drinking beers with Breitbart until 3 a.m. also brought forth other miraculous events that the godless would have us believe happened by mere luck. This is the crux of Evan Sayet’s attack on what he properly calls the Militant Materialist worldview of those atheists who claim that Darwinian theory disproves the existence of God.

Coincidence — chance, random luck, statistical probability — is what the atheists offer as the explanatory alternative to Creation. Evan Sayet grabs hold of this point with the ferocity of a pitbull and does not let go until the Godless Serendipity Theory is bleeding out from a loss of credibility:

Atheism is not a scientific belief. In fact, it is neither scientific nor a belief. Militant atheism is not an ideology. It is a weapon used by demagogues and would-be revolutionaries to clear the moral path to their rise to power and the godless way in which they intend to rule.

Evan’s book is crammed full of pithy paragraphs like that, as well as many laugh-out-loud punch lines like that gag about Jennifer Aniston movies. A veteran stand-up comedian and writer for TV comedy shows, Evan knows how to make his points with humor, but as much as you’ll enjoy his jokes, you’ll also understand that Magic Soup is a very serious project, given the totalitarian implications of the atheist worldview.

Ask yourself a question: “Why am I reading this?” Out of all the blog posts in the entire World Wide Web, why are you reading this one? Could it be that Almighty God wants you to buy Evan Sayet’s new book? Far be it from me to presume to speak on God’s behalf, but let the reader ponder the improbability of any other explanation for why you are, in fact, reading a blog post with such a headline. There are no coincidences.

Whereas I tend toward a Calvinistic explanation of how God’s will operates in human affairs, my good friend Evan Sayet is arguably closer to the original source of our monotheistic faith, IYKWIMAITYD.

When Evan contacted me to let me know he had a new book on the market, one of the first things he told me was that it had gotten a glowing review in Chronicles, to which I replied, “Wow.” Because, as I was aware, Chronicles has sometimes had a reputation as being not entirely friendly toward Members of the Tribe. It would be grossly unfair to say that Chronicles is, or ever was, anti-Semitic, but the magazine is proud of its status as the de facto journal of paleoconservatism, and thus the nemesis of neoconservatism, and if you’ve followed the history of that obscure conflict — as I have, by necessity — you perhaps understand why I was impressed to learn that Chronicles had heaped praise on Magic Soup.

How often must I repeat myself: There are no coincidences. Because you see, dear reader, that when I went to find the Chronicles review of Evan’s book, I discovered that it was written by none other than former Michigan Rep. Thaddeus McCotter — who just happens to be the political hero of my co-blogger Smitty. What are the statistical probabilities of such a happenstance? Never mind — it’s the divine will at work, and you can believe whatever you want to believe, but as for myself, I’m 100% certain that it was none other than Jehovah who aligned this so perfectly.

We live in troubled times, my friends, and never has it been more urgent to rally the faithful to defend against the worldwide armies of godlessness that have now surrounded the Camp of the Saints (Revelation 20:9).

You can — indeed, you should, and I would argue, you must — click here to buy Magic Soup, Typing Monkeys, And Horny Aliens From Outer Space: The Patently Absurd Wholly Unsubstantiated and Extravagantly Failed Atheist Origin Myth for $15.99, and by purchasing it through this link, of course, you’ll provide a small commission to me, at no extra cost to yourself. It would be a mitzvah, and may God bless you for it.



 

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Blue Whales Are Decadent and Depraved

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Today I was just innocently scrolling through the news on my phone when I encountered this disturbing headline:

Hidden DNA found in blue whales reveals
they’ve been mating with other species
— and their hybrid offspring

What kind of twisted West Virginia hillbilly freak show is this? “Mating with other specias” and — AND! — “their hybrid offspring”?

For years, we’ve been subjected to environmentalist propaganda portraying the blue whales as being “endangered,” i.e., victims, for whom we’re supposed to feel sympathy, and now scientists have discovered that they’re a slutty bunch of disgusting sea-mammal perverts!

Blue whales in the Atlantic Ocean are harboring a previously unknown and potentially alarming level of hybrid DNA, a new study shows. The findings hint that whale hybrids are much more reproductively viable than previously realized. . . .

(“Potentially alarming”!)

Around 3.5% of the group’s DNA came from fin whales on average. . . .
Scientists have long known that blue whales and fin whales can reproduce to create hybrids of the two species, despite blue whales being around 85 tons (77 metric tons) heavier on average, according to The New York Times. These hybrids are sometimes referred to as “flue” whales and often look like unusually large fin whales with the coloration and jaw structure of blue whales, according to a 2021 study.

(Damned mongrelized freak whales, is what they are.)

Until recently, it was assumed that these hybrids were infertile and could not have offspring of their own, similar to most other hybrid animals. However, a 2018 study revealed that at least some of these hybrids could successfully reproduce with blue whales.
Researchers believe hybrid whales have been reproducing with blue whales, resulting in “backcrossed” offspring with mostly blue whale DNA and some fin whale DNA. This type of DNA transfer from one species to another via interbreeding is known as introgression. . . .

(Yeah, lots of “introgression” in West Virginia, too.)

Similar studies on fin whales have found no evidence that the species have inherited any blue whale DNA via introgression, Engstrom said. So it seems that only blue whales are capable, or perhaps willing, to reproduce with these hybrids.
“We don’t know why introgression appears unidirectional,” Engstrom said. . . .

(Because blue whales are just horny sluts, that’s why.)

There is also little evidence that introgression between fin whales and blue whales happens in any other part of the world. “As far as we know, this is a phenomenon in the North Atlantic only,” Engstrom said.

The North Atlantic is the Appalachia of the oceans. After this shocking news report, I’ve got a whole new perspective on sea mammals. Never trust a blue whale, especially one from the North Atlantic.



 

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Mr. Hockey Stick Says the Quiet Part Out Loud About Population Control Agenda

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Some readers may be unfamiliar with the story of Michael Mann and his infamous “hockey stick” graph, so I will summarize briefly: In 1999, Mann and two colleagues produced a paper on climate trends, showing a sharp upward spike in worldwide temperatures beginning around 1900. The shape of this graph resulted in the “hockey stick” nickname, and it was widely publicized as evidence that global warming was a crisis, a dire emergency requiring severe policy action to reduce the level of carbon emissions. Then in the 2009 “ClimateGate” scandal, the release of emails from England’s East Anglia University showed how the “consensus” about global warming had been manufactured, leading to accusations that Mann had engaged in research fraud. In 2012, Mark Steyn published a brief blog post at National Review referring to Mann as “the man behind the fraudulent climate-change ‘hockey-stick’ graph,” and quoting Rand Simberg of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, another Mann critic. This led to Mann filing a libel lawsuit against Steyn, Simberg, CEI and NR, which has still not been completely dismissed.

Science is not advanced by silencing criticism, and I would argue that Mann’s lawsuit is the best evidence that his research is not trustworthy. Certainly I am not alone among climate-change skeptics in seeing this kind of “science” as just another manifestation of the Paul Ehrlich “Population Bomb” hoax of the 1960s. Mann’s “science” is not about objective analysis of facts; it’s about justifying a totalitarian agenda.

And so the mask is now removed:

“It is obvious the planet can only support so many human beings. We can inflate the numbers through technology, but there are limits.”
Discussions about population are often avoided because, historically, they have sometimes “let us to problematic places where the blame seems to be placed preferentially on the developing world and on people of colour,” says Mann. “The racial overtones that have emerged in the past are problematic and troubling, and we need to flip the switch.
“It is possible to say a population is too large for the planet to support and still recognise the culpability does not apply equally across the board. In the developed world, our footprint is orders of magnitude bigger than in the developing world. More people means more carbon, more warming, and more climate change, but not all people are the same.”
Instead of focusing on population by itself, Mann advocates increasing support for the education of women, which can limit population growth and help address climate change.

(Hat-tip: Beege Welborn at Hot Air via Instapundit.)

Is it not obvious that, rather than “climate change” being a fact discovered by science, which then points to population control as the solution, that instead Mann and his colleagues went looking for some reason — a pretext — to justify the pre-existing desire for population control? Fears about “overpopulation” emerged as a logical conclusion of the acceptance of Darwinian theory among the intelligentsia circa 1900. If, after all, “progress” is dependent upon evolutionary fitness, and it can be observed that birth rates are generally highest among the poor, the ill-educated and socially backward segment of the populace, then . . . something must be done. Such were the concerns that led “philanthropists” to lavish millions of dollars to support advocacy for what we nowadays condemn as the eugenics movement

Historian Donald L. Critchlow chronicled this phenomenon in his excellent 2001 book, Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Goverment in Modern America. A comparative handful of wealthy men created the population control movement, long before any scientist expressed any concern about the impact of carbon emissions. “Climate change” is merely a pretext for advancing this agenda, which is why Mann is supported by the same kind of people who supported Margaret Sanger, Alfred Kinsey and Paul Ehrlich.



 

Now That We’re All Dead …

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In case you missed it, humanity was wiped out Tuesday, according to angry Swedish adolescent Greta Thunberg who, for some reason, decided it was prudent to delete that tweet. Her apocalyptic prediction is part of a long series of false prophecies by environmental doomsayers following in the failed footsteps of Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich who, despite being completely debunked, is still sought out as an “expert” by the liberal media. One cannot help but notice that the same people who’ve been wrong about everything regarding climate change — exactly none of their dire predictions have come true — were also the people telling us that The Science™ required economically destructive lockdowns, compulsory masking and mandatory vaccines to deal with COVID-19, all of which measures proved either unnecessary or only modestly efficacious in stemming the pandemic. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

The thing is, intelligent observers have known for decades that the “climate change” hysteria is not scientific. Ronald Bailey is an award-winning science writer for Reason magazine. In 1993, he published Ecoscam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse, and in 2002, he published Global Warming and Other Eco Myths: How the Environmental Movement Uses False Science to Scare Us to Death. Both of these books, now more than two decades old, are crammed with scientific truth in opposition to the pseudoscientific bullshit of “climate change” and other such environmentalist doomsday myths.

When people say, as they sometimes do, “you ought to write a book” about such a topic, I’m filled with a sense of futility. What’s the point of writing a book debunking “climate change” or some other false liberal belief, when there is already a vast library of books proving that liberals are always wrong about everything? Whatever the issue may be — economics, foreign affairs, education, race relations, you name it — if liberals have any clear set of consensus beliefs on a subject, their opinions and policy preferences are without exception demonstrably wrong.

And yet, Joe Biden is president.

Why even bother pointing out the errors of liberalism? It’s clear that at least half the population is emotionally committed to the pursuit of irrationality and error, no matter what the facts may be.

Yet despite the hopelessness of curing these fanatics of their mental disorder, Catherine Salgado at PJMedia points out the latest evidence that the “climate change” kooks are wrong: Computer-model predictions of temperatures in the U.S. “corn belt” (i.e., the agricultural heartland that feeds the world) have all overestimated the warming trend.

(Hat-tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

In the past 50 years, the actual temperature increase was minimal, a fraction of a single degree of warming. But every one of the computer models predictions had predicted at least twice as much of an increase, with some missing it by far larger factors. This is not a minor error, nor is it a trivial matter. If “climate change” was real, the possibility of dramatic warming in the world’s prime agricultural region — producing severe droughts and other adverse weather effects — would be catastrophic. But the predictions were all wrong, and there has been no catastrophe.

And despite Greta Thunberg’s prediction that humanity would be wiped out by Tuesday, I’m still very much alive, and so are you. And I’m glad. Otherwise, you couldn’t HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR.



 

 

‘Limited Scientific Evidence’

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Are you kidding me with this? What kind of “journalism” is being practiced at NPR? Perhaps the kind in which ordinary common sense is prohibited. You don’t need an advanced degree in biology to know that the average man is 5-foot-10 and the average woman is 5-foot-5. And these average differences have a profound effect when considering the tail ends of the bell curve distributions. A man who is 5-foot-5 (the average height of a woman) is at the eight percentile (bottom 8%) of the male distribution; in other words, 92% of men are taller than the average woman. A man who is 6 feet tall is at the 84th percentile of the male distribution, whereas a 6-foot-tall woman is at the 99th percentile of the female distribution. So in a randomly selected group of 100 men, you’ll find 16 guys who are 6 feet tall. To find 16 women who are 6 feet tall, you’ll need to be choosing from a group of more than 1,500 women.

This is just basic statistics, using a single metric, based on information anybody can find with Google. There are other metrics we could consult. The world record for the 100-meter sprint is 9.58 seconds, set by Usain Bolt in 2009; the women’s world record, 10.45, was set by Florence Griffith-Joyner in 1988. The women’s record has stood for 35 years, which should suffice to suggest that it represents pretty much the maximum feasible speed by a female runner. Last year in the Southeastern Conference men’s 100-meter finals, how many of the male finalists ran faster than Griffith-Joyner’s world-record 10.45 seconds? The answer: All of them. And this is routine — that is to say, all competitive male sprinters outrun Flo Jo’s female world-record time, in every college track meet in America. “Limited scientific evidence”?

Being a traditionalist, I can’t resist an ironic smile at the strange fruit now being produced by the feminist tree of Equality. For decades, feminists have assaulted any all-male institution as inherently unfair, but now you have men pretending to be women in order to access all-female institutions and suddenly the absurdity of Equality is apparent to everyone. The fact that militant feminists like Meghan Murphy now find themselves siding with conservatives vindicates what I’ve been saying for years: Never bet against the Gods of the Copybook Headings.

(Hat-tip: John Hoge.)



 

 

The COVID-19 Fetish Community

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John Hoge blogged about the person pictured above with the headline “I’m Not Making This Up, You Know,” and yet at first, I didn’t believe it. Surely, I thought, this must be some kind of satire — a 4chan troll, a parody of extreme COVID-19 paranoia. But then I checked her Twitter timeline and discovered that (a) not only is she real, but (b) she’s part of an online hive of thousands of viral panic-mongers. These people are hoarders of bad news, obsessed with the phenomenon of “long COVID,” and convinced that the pandemic isn’t over yet. Three years since we began “15 days to slow the spread,” followed by “30 days to flatten the curve,” some people still can’t let it go. They’re addicted to fear.

Well, the good news is: I’m not dead yet. And since you’re reading this, obviously, you’re not dead, either. Back in September 2021, I got the Moderna vaccine, because I didn’t want to give the “Lockdown Forever” crowd any excuse to cite me as a statistic of “vaccine resistance.” The virus didn’t kill me, and the vaccine didn’t kill me, either, but when they started promoting COVID-19 booster shots, I was like, “Hold up there.”

All these new variants kept being reported — Delta, Omicron, etc. — and we were told that we needed more shots to fight the new variants. Meanwhile, there were reports of so-called “breakthrough” cases, where people got COVID-19 despite their prior vaccinations, even as there was talk of making the vaccine mandatory, and it was just about this time that I began to suspect it was all a racket. The push for 100% vaccination and even mandatory boosters was really about profits for Big Pharma.

Far be it from me to spread “misinformation” or “conspiracy theories,” but when an industry lobbies government to make their products mandatory? Wake up and smell the corruption.

Probably a lot of other people reached a similar conclusion, but regardless of whether they see the mandatory vaccine campaign as a Big Pharma scam, nearly everybody agrees: It’s over.

No more lockdowns. No more masks. No more panic-inspired testing of people every time they come down with a case of the sniffles.

We’re done with that, and we’re not going back, ever.

Raise your hand if you never once got tested for COVID-19.

See, that’s the dividing line. Over the past three years, I had one or two mild colds, but a couple of days of a runny nose and a cough never inspired me to rush out and get tested for COVID-19. For all I know, any one of those might have been a COVID-19 case, but if so, it wasn’t too much for my immune system. And since we’re talking about “The Science,” is there any reason to believe that the Wuhan lab was able to mutate the virus to such an extent to render normal human immune responses completely ineffective? Is mere exposure to the virus an automatic death sentence? Or is it the case, as I suspect, that most reasonably healthy people who were exposed to the Wuhan bug never experienced severe symptoms, never got tested, never sought medical care, and recovered without ever being counted as a COVID-19 case?

Excuse me for exercising what used to be called “common sense,” a trait that seems to have become much less common. At the core of the COVID-19 panic was a bunch of hypochondriacs, people vulnerable to suggestion, who became obsessed with the virus in the same way that some people develop sexual fetishes about high-heeled shoes, leather, or whatever.

The Internet allows these COVID-19 fetishes to find each other online, to form social-media cliques that turn into echo chambers where it’s 24/7 gloom-and-doom — all fear, all the time. Inside these online echo-chambers, the hypochondriacs feed each other news items — the latest research findings, etc. — that feed their irrational paranoia about the Deadly Super-Virus From Hell. It’s a sort of religious cult, where the voices of common sense are condemned as heresy. In a way, it’s a mirror-image of the cult of extreme anti-vaxxers, a place where True Believers seize upon anecdotal evidence that “proves” their point of view. Yes, there is such a thing as “long COVID,” and yes, some people die from bad vaccine reactions, but as a matter of statistical probability, you’re very unlikely to be affected by either of these phenomena.

It’s like “police brutality.” No matter how many times we’re confronted with claims that racist police have murdered an innocent black man, we know that (a) such cases are statistically rare, (b) cops are more likely to be killed by black criminals than the other way around, and (c) the “activists” who seek to turn every such case into an excuse to riot are motivated by hatred, greed and a lust for political power. Knowing the facts is the only way to protect yourself from being manipulated by these dishonest “activists” and their unscrupulous media henchmen.

What is to be done about the COVID-19 fetishists, like this lunatic woman with her science-fiction-movie protective gear? Mockery, yes, but other than that, we need to keep a watchful eye on these people for the simple reason that they’re crazy and, as you know, Crazy People Are Dangerous.