Presenting the European Heat Wave
OK children, get out your red, orange and yellow crayons!
You can print tomorrow’s temperature map for Germany (below) and add your own colors to make it more exciting like the one from a month ago (above).
Month: July 2022
Stopping Phantom Voters Deciding US Elections
Jay Valentine reports what is known about the phantom voting industry and those fighting it for the sake of US election integrity. His American Thinker article is Election Heroes Are Stopping Fraudulent Voting…Right Now. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
The soul of phantom voter fraud is the occasional, non-committed voter.
They show up at the last minute, delivering winning margins.
Actually, nobody shows up. Nor does anyone return an absentee ballot. That magic comes from a wonderful customer service innovation, the Phantom Voter Concierge, who casts the non-committed voters’ votes for them.
1. Building Reserves of Phantom Voter Identities
Let’s go there. Voter rolls are crammed with millions of voters who seldom, occasionally, or never vote. Democrat-leaning organizations run voter registration drives in edge communities, collecting identities they expect will never vote. You remember ACORN registering drug addicts on city streets? You might have said, “Why? They will never vote!”
They aren’t expected to vote. They are simply voter identity placeholders
later used by vote-harvesters.
State-funded groups like ERIC are paid by a dozen state governments, some with clueless Republican governors, to make sure almost nobody is ever taken off voter rolls. The Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) provides institutional cover to this national phantom voter scam.
During early voting, vote-harvesters track those who never voted
or have not voted yet and vote for them.
In some states, like Wisconsin, leftist groups had access to the online voter rolls — something nobody else had. They could track every voter and vote for all of them if they did not show up in 2020.
Remember the stories in 2020 of people coming out to vote, often for the first time in years, to be told, “Sorry, you already voted”? Your Voter Concierge voted for you! Saved you the gas money to drive to the polls!
There are people voting from Salvation Army Food Banks who registered at that address twelve years ago. Those people are likely dead or living in a tent in Austin now — but still voting.
There are people at the Alabama college dorm, registered since 1984, still active and voting.
In Wisconsin, the Voter Concierges went to cognitive care facilities, where the patients did not recognize their own children. Their Voter Concierge voted them. Now part of a criminal investigation, this is how it’s done.
So how bad is the problem?
The Wisconsin voter integrity team did a deep dive, using U.S. government and state databases, and found 225,000 active, current voters who had “issues.” Those included addresses that did not exist; locations that could not be a true registration address, like a jail; and scores of others.
Elections are often decided by 1% of the vote. The Wisconsin team identified potential phantom voters easily able to impact an election.
2. Creating a Surplus of Empty Ballots
The other half of the scam is sending out absentee ballots to addresses that don’t line up.
For instance, there may be an apartment building at 145 Essex Street. The ballot-harvesting industry registers people there, deliberately skipping their apartment number.
Their mail gets returned to — you guessed it, smarty-pants! Those absentee ballots accumulate at the local Post Office.
The Wisconsin voter integrity team, one of the best in the country, found evidence that the Post Office collected those ballots and gave them to the Voter Concierges — to vote. Pretty good USPS customer service!
You might think this would be caught with signature matching. Right! That is why so many states or counties eliminate the signature match — like Maricopa County in Arizona.
If your blood is boiling right now, you just don’t get it. This is customer service on a whole new level. The Voter Concierge gets votes counted – even if the voter never casts that vote.
3. Scrubbing Clean the Voter Rolls
Voter integrity teams are now applying advanced computer technology to thwart the Voter Concierge by deep-cleaning the rolls.
In 2022, the vote-harvesting industry will again flood the zone in swing counties with over 250,000 new registrants from September to November.
Several voter integrity teams, using advanced artificial intelligence technology, can check every registrant, at silicon speed, against over 30 databases, with a billion records, ensuring that the registrant is not living in an R.V. park, a church, or a UPS store, and that his address meets current legal standards.
Sorry, Beto, but registering every itinerant is no longer the key to the Texas Governor’s Mansion.
For the first time, phantom voters are being identified before their registrations take effect.
Living in an apartment where you do not designate the apartment number? Sorry, pal — you aren’t voting this year. Registering from a church? There had better be enough bathrooms to meet the certificate of occupancy requirements for that county.
More voters showing up in a county than there are eligible citizens? Flagged hourly! Alert issued before the ballots are counted!
4. Applying Real-Time Voter Integrity Technology
As ballots arrive during early voting, artificial intelligence snapshots aggregate voter identities. That guy who voted on day 2 in person, disappeared on snapshot 8, reappeared on snapshot 11 with his ballot changed to absentee…is identified. Before that ballot is tabulated, it is red-flagged, and the voter integrity team files a protest.
Thirty-five thousand inactive voters, changed to active — then voted, then changed to inactive again? The A.I. systems pick this up with snapshot analysis. That scam is over!
For the first time, voter integrity teams have technology ballot-harvesters cannot outrun.
When Sheriff Clarke and Mike Lindell started supporting these kinds of technologies, after the 2020 election, the focus was voter roll anomalies. Anomalies were abundant.
The battlefield has changed to real-time analysis, driven by artificial intelligence.
The combined knowledge of a dozen gifted voter integrity teams, with 16 months of experience, is built into an artificial intelligence engine, identifying phantom voters before they are registered, before they can illegally vote.
Every time a fake vote is cast by a Voter Concierge, an American is disenfranchised. Artificial intelligence helps the good guys protect the vote and gives confidence to all Americans that their elections are legit.
Voter integrity teams learned that chasing 2020 voter fraud after the election is too late. Some leading election integrity teams are stopping phantom voter fraud before it impacts elections. Cleaning up voter rolls just became an A.I.-driven, real time endeavor.
Jay Valentine led the team that built the eBay fraud detection engine and the TSA No-Fly List. Jay’s website is JayValentine.com. He can be reached at Jay@ContingencySales.com.
Explaining Our Enduring Mild Climate
This post from some years ago was in response to David A. elaborating on his thinking and questions on this topic. There is much uncertain and unknown about the functioning of our climate system. I listen when a seasoned expert such as John Christy says:
“The reason there is so much contention regarding “global warming” is relatively simple to understand: In climate change science we basically cannot prove anything about how the climate will change as a result of adding extra greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. So we are left to argue about unprovable claims.”
See Christy’s Data-Based Climate Science
So everyone is theorizing and wondering if and when the best theory will win–that is, become the new conventional wisdom. According to Christy, the science is far from settled, and he has examined the datasets extensively, having built some of them himself.
I have also learned a lot from Nullius in Verba, who is one of best explaining these things to us laymen. For example, he comments:
“It would be slightly more accurate to say that the lapse rate is the vertical temperature gradient at which convection switches off and therefore stops cooling the surface.
The sun warms the surface, but the heat escapes very quickly by convection so the build-up of heat near the surface is limited. In an incompressible atmosphere, it would *all* escape, and you’d get no surface warming. But because air is compressible, and because gases warm up when they’re compressed and cool down when allowed to expand, air circulating vertically by convection will warm and cool at a certain rate due to the changing atmospheric pressure. Air cools as it rises and expands, and warms as it descends and is compressed. This warming/cooling effect means that hot air no longer rises when it would cool faster from expansion than the surrounding air. Cold air can sit on top of warm air and be stable. The adiabatic lapse rate is why the tops of mountains are colder than their bottoms.
It’s a bit like the way a pot of boiling water sticks at a temperature of 100 C. If you turn the gas up, the water boils more vigorously, carrying more energy off as steam, which balances the extra energy supplied and keeps the temperature still at exactly 100 C. The rate at which heat escapes is very non-linear – extremely fast for temperatures above the threshold, extremely slow for temperatures below it. So long as the system is driven hard enough, it will get driven up against the non-linear limit and held there. The lapse rate does the same thing, except that instead of fixing the temperature, it fixes its gradient so you get a rigid slope that can freely float up and down in level.
The temperature at the average altitude of emission to space converges on the temperature that radiates the same energy the Earth absorbs. All levels above and below it are held in a fixed relationship to it by the lapse rate. The temperature at any other level is the temperature at the emission altitude plus the lapse rate times the difference in heights. Hence, the temperature at the surface differs by the lapse rate times the average height of emissions to space.”
“It’s interesting to consider what would happen if you had a strongly absorbing greenhouse material but a zero lapse rate. You’d get lots of backradiation, but no greenhouse warming. By marvelous happenstance we do have such a physical situation in the oceans. Water absorbs all thermal radiation within about 20 microns, making it something like 20,000 times more powerful a greenhouse material than the atmosphere. It’s a (relatively) easy calculation to show that if radiation was the only way heat could be transported, as the backradiation argument assumes, the temperature a metre down would be several thousand degrees! But water is almost incompressible, having a lapse rate of around 0.1 C/km, and so convection nullifies it entirely. Fortunate, eh? . . .”
“The direction of net energy flow is determined only by the difference in temperatures, not the amount of stuff. If you have a big body at a cold temperature next to a small body at a very hot temperature, the cold body might be emitting more heat overall because of its bigger surface area, but the net flow is still from the hot body to the cold. Most of the heat emitted from the big cold body doesn’t hit the small body, because it’s so small. Only the temperature matters.
The way this is arranged varies depending on the configuration, but it always happens. People have had a lot of fun over the years trying to construct exotic arrangements of mirrors and radiators and insulators and heat engines to try to break the rule, but nobody has succeeded yet. The second law of thermodynamics is one of the most thoroughly challenged and tested of all the laws of physics. I do encourage people to try though. The prize on offer is a perpetual motion machine to the lucky winner who defeats it!”
hat tip to Homer Simpson
Nullius in Verba holds forth here:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/discussion/post/2471448?currentPage=5
David, I am not a fan of thought experiments about hypothetical worlds with or without CO2. I have read too many threads that go around in circles until everyone turns into wheels.
I do like what E.M. Smith (Chiefio) said sometime ago:
“It is peculiar that everyone is so taken in by the whole notion of the so-called ’radiative greenhouse effect’ being such an ingrained necessity, such a self-evident, requisite part, as it were, of our atmosphere’s inner workings. The ’truth’ and the ’reality’ of the effect is completely taken for granted, a priori. And yet, the actual effect is still only a theoretical construct.
In fact, when looking at the real Earth system, it’s quite evident that this effect is not what’s setting the surface temperature of our planet.
The whole thing can be stated in a simple, yet accurate manner.
The Earth, a rocky sphere at a distance from the Sun of ~149.6 million kilometers, where the Solar irradiance comes in at 1361.7 W/m2, with a mean global albedo, mostly from clouds, of 0.3 and with an atmosphere surrounding it containing a gaseous mass held in place by the planet’s gravity, producing a surface pressure of ~1013 mb, with an ocean of H2O covering 71% of its surface and with a rotation time around its own axis of ~24h, boasts an average global surface temperature of +15°C (288K).
Why this specific temperature? Because, with an atmosphere weighing down upon us with the particular pressure that ours exerts, this is the temperature level the surface has to reach and stay at for the global convectional engine to be able to pull enough heat away fast enough from it to be able to balance the particular averaged out energy input from the Sun that we experience.
It’s that simple.”
Update 1 May 5,2015
David, an additional point of some importance: There is empirical support for the lapse rate existing independent of IR activity.
Global warmists share an assumption that CO2 raises the effective radiating altitude, thereby warming the troposphere and the surface. Now this notion can be found in textbooks and indeed operates in all the climate models. Yet there is no empirical evidence supporting it. What data there is (radiosonde balloon readings) detects no effect from IR active gases upon the temperature profile in the atmosphere.
“It can be seen from the infra-red cooling model of Figure 19 that the greenhouse effect theory predicts a strong influence from the greenhouse gases on the barometric temperature profile. Moreover, the modeled net effect of the greenhouse gases on infra-red cooling varies substantially over the entire atmospheric profile.
However, when we analysed the barometric temperature profiles of the radiosondes in this paper, we were unable to detect any influence from greenhouse gases. Instead, the profiles were very well described by the thermodynamic properties of the main atmospheric gases, i.e., N 2 and O 2 , in a gravitational field.”
While water vapour is a greenhouse gas, the effects of water vapour on the temperature profile did not appear to be related to its radiative properties, but rather its different molecular structure and the latent heat released/gained by water in its gas/liquid/solid phase changes.
For this reason, our results suggest that the magnitude of the greenhouse effect is very small, perhaps negligible. At any rate, its magnitude appears to be too small to be detected from the archived radiosonde data.” Pg. 18 of referenced research paper
Open Peer Rev. J., 2014; 19 (Atm. Sci.), Ver. 0.1. http://oprj.net/articles/atmospheric-science/19 page 18 of 28
In summary David, it is observed and accepted by all that there is a ~33C difference between the temperature at the surface and at the effective radiating level (the tropopause, where convection stops). Warmists attribute that increase in temperature to the IR activity of CO2.
Others, including me, contend that it is the mass of the atmosphere, mostly O2 and N2 delaying the loss of heat from the surface until IR active gases are able to cool the planet effectively without obstruction. That retention of heat in the atmosphere is measurable in the lapse rate. And 90% of the IR activity is due to H2O, especially in the lower troposphere.
Wrightstone’s Climate Truth Canceled by LinkedIn
Gregory R. Wrightstone writes at Real Clear Energy LinkedIn Shuts Out Truth — Again. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and some added images
Censors at LinkedIn have permanently banned me from the social media site after I presented data drawn from peer-reviewed data used by the preeminent promoter of the narrative that man-made global warming threatens the planet— the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
How can this be? Well, first, my offending posts placed today’s level of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the context of geological time, suggesting that life would be well served if there were more CO2 — exactly the opposite of what climate alarmists say. Secondly, I’ve had the audacity to publish facts — also know as the truth, multiple times on LinkedIn— that contradict the theory that humans face an “existential threat” from a harmless gas of which each of us daily exhales two pounds.
“Your account has violated the LinkedIn User Agreement and Professional Community Policies,” read the email from the site. “Due to the number and/or the severity of these violations, this account has been permanently restricted.”
The posts were of two charts. One showed that carbon dioxide levels were nearly 6,000 parts per million (ppm) 600 million years ago when many animal life forms first appeared in the Cambrian Era. Another illustrated a 140-million-year decline of CO2 levels — from 2,500 parts per million (ppm) to the current 420 ppm.
Implied in the data is that carbon dioxide levels eventually would drop to 150 ppm, at which point plants — and ultimately all life — begin to die from CO2 starvation. The concentration got as low as 180 ppm in the last ice age about 12,000 years ago. It was at 280 ppm at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century.
The addition of 140 ppm since then have likely come from man’s activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels. If so, human activity has saved the planet from the existential threat of too little CO2. In any case, more of the powerful plant food is a good thing, as evidenced by the overall greening of Earth and record crop harvests of recent decades.
As executive director of the CO2 Coalition, I’ve had previous run-ins with LinkedIn censors. One involved a post about a CO2 Coalition paper on global temperatures. Although LinkedIn did not identify the broken rules, the only possible “violation” would have been an admonition to “not share false or misleading content.” The censored paper, The Global Mean Temperature Anomaly Record, was fully sourced and written by two of the top climate scientists in the world, Richard Lindzen and John Christy.
These are no lightweight scientists. Dr. Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is an award recipient of the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and was a lead author of the IPCC’s third assessment report’s scientific volume.
Professor Christy is the director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and has been Alabama’s State Climatologist since 2000. Along with Dr. Roy Spencer, he has maintained one of the key global temperature data sets relied on by scientists and government bodies. For this achievement, they were awarded NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement.
Figure 4. As in Fig. 3 except for seasonal station and global anomalies. As noted in the text, the inhabitants of the Earth experience the anomalies as noted by the black circles, not the yellow squares.
The main thrust of the paper was to put the modest one-degree rise in temperature since 1900 in its proper perspective. When compared to wide swings in temperature experienced on a daily and yearly basis, that slight rise in global temperature over the last 120 years does not appear as alarming as portrayed by the purveyors of climate doom. Like so many others who challenge the notion of catastrophic man-made warming, the authors risked being censored by the intellectual elite — or those who identify as such. And they were.
The CO2 Coalition has been attacked by other climate cultists, including Facebook and members of a political class that insists on forcing its ideology on everybody. Obviously, we care more about the truth — and our freedom — than anybody’s approval.
As noted philosopher of science Karl Popper said, “Democracy (that is, a form of government devoted to the protection of the open society) cannot flourish if science becomes the exclusive possession of a closed set of specialists.”
Gregory Wrightstone is a geologist, executive director of the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Va., and author of “Inconvenient Facts: The science that Al Gore doesn’t want you to know.” He has been an IPCC expert reviewer.
Woke Rights Nullify Others’ Liberties
Georgi Boorman writes at The Federalist Woke ‘Rights’ Are All Based On Coercion. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
The litany of woke entitlements alleged by the left infringe on existing rights,
restricting the freedoms of some in order to benefit others.
When the political left finds a meme they really think sells, they go all-in. Such is the case with “forced birth” or “forced motherhood” in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade and stated a Constitutional right to abortion does not exist. I wrote recently about how “forced birth” is a nonsensical description of pregnancies resulting (as is almost always the case) from consensual sex. Babies are a natural consequence of sex and procreation is the primary reason sex exists in the first place.
“Forced birth” or “forced motherhood” are projections of the left’s own brutality and reliance on force onto their political and cultural opposition. Abortion is force. Abortion kills; it is a brutal denial of this tiny, developing human’s right to life, the most fundamental of all rights. For the woman’s “right” to be exercised, another life must end. This wretched truth differs from the left’s construction of other “rights” only in degree, not in kind.
They predicate many of their “fundamental rights” on the coercion of others,
and if a so-called “right” is based on coercion, it is not fundamental,
merely an entitlement guaranteed by a bully state.
Of course, when we speak about coercion, abortion advocates point to exceptional cases such as pregnancy resulting from rape. As I wrote in my last piece, nonconsensual sex, especially resulting in pregnancy, is a grave loss of autonomy. Yet the innocent baby’s more essential right to life supersedes this loss of autonomy for nine months, as difficult a circumstance as it may be. One tragedy should not be compounded by another.
A baby’s right to life obviously doesn’t supersede a mother’s right to life.
That may be a reason to deliver a baby early, even too early to survive, but not a reason for deliberate destruction. What opponents of abortion are referring to, and what is being debated, is not situations in which carrying a preborn baby endangers the mother. The practice we condemn is the premeditated killing of a baby in the womb because that baby is not wanted, whether because of his paternity, apparent defect, or general inconvenience to the parents.
One of the definitions of “coerce” is “to deprive of by force.” So, it is fitting we call this kind of “right” a coercive entitlement. That classification extends far beyond abortion, though abortion is the most heinous of all.
Before further characterizing these coercive entitlements, let me address the other objection that will doubtlessly arise: that all our rights rely on at least the threat of the use of force, so what’s the difference? Force wielded by the state on those who would violate a right, which is the only way rights can be protected, is not the same as coercion or restrictions applied to people in order for a right to be exercised in the first place.
If I give a public speech and someone who hates my views comes and tries to drag me off the stage to shut me up, police should intervene to protect my right and take the perpetrator into custody. If, on the other hand, the police themselves drag me off the stage because my speech violates a law against “hate speech” meant to “protect” certain demographics, or if I don’t make that speech in the first place due to the threat of being dragged off to jail, that is force necessarily applied or threatened in order to guarantee this “right” to not be a victim of “hate speech.”
The Right Not to be Offended
Woke rights are entitlements to coercion and the restriction of others’ rights previously recognized. To protect certain people’s “right to live their true selves,” for example, the far left alleges it has the constitutional right to limit others’ free speech so that some groups are not offended or emotionally wounded. With “misgendering” and “dead-naming,” we must in some cases be forced into certain speech for this right to “be one’s authentic self” to exist.
Again, with transgender athletes: it isn’t “equality” unless all institutions are forced to allow them to compete with the sex with which they identify. The right of parents to protect their children is also threatened by the left as children far below the age of consent are alleged to have the “right” to do permanent and severe damage to their bodies with so-called gender transition. They allege this “right” while children face social contagions they’re poorly equipped to handle and gender doctrines that confuse rather than elucidate. The right of parents to make medical decisions for minors are critical in these circumstances, and the far left would have them erased.
More Coercion Regarding Gays, Lockdowns
The alleged “right to equal treatment” for gay couples a la Masterpiece Cake Shop also relies on coercion. The left claims true “equality” isn’t achieved unless bakers, photographers, and floral designers can be forced to express views or support behaviors they disagree with.
Consider more recently the left’s fervent support for lockdowns in the name of a supposed “right” to not be infected, smearing those who disagree with them, who simply want to exercise their freedom to live a normal life, as “reckless” and “murderous.” The alleged entitlement to a reduced threat of Covid infection (or insert latest panic-inducing pathogen here) is dependent on restricting the more basic freedoms of others. Mask and vaccine mandates follow the same flawed logic.
Affirmative Action and Taxes
Universities likewise violate the right to equal treatment under the law through affirmative action. Applicants of certain minority statuses are given preferential treatment while non-minority applications may be “downgraded” simply due to applicants’ ethnicity, gender, or sexuality. The left would see affirmative action expanded and racial quotas in employment, now banned, used widely.
Even the most basic right to keep the money you earn has been infringed upon for decades by the government expressly for the purpose of distributing it to others who earn less. Those with fewer resources are entitled to the resources gained by others, according to the left.
Supplanting Natural Rights
The new, “woke” set of rights are just more aggressive iterations of this long-standing belief of the left: government must take some of the wealth, opportunity, freedoms, and rights of some in order to benefit others. Thus, the leftist coercive rights supplant natural rights identified by the Framers of our Constitution, rights that come from the Creator. Abortion as a “fundamental” right supplants the right to life. They cannot coexist. The rights to not be “victimized” by disfavored speech and to “be one’s true self” and be “equal” supplant the right to free speech. The “right” to not be infected with a certain pathogen supplants the rights to move about freely and to peaceably assemble. The latter rights must be abridged to uphold the new ones.
The “forced birth” talking point discussed above reminds us what is inside this trojan horse of entitlements alleged to be “civil rights” or “fundamental human rights:” bondage. The only real fundamental right leftists believe in is the right of the state to use force in enacting their agenda. From abortion to so-called gender transition, these new rights are definitionally authoritarian, abridging pre-existing rights to support themselves.
The quest of the woke left to free themselves from biological realities and natural order, as in the case of abortion, gender, and sexuality, and to achieve a more “equitable” society, relies on submission, subjugation, and if necessary, lethal force. The truth remains amid the temper tantrums and the angry memes:
There is no free, thriving society that can be achieved through the use of force
by one group of citizens in the name of another.
Trans Ideology Vs. Anthropology
The Lucy Exhibit, 3.2 million year old humanoid, National Museum of Ethiopia
The woke progressives are hell-bent on erasing all historical wisdom in order revolutionize society. If you thought traditional disciplines like Archeology and Anthropology would be spared, think again. The gender and racist zealots are outraged that ancestors like Lucy were given feminine names, (or others masculine ones) despite our not knowing whether or not they identified with their own anatomy. And as well, it’s an insult to the living who want to keep their gender options open.
The woke worms are hard at work on the foundation of human knowledge about humans, as Christian Schneider writes at College Fix Gender activists push to bar anthropologists from identifying human remains as ‘male’ or ‘female’. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Argue scientists cannot know how an ancient individual identified themselves
As soon as ancient human remains are excavated, archaeologists begin the work of determining a number of traits about the individual, including age, race and gender.
But a new school of thought within archaeology is pushing scientists to think twice about assigning gender to ancient human remains.
It is possible to determine whether a skeleton is from a biological male or female using objective observations based on the size and shape of the bones. Criminal forensic detectives, for example, do it frequently in their line of work.
But gender activists argue scientists cannot know how an ancient individual identified themselves.
“You might know the argument that the archaeologists who find your bones one day will assign you the same gender as you had at birth, so regardless of whether you transition, you can’t escape your assigned sex,” tweeted Canadian Master’s degree candidate Emma Palladino last week.
She is not alone. Gender activists have formed a group called the Trans Doe Task Force to “explore ways in which current standards in forensic human identification do a disservice to people who do not clearly fit the gender binary.”
“We propose a gender-expansive approach to human identification by combing missing and unidentified databases looking for contextual clues such as decedents wearing clothing culturally coded to a gender other than their assigned sex,” the group’s mission statement reads.
This February, University of Kansas Associate Professor Jennifer Raff published “Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas,” in which she argued that there are “no neat divisions between physically or genetically ‘male’ or ‘female’ individuals.”
Raff suggested scientists cannot know the gender of a 9,000 year-old biologically Peruvian hunter because they don’t know whether the hunter identified as male or female – a “duality” concept she says was “imposed by Christian colonizers.”
Some archaeologists push back at the effort to de-gender human remains.
San Jose State archaeology Professor Elizabeth Weiss told The Fix that eliminating gender classifications amounts to “ideologically-motivated fudging.” Weiss said there is a move among academics “toward getting all of the academy’s favored shibboleths to accord with one another.”
Weiss said the recent explosion in the number of people identifying as transgender suggests that trend is “social and not biological,” so “retroactively de-sexing obscures this obvious fact.”
She noted that applying biological sex to remains often helps dispel myths detrimental to women.
“Some early anthropologists sometimes mistook some robust female skeletons as male skeletons, particularly in the Aleut and Inuit collections; this reinforced false stereotypes that females were not as hard working as males,” she said. “Over time, biological anthropologists and archaeologists worked hard to determine which traits are determined by sex, regardless of time and culture. This new policy of erasing this progress is a step back for science and women.”
“Sexing skeletal remains is a critical skill in forensics and any diminishing of this skill will negatively impact criminal investigations, denying the victims and their families justice,” she said.
Weiss is joined by University of Cambridge scholar Jennifer Chisolm, who has argued analyses that posit transgender individuals played a large part in Indigenous populations are often ahistorical, and can even distract “from the contemporary discrimination [such individuals] face within their own communities.”
Gender politics are not the only ideology to work its way into anthropology and archaeology. Some activists have called for scientists to cease classifying remains by race, as well.
“Ancestry estimation contributes to white supremacy,” DiGangi and Bethard wrote, labeling the practice “dangerous.”
Others have called for changing primate names that were derived from white white men from the northern hemisphere. The activists argue that continuing to use the current names is “perpetuating colonialism and white supremacy.”
“This is just another attempt to insert a current woke ideology where it doesn’t belong,” Weiss said.
Monkeypox Hygiene Advice
The usual suspects are stirring the panic pot over Monkeypox, and so far our trusted sources of health guidance, like CDC and FDA and NIH, have been silent. So in the public interest I put forward a two-step program by which every individual can self-protect against Monkeypox.
1. Do not handle monkeys, squirrels or other rodents,
2. Do not have sex with anyone who does, or who has open skin sores.
There you go. Refrain from these two activities and no vaccine required.
More from Dr. Malone, who actually is trustworthy:
Don’t be Worried By Monkeypox (Unless it’s Genetically Altered!)
Growing Backlash Against Covid/Climate Tyranny
Two Sides of the Same Coin
Andrea Widburg writes at American Thinker Fighting back against COVID and Climate Change tyranny. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
The phrase “New World Order” (“NWO”) is a loaded term. For starters, the people who are pushing for a single world government prefer to call it “The Great Reset.” Additionally, NWO sounds like the ultimate conspiracy theory, complete with indivisible dots, imaginary lines, and tin foil hats. And yet there’s no doubt that the self-anointed elites across the world have coalesced around a single vision that involves ending fossil fuel and achieving total control over individuals to “protect” them from COVID. Still, people across the globe are pushing back and one group has a global vision of what this pushback can look like.
During COVID’s first two years, we learned that most First World governments happily embraced tyranny. Even in the face of mountains of evidence that the lockdowns and mask and vaccine mandates did nothing to improve the situation, governments not only didn’t stop, but they also dug in deeper, systematically taking away people’s rights.
No person embodied this more than Canada’s Justin Trudeau, who went from fuzzy tree hugger to steely-eyed tyrant overnight. Canada is still in deep lockdown mode, right there with China, with millions of gleeful fascist apparatchiks happily imposing the government’s diktats:
With COVID losing its power to frighten people, the world’s budding dictators are reverting to Climate Change to clamp down on power. The most recent outburst of this madness was in Holland, where the government announced that it was shutting down farmland (i.e., the place where food is grown) essentially to stop fertilizer and cow farts. (I simplify a bit but you know what I mean.) The farmers pushed back hard.
The Hague: Thousands of farmers drove their tractors along roads and highways across the Netherlands, snarling morning traffic as they headed for a mass protest against the Dutch government’s plans to rein in emissions of nitrogen oxide and ammonia.
And indeed, although it never makes it to the New York Times or Washington Post unless they can no longer avoid the topic, people all over the world are pushing back at COVID and Climate Change totalitarianism:
According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which records protests worldwide, 11 countries are currently seeing protests of more than 1,000 people in response to the rising cost of living and other economic woes in 2022. As of July 5, Carnegie had recorded protests of more than 120,000 people in France, 100,000 in Spain, 10,000 in Greece, 10,000 in Kazakhstan, 10,000 in Sri Lanka, 10,000 in India, 5,000 in Iran, 5,000 in Peru, 1,000 people in Argentina, 1,000 in Morocco, and 1,000 in the U.K.
It’s Americans who are behind the curve on this one for two possible reasons. One, we believe our Constitution will protect us. And while it certainly offers protections in theory, there’s every reason to believe that the Democrats currently controlling the federal government have no intention of letting it offer those protections in fact. Two, the Democrats’ January 6 “insurrection” hysteria has frightened Americans into abandoning their First Amendment rights.
But just as the tech world offers governments unprecedented power to control individuals by monitoring their every word, thought, and move, technology also can still be used to bring people across the world together in one giant, peaceful “NO!” against the gathering forces of tyranny. That’s the goal of an organization called Reignite World Freedom.
The organization’s mission is simple: End the globalism that is wrapping itself around the earth like a giant chain, magnifying the power of world governments stealing away their citizens’ liberty. The organization hopes to have what it calls a “global walk out.”
A unified, global event and convoy to your capital city.
Unelected bureaucracies like The World Health Organization (WHO) and The World Economic Forum (WEF) should not have the power to dictate policies in our countries.
Let’s send them a clear message they can’t ignore.
It’s time for governments around the world to consider replacing and leaving these ‘globalist’ organizations.
I.How will the Global Walkout work?
1.A global WALK OUT from the society they’re trying to enslave us into, including an optional convoy to occupy your capital city. The length of the walkout will depend on the momentum built in each country.
2.We will not announce the walk out dates until we have enough pledges worldwide.
3.If you can’t participate in the convoy, that’s fine. You can still commit to walk out for as long as you can.
4.You can choose one or more of these options when you pledge;
- Walk out of work and have a holiday.
- Walk your children out of school.
- Walk away from spending money at corporations that support globalism.
- Walk away from consuming any mainstream media or streaming channels.
- Convoy to your capital city on the scheduled dates (yet to be announced).
Read more here.
The organizers want people to sign a pledge before setting a date.
I don’t know how well this fascinating idea will work in the U.S., especially because of the January 6 crackdown. Still, if people don’t push back against the COVID and Climate Change cudgels, we will enter a new dark age (literally dark, as in no fossil fuels) in which most Westerners, after decades of prosperity, live in squalor and despair.
Arctic Ice Above Average July 16, 2022
The image above shows melting of Arctic sea ice extent over the first half of July 2022. As usual, on the extreme left of the image, the Pacific basins of Bering and Okhotsk seas are entirely open water. Meanwhile on the lower far right, Hudson Bay ice retreats from 600k km2 to 300k km2 from north to south. Note center right Hudson Strait opens up between Hudson Bay and Baffin Bay. At the top center Barents Sea is mostly open water, while Kara Sea upper left lost 200k km2 down to 29% of its last max. Center left Laptev has melted somewhat, but still retains 63% of its maximum ice extent. The central mass of Arctic ice is intact with some fluctuations back and forth, and as well as Beaufort Sea and CAA (Canadian Arctic Archipelago) were slow to melt in July, retaining 91% of maximum ice in each basin.
The graph below shows the ice extent retreating mid June to mid July compared to some other years and the 16 year average (2006 to 2021 inclusive).
The chart black line shows that on average in these 30 days Arctic ice extent goes down 2.5 Wadhams (M km2). 2022 started nearly average, melted faster than average late June, then went surplus in July continuing to yesterday July 16. SII was higher than MASIE some days, lower other days, but ended up the same. 2020 started 500k km2 down, and on day 197 was 800k km2 deficit to average.
The table shows where the ice is distributed compared to average. Bering and Okhotsk are open water at this point and are dropped from this and future monthly updates.
| Region | 2022197 | Day 197 Average | 2022-Ave. | 2020197 | 2022-2020 |
| (0) Northern_Hemisphere | 8406464 | 8243242 | 163222 | 7467638 | 938826 |
| (1) Beaufort_Sea | 971940 | 857420 | 114520 | 933571 | 38369 |
| (2) Chukchi_Sea | 669852 | 624347 | 45504 | 613199 | 56653 |
| (3) East_Siberian_Sea | 928329 | 908426 | 19903 | 651811 | 276519 |
| (4) Laptev_Sea | 566487 | 546079 | 20408 | 133721 | 432765 |
| (5) Kara_Sea | 271923 | 335569 | -63647 | 127208 | 144715 |
| (6) Barents_Sea | 15777 | 56412 | -40635 | 40301 | -24524 |
| (7) Greenland_Sea | 333097 | 398154 | -65057 | 405198 | -72102 |
| (8) Baffin_Bay_Gulf_of_St._Lawrence | 383118 | 286652 | 96466 | 242131 | 140987 |
| (9) Canadian_Archipelago | 784359 | 706015 | 78344 | 737235 | 47124 |
| (10) Hudson_Bay | 293184 | 352063 | -58880 | 495103 | -201920 |
| (11) Central_Arctic | 3186972 | 3167895 | 19076 | 3087401 | 99571 |
The main deficits to average are in Kara, Barents, Greenland Sea and Hudson Bay, more than offset by surpluses in Beaufort, Chukchi, Baffin Bay and CAA.
Illustration by Eleanor Lutz shows Earth’s seasonal climate changes. If played in full screen, the four corners present views from top, bottom and sides. It is a visual representation of scientific datasets measuring Arctic ice extents.
Never Forget: Four Myths Drove Covid Madness
Update July 17, 2022
As we approach autumn in the NH, already the medical-governmental complex is gearing up for another takeover of individual rights and freedoms. New medications (pale, dangerous ivermectin imitations) and more experimental shots have been approved in readiness for imminent mandates requiring their use, This is a time to remember, not forget, how a fake pandemic was foisted upon the world. Yes, runny nose coronaviruses are real and have been in circulation worldwide for decades. But the threat was never great for the large majority of populations, and anti-viral treatments were available despite intimidation against them. Like the four horsemen of the apocalypse, four myths are saddling up again to ride over our peace and harmony.
Myth: Sars-CV2 is a new virus and we have no defense.
Fact: Sars-CV2 has not been scientifically established as a virus.
Myth: Testing positive for Sars-CV2 makes you a disease case and a spreader.
Fact: PCR tests say nothing about you being ill or infectious.
Myth: Millions of people have died from Covid19.
Fact: Life expectancy is the same before and after Covid19.
Myth: Wearing masks prevents viral infection.
Fact: Evidence shows masks are symbolic, not effective.
Jack Kerwick has written a series of articles at FrontPage Mag over the last year discussing how facts have been overwhelmed by fears, a mythology replacing scientific knowledge and reason. From the beginning this contagion was different, being the first one in an age of 24/7 cable news and rampant social media. So emotion and exaggeration were spread and political leaders pressured to act as protectors, clamping down on social and economic transactions. This post provides a synopsis of what went wrong, based on Kerwick’s recent essay Masks and Stopping COVID. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
What the science – lots of science – really tells us.
In previous essays, I argued for three theses against the prevailing COVID Orthodoxy:
(1)SARS-CoV-2 has never been isolated, purified, and extracted in accordance with the scientific method that has long been in place for isolating, purifying, and extracting other viruses (like bacteriophages and “giant viruses”), and neither has the scientific method been observed with respect to establishing whether this virus is in fact the cause of a disease called “COVID-19.”
Discussion:
Has the existence of “the Virus” been established according to a universally acknowledged set of scientific procedures that must be observed to establish the existence of any and all other viruses?
From the sounds of it, the answer is a resounding no.
Dr. Tom Cowan, Dr. Andrew Kaufman, and Sally Fallon Morell, are among those who have noted in a paper published last year that in demonstrating the existence of a new virus, samples must, firstly, be taken from the blood, phlegm, or other secretions of hundreds of people exhibiting symptoms that are “unique and specific enough to characterize an illness.”
Then, “without mixing these samples with ANY tissue or products that also contain genetic material, the virologist macerates, filters, and ultracentrifuges, i.e. purifies the specimen.” This, the authors explain, is a “common virology technique, done for decades to isolate bacteriophages [viruses that infect bacteria and reproduce within them] and so-called giant viruses [a virus larger than typical bacteria].”
Thirdly, once virologists perform this procedure, they are then able to “demonstrate with electron microscopy thousands of identically sized and shaped particles.” The latter are “the isolated and purified virus.”
Fourthly, upon determining the purity of these particles, virologists are able to examine their “structure, morphology, and chemical composition [.]”
Fifthly, “the genetic makeup” of the particles [the virus] “is characterized by extracting the genetic material directly from” them and “using genetic-sequencing techniques” that have long been in existence.
Finally, an analysis must be conducted to prove that “these uniform particles are exogenous (outside) in origin” as viruses are held to be and not just “the normal breakdown of products of dead and dying tissues.”
The authors conclude: “If we have come this far then we have fully isolated, characterized, genetically-sequenced an exogenous virus particle” .
They add that nowhere in the literature does it show that any of these steps have been taken with respect to SARS-CoV-2.
Neither—and this is crucial—have the scientific steps for determining that SARS-CoV-2 is the cause of a disease, COVID-19, been taken. What are these steps? There really isn’t much to it:
A group of healthy subjects, typically animals, is first exposed to “this isolated, purified virus in the manner in which the disease is thought to be transmitted.”
Subsequently, virologists will wait to determine whether these subjects fall ill with “the same disease, as confirmed by clinical and autopsy findings [.]” If so, “one has now shown that the virus actually causes a disease.” In other words, the “infectivity and transmission of an infectious agent” will have been demonstrated.
Again, according to the authors, nothing like this has been performed to show that
there is a virus, SARS-CoV-2, that causes what has become known as COVID-19.
An ever growing number of citizen journalists in over ten different countries from around the world have, via the Freedom of Information Acts of their respective homes, requested from scores of health agencies an account of the process by which SARS-CoV-2 has been isolated (i.e. separated out from all other stuff). To date, no account has been provided.
(2) The explosion of COVID “cases” is an illusion generated by a combination of two things: (a) the redefining of a “case” from meaning “infection in need of medical attention”—which is how it was defined in the pre-COVID era—to meaning “anyone who is presumed to have, or to have had, COVID and/or anyone who tests positive for COVID” plus (b) an intrinsically limited PCR test that is deliberately run at a number of cycles guaranteed to produce a tsunami of false-positives.
The official case numbers, in other words, are meaningless.
Discussion:
Right from the jump, it’s crucial to take note of the fact that for the first time ever, beginning just last year, “cases” was radically redefined in such a way that would have been unthinkable in just February of 2020 (one month before The Virus Apocalypse engulfed the universe).
For starters, as indicated above, many of these “cases,” per the CDC, included those patients who were labeled as “probable” carriers of the virus. This means that they were diagnosed as “cases” in the absence of any “confirmatory laboratory testing.” And yet they were identified as COVID “cases.”
Moreover, even when testing is figured into it, with respect to no other virus or disease has the CDC ever counted as a “case” a merely positive test. A positive test, in other words, has never been regarded by the medical establishment as sufficient grounds upon which to determine a “case.” Rather, in order for something to count as a “case,” a person had to have been sick and in need of medical attention like, say, hospitalization.
In the COVID era, however, the CDC began accumulating positive PCR test results (about more of which will be said below) from people the vast majority of whom are “asymptomatic,” meaning they feel just fine, and combining them with positive antibodies tests from people who also feel just fine: The final sum, this compound, comprises all “cases.”
Now, as for those PCR tests: There are two problems.
First, as Karry Mullis bluntly remarked: “Quantitative PCR is an oxymoron.” Who was Karry Mullis? He was the inventor of the PCR test. And he won a Nobel Prize in Science for this achievement. What did the late Dr. Mullis mean by his characterization of his own invention?
“PCR is intended to identify substances qualitatively, but by its very nature is unsuited for estimating numbers [of viruses]. Although there is a common misimpression that the viral load tests actually count the number of viruses in the blood, these tests cannot detect free, infectious viruses at all; they can only detect proteins that are believed, in some cases wrongly, to be unique to HIV. The tests can detect genetic sequences of viruses, but not viruses themselves” (emphases added).
Lauitsen explains further:
“What PCR does is to select a genetic sequence and then amplify it enormously. It can accomplish the equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack; it can amplify that needle into a haystack. Like an electronically amplified antenna, PCR greatly amplified the signal, but it also greatly amplifies the noise” (emphases added).
What this implies is that given that “the amplification is exponential, the slightest error in measurement, the slightest contamination, can result in errors of many orders of magnitude.”
There is still another problem with the PCR test as it is currently being used that guarantees its utter worthlessness. More exactly, that guarantees that the “case” numbers built upon it are wholly inaccurate and, hence, meaningless.
This past fall, none other than the New York Times noted that possibly as high as 90% of all positive test results are false.
Per the CDC and FDA guidelines, the vast majority of PCR tests are run at a threshold of 40 cycles. Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist from Harvard who is quoted in the Times piece, notes that when PCR tests are run at 35 or more cycles, they “may detect not just live virus but also live fragments, leftovers from infection that pose no particular risks—akin to finding a hair in a room long after a person has left.”
The French researcher Didier Raoult has shown that when the PCR test is run at 25 cycles, about 70% of samples were genuinely positive—meaning infectious. However, when the test is run at a threshold of 30 cycles, only 20% of samples were infectious. At 35 cycles, but three percent of samples were infectious.
And when the test was run above 35 cycles? Zero samples were infectious.
(3)People are getting sick and dying from all manner of things from which people get sick and die each and every year. Only throughout this past year, these causes of sickness and death have been repackaged as COVID sickness and death.
Discussion:
Think about it: a cough, running nose, sore throat, chills, chest congestion, fever, loss of taste and smell—these are all symptoms of a plethora of things, from the common cold to seasonal influenza and a whole lot else. Particularly since the vast majority of COVID cases are “mild,” it’s with the greatest of ease that any single one of these symptoms or any number of combinations of them can be used as a pretext by which to establish a “COVID case.”
This is not necessarily to say that the symptoms in question are not signs of COVID or the SARS-CoV-2 virus that is claimed to be its cause. It’s only to note that in the absence of scientifically confirming definitively that (a) there is a unique strain of a coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2, (b) that it is the cause of something called COVID-19, and that, (3) given the scandalously unreliable PCR test, people do in fact have COVID, symptoms that are associated with the latter are more economically, more plausibly explained by way of reference to illnesses that have long been with us.
The Principle of Parsimony—better known since the 14th century as “Ockham’s Razor”—applies: When confronted with two or more explanatory hypotheses, all things being equal, reason dictates that we opt for the one that is simplest.
Since many of the symptoms now being associated with COVID until recently were explained in terms of, say, the flu, and, given the foregoing facts regarding the science—or lack of science—behind the COVID Narrative, it makes better sense to continue explaining those symptoms in terms of the flu.
Indeed, there is no doubt that a great shell game has been transpiring for a year now as cases of various illnesses have been re-labeled as COVID cases.
For example, over at John Hopkins University, Genevieve Briand, assistant program director of the Applied Economics master’s program, used data from the CDC to analyze the effect of COVID-19 deaths in America on all other deaths. Reasonably enough, she had expected to witness a substantial number of excess deaths in 2020, i.e. deaths by all other causes plus the orgy of COVID deaths with which politicians and those in the media had been singularly preoccupied.
She was mistaken. Sorely mistaken. Yanni Gu, a writer for the university’s student newspaper, reports: “Surprisingly, the deaths of older people stayed the same before and after COVID-19.”
This was surprising because COVID (not unlike virtually everything else) overwhelmingly affects elderly people. Thus, “experts expected an increase in the percentage of deaths in older age groups. However, this increase is not seen from the CDC data.” Furthermore, “the percentages of deaths among all age groups remain relatively the same” (emphases added).
Whoa. Briand would soon discover that the plot was just beginning to thicken. What the “data analyzes suggest,” Gu writes, is “that in contrast to most people’s assumptions, the number of deaths by COVID-19 is not alarming. In fact, it has relatively no effect on deaths in the United States” (emphases added).
There is a perfectly rational, and simple, explanation to account for the unbridgeable chasm between the media-concocted perception of COVID and the reality that Briand discovered:
Deaths from all other causes were being re-classified—misclassified—as death from COVID. And how did Briand determine this?
For the first time ever, deaths from all other causes—heart diseases, respiratory diseases, influenza, and pneumonia—decreased.
Especially shocking was the realization that heart disease, which has always been the number one killer in America, appeared to have suddenly lost that distinction with the onset of COVID.
Moreover, deaths from all other causes decreased just in proportion to the extent to which COVID deaths increased. “This trend is completely contrary to the pattern observed in all previous years. Interestingly…the total decrease in deaths by other causes almost exactly equals the increase in deaths by COVID-19.”
Within 24 or so hours of the publication of the article relaying Genevieve Briand’s discoveries, the student paper at John Hopkins University retracted it. They never, however, denied the truth of a single syllable of either Briand’s analysis nor its summary of it. That it was political pressure, and not shoddy scholarship that informed its decision is clear, for the school paper saved its article in a PDF file (to which I link above) for all of the world to read.
Wearing of Masks is Not Supported by Scientific Evidence
In this essay, we will revisit the topic of masks. I’ve already written about the psychological, moral, and social costs of mask-wearing. Here, I will focus specifically on the science—or lack of science—behind it.
Scientists recognize that the RCT—Randomized Control Trial—is the “gold standard” as far as “effectiveness research” is concerned. Drs. Eduardo Hariton and Joseph J. Locasio explain that randomization “reduces bias” while providing “a rigorous tool” by which “to examine cause-effect relationships between an intervention and outcome.” RCTs eliminate the risk of confirmation bias, something that is “not possible with any other study design” (emphases added).
This is critical for our purposes, for the largest study of the effectiveness of mask-wearing by the general public to thwart the transmission of COVID utilized not one, not two, not three, but a staggering 14 randomized control trials.
The study was performed at the University of Hong Kong. What Dr. Jingyi Xiao and her team of researchers there concluded will doubtless be written off as the stuff of “conspiracy theorists” by Mask Nation. So be it. But those on the editorial board of Emerging Infectious Diseases, the widely esteemed journal of none other than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), determined that the findings were worth publishing.
The verdict: Masks are ineffective.
The authors of a review of studies on face masks published last year by the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine determined that there is no evidence indicating the effectiveness of cloth masks when it comes to COVID. They lament how the “abandonment of the scientific modus operandi and lack of foresight has left the field [of science] wide open for the play of opinions, radical views and political influence.”
The authors, one an epidemiologist, the other a professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford, do note that all randomized control trials that have been conducted over the last decade or so have demonstrated that “masks alone have no significant effect in interrupting the spread of ILI [Influenza-Like-Illness] or influenza” in neither “the general population…nor in healthcare workers” (emphases added).
We could continue in this same repetitive vein. Readers who are interested in pursuing this topic further can check out this piece of mine from October of last year. I review still other studies there, including remarks from such media-adored “Experts” as Anthony Fauci that dovetail seamlessly with these findings on the essential uselessness of masks with respect to COVID. More research confirming these findings are here, here, here, here, and here. Neither have we yet touched upon the numerous studies showing that countries and states with mask mandates did no better and, in some instances, worse than those places that had no such mandates. Nor have we looked at those studies demonstrating that those who faithfully wore masks were not less likely to contract COVID than those who did not wear masks, with some of these—like this one from the CDC—showing that most people who became infected with COVID wore a mask “always” or “often.”
The science, it should now be obvious, does not support Mask dogma.
Science Matters 