Brandon Morse writes at Red State No, Slaves Didn’t Build This Country.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Not long ago, Disney ripped off any pretense of being a family company and dove head-first into the social justice muck with an episode of “The Proud Family” that featured a slam poetry segment that echoed the fringe critical race theory claim that “slaves built this country.”

As RedState reported, it soon surfaced that the writer of the show is a very loud and proud social justice radical named Latoya Raveneau, who has a “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” and wants to introduce “queerness” to the shows your kids watch whenever she gets the chance. She also bragged that no one at Disney is trying to stop her.

First things first, we need to torpedo this idea that slaves built this country. While it’d be unrealistic to say they weren’t a part of the nation’s development, putting them as the prime constructors of an entire nation is like saying the guy who crafted the axle at the car factory built your vehicle. He was definitely a part of it, but he hardly gets to take full credit.

So many kinds of people came to the new world and worked their own land, built their own towns, and established their own societies without the help of slaves. For one thing, the Trans-Atlantic slave trade transported well over 12 million slaves, but only a little over 300,000 made their way into the United States. This didn’t happen all at once.

Slavery did officially begin in 1619, but it began with just over 20 slaves.

To think that over the course of time that singular group of people built an entire nation — even a burgeoning one — by themselves is the height of fantasy. Especially as you continue to plug in the numbers.

The slave population would later balloon to around four million by the time the emancipation proclamation was signed in 1863, and while that number is tragically large, it doesn’t mean that there was a slave for every family. The vast majority of slaves were held in the agrarian south and even then, only around 25 percent of the south was wealthy enough to own slaves.

Meanwhile, the slave-free north continued to outpace the south by leaps and bounds, including agriculturally according to Warfare in the Western World:

“But in a longer struggle the North’s advantages were substantial. With a population of 20 million, the Northern states obviously possessed a much larger military manpower base, but their industrial capacity was far greater as well. In 1860 the North had over 110,000 manufacturing establishments, the South just 18,000. The North produced 94 percent of the country’s iron, 97 percent of is coal and – not incidentally – 97 percent of its firearms. It contained 22,000 miles of railroad to the South’s 8,500. The North outperformed the South agriculturally as well. Northerners held 75 percent of the country’s farm acreage, produced 60 percent of its livestock, 67 percent of its corn, and 81 percent of its wheat. All in all, they held 75 percent of the nation’s total wealth.”

These stats immediately wreck the idea that “slaves built this country.” Not only did the north succeed greatly without them, but the majority of the south also didn’t have them.

The idea that white people were sitting in rocking chairs sipping tea while black people did all the work from 1619 to 1863 is, frankly, stupid. It dismisses the blood, sweat, and tears of many different kinds of people, including Mexicans, Germans, Irish, Chinese, and more. It purposely shoves aside the industriousness of an entire country looking to build a new world and make something for itself.

Yes, slavery did play a part, but not nearly enough of one to claim all the credit.
This leads me to the idea that reparations are owed to the black population
of the United States by the taxpayers of this country.

No. No one owes anything to anyone for the atrocity that is slavery. For one, no one alive today was around to commit that sin or have that sin be committed upon them. Whatever guilt there was for it has long since died off. Outside of the church, the idea of original sin is ludicrous. White people alive today are not guilty of what a percentage of white people did long ago. Moreover, the nation that declared slavery illegal and went to war with emancipation being a goal leading to an astounding loss of life is not responsible for reparations either.

This nation’s story is, in part, a struggle against slavery beginning at its very foundations. White supremacy was never the intended goal of those most loyal to the American dream and spirit, despite the claims of race hustlers. Nothing is owed because there is no one around to whom anything would be owed.

Social sin is non-transferable.

Raveneau is, like most radical leftists, incredibly bitter and bigoted herself. Her racism against white people is clearly on display, as is her disdain for a country that sacrificed much to shed itself of the slavery she’s using as a tool to exert social control over innocent people. That Disney is allowing this to happen shows just how lost it is and how it too wishes to damage this great nation’s reputation and cast its people as villains for simply existing in a place where once there was slavery.

The bitter truth that race hustlers need to face is that white people today aren’t guilty of slavery. White supremacy is not the foremost wish of the vast majority of white people in this nation today, and anyone who says differently is trying to sell you something that would be detrimental to everyone for having bought it.

Slavery is evil and it should be left in the past. No one living today should try to bring it back,
not in practice or as a social tool to use as a method of social dictatorship.

Covid Buzzwords 2020

Ramesh Thakur writes of his journey since 2019 in his Spectator Australia article A Covid vocabulary.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Words I learned, and learned to hate

When the novel coronavirus began to dominate world news in 2020 (the virus may already have been in circulation in 2019), a modest existing knowledge on pandemic policy, based in a background in global governance, indicated that governments were departing radically from the existing scientific and policy consensus. Several well-credentialled experts tried to say so but were dismissed as has-beens or fringe-dwellers suffering from relevance deprivation syndrome. This was troubling. Being retired, I had immunity against being fired. With time to do my own policy-oriented research, I began digging deeper into Covid pandemic management as a policy challenge. And this meant familiarising myself with the language of health experts and a resulting expansion of my vocabulary.

What follows is a description of the key new words I learnt over the last three years,
but also words I’ve learnt to hate. With each step on the journey,
confidence and trust in the public health clerisy fell further.

We began with the distinctions between (a) infection and case fatality rates and (b) pharmaceutical interventions like vaccines and drugs and non-pharmaceutical interventions like enhanced surveillance, testing and contact tracing; social distancing (a euphemism for anti-social behaviour like physical distancing); workplace and school closures; working from home; sanitisers and surface cleaning.

This led to ‘lockdowns’, another euphemism for shutting down all economic and social activity and locking up entire populations in their homes because the health experts said so despite the previous consensus against it.   As part of the public discourse on justification for the unprecedented lockdowns and possible timing for lifting the restrictions, officials and commentators fussed over the ‘R’ number (how many more people on average will one sick person infect?) or the rate at which the virus was reproducing in order to assess if it was still growing or contracting.   By 2022 the world had lost interest in this 2020 obsession. As the debate between lockdown enthusiasts and sceptics heated up, the language deteriorated into name calling and ‘Covidian’ and ‘Covidiot’ were deployed as reciprocal insults.

With masks we tried to understand the difference between and relative merits of facecloths, surgical masks and N95 respirators; healthcare, outdoor and indoor settings; and why the medical consensus did an instant (that is, without any additional data or scientific studies) 180-degree turn on masks from being pointless to an extremely critical individual and community protection measure. The existing standard metric in 2020 for allocating finite health resources, a cost-benefit analysis using quality adjusted life years for measuring health outcomes, was similarly abandoned without explanation.

In 2021 we turned our attention to vaccines and the importance of numbers: absolute risk reduction, relative risk reduction, and (a) the number needed to vaccinate (NNV) to prevent one additional infection or death in a specified group (ie elderly, young, children, industry or setting-specific employees) and (b) the number of ‘serious adverse events’ that would constitute a critical ‘safety signal’ within a target cohort. We also had to grasp the distinction between vaccine efficacy in controlled clinical trials and vaccine effectiveness in the real world. The equations just didn’t compute. Despite the famed 95 per cent efficacy claimed in trials, people in NSW who had been vaccinated at least once made up 77 per cent of those infected and 85 per cent of those who died of or with Covid from 22 May-31 December 2022 (the period in which data was separated by vaccination status, as the practice has been discontinued in 2023).

Finally, in response to the increasingly esoteric (and desperate) justifications for the vaccination drives despite the empirical outcomes showing their poor performance, we began looking at all-cause ‘excess’ mortality that is less susceptible to statistical and linguistic manipulation. For example, in an instructive analysis in The Spectator Australia online’s Flat White (6 January 2023), Jason Strecker goes through the Australian statistics on excess deaths to comprehensively demolish the self-serving claims made by federal and state politicians of how many lives they saved with their lockdown policies. You’ve gotta love this sub-heading from the New York Times subscriber-only newsletter (4 January): ‘Mass vaccination, though miraculously effective, didn’t usher in a lower overall death toll’. Which leads me to Merriam-Webster’s word of the year concept of ‘gaslighting’, by the mainstream media as much as by governments.

Moving to words I learnt to hate:

‘Follow The Science’ was the dishonest slogan used to shut down legitimate scientific inquiry even while implementing many unscientific and even some anti-scientific policies.

‘Staying Apart to Stay Together’ was a too-clever-by-half effort to camouflage an oxymoron.

‘Three weeks to flatten the curve’? Yeah, right. Three years later, it’s our lives, spirits and economies that have been flattened.

‘Protect the health service’? No, it’s the mission of the health service to protect us. Sure enough, as the winter pressures return on the broken, dysfunctional yet sacralised National Health Service in the UK that has in recent times spent massive amounts of money recruiting DIE (diversity, inclusion and equity) bureaucrats while firing frontline staff who refused the jab, the Daily Mail reported on 4 January that the government is drawing up plans to reintroduce Covid-era measures ‘to save the NHS’. An online poll showed 65 per cent of over 13,000 readers oppose any measure being brought back but, surprisingly, 22 per cent support the return of face masks. Another pet peeve was,

‘We are all in this together’ and equivalent phrases like the virus doesn’t discriminate, it’s out hunting whoever it can find, etc. No, not really, not by risks, benefits nor burdens are we all in this together.

Finally, the concept currently in vogue: ‘abundance of caution’, used to impose a negative test requirement for Chinese arrivals from 5 January 2023 despite medical advice to the contrary. This substitutes a slogan for a policy and confirms the trigger-happy authoritarian instincts of the government to reimpose curbs on people’s freedoms on the minister’s whim, with no justification advanced in the form of a cost-benefit analysis. It speaks to the undying conceit of politicians that they can control viruses. And it highlights their complete abandonment of caution on the harms of government interventions. 

Despite three years of worldwide evidence that the rise and fall of the virus curve
has been policy-invariant, while the damage from the ill-conceived interventions
has been severe and will be long lasting.

Extra!  Extra!  Read All About It!

COVID Vaccine Hesitancy and Risk of a Traffic Crash

Could be a parody, or not.  This twitter thread digs into the background:

Double click on image above to link to Greg’s twitter thread.

Bjorn Lomborg exposes the fake piety on display at IPCC Sharm El-Sheikh gathering in his Forbes article COP27:  A Parade Of Climate Hypocrisy. Excerpts in italics with my bolds

Every year, global climate summits feature a parade of hypocrisy, as the world’s elite arrive on private jets to lecture humanity on cutting carbon emissions. The current UN climate summit in Egypt offers more breathtaking hypocrisy than usual, because the world’s rich are zealously lecturing poor countries about the dangers of fossil fuels—after devouring massive amounts of new gas, coal, and oil.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pushed up energy prices even further, wealthy countries have been scouring the world for new sources of energy. The United Kingdom vehemently denounced fossil fuels at the Glasgow climate summit just last year, but now plans to keep coal-fired plants available this winter instead of shutting almost all of them as previously planned. Thermal coal imports by the European Union from Australia, South Africa and Indonesia increased more than 11-fold. Meanwhile, a new trans-Saharan gas pipeline will allow Europe to tap directly into gas from Niger, Algeria and Nigeria; Germany is reopening shuttered coal power plants; and Italy is planning to import 40% more gas from northern Africa. And the United States is going cap-in-hand to Saudi Arabia to grovel for more oil production.

At the climate summit in Egypt, the leaders from these countries will somehow declare with straight faces that poor countries must avoid fossil fuel exploitation, for fear of worsening climate change. These very same rich countries will encourage the world’s poorest to focus instead on green energy alternatives like off-grid solar and wind energy. They’re already making the case. In a speech widely interpreted as being about Africa, the United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said it would be “delusional” for countries to invest more in gas and oil exploration.

The hypocrisy is simply breathtaking. Every single rich country today became wealthy thanks to exploitation of fossil fuels. The world’s major development organizations—at the behest of wealthy countries—refuse to fund fossil fuel exploitation that poor countries could use to lift themselves out of poverty. What’s more, the elite prescription for the world’s poor—green energy—is incapable of transforming lives.

That’s because sun and wind power are useless when it is cloudy, night-time, or there is no wind. Off-grid solar power can provide a nice solar light, but typically can’t even power a family’s fridge or oven, let alone provide the power that communities need to run everything from farms to factories, the ultimate engines of growth.

A study in Tanzania found almost 90 percent of households given off-grid electricity just want to be hooked up to the national grid to receive fossil fuel access. The first rigorous test published on the impact of solar panels on the lives of poor people found they got a little bit more electricity—the ability to power a lamp during the day—but there was no measurable impact on their lives: they did not increase savings or spending, did not work more or start more businesses, and their children did not study more.

Moreover, solar panels and wind turbines are useless at tackling one of the main energy problems of the world’s poor. Nearly 2.5 billion people continue to suffer from indoor air pollution, burning dirty fuels like wood and dung to cook and keep warm. Solar panels don’t solve that problem because they are too weak to power clean stoves and heaters.

In contrast, grid electrification—which nearly everywhere means mostly fossil fuels—has significant positive impacts on household income, expenditure, and education. A study in Bangladesh showed that electrified households experienced a 21 percent average jump in income and a 1.5 percent reduction in poverty each and every year.

The biggest swindle of all is that rich world leaders have somehow managed to portray themselves as green evangelists, while more than three-quarters of their enormous primary energy production comes from fossil fuels, according to the International Energy Agency. Less than 12 percent of their energy comes from renewables, with most from wood and hydro. Just 2.4% is solar and wind.

Compare this to Africa, which is the most renewable continent in the world, with half of its energy produced by renewables. But these renewables are almost entirely wood, straws, and dung, and they are really a testament to how little energy the continent has access to. Despite all the hype, the continent gets just 0.3% of its energy from solar and wind.

To solve global warming, rich countries must invest much more in research and development on better green technologies, from fusion, fission and second-generation biofuels to solar and wind with massive batteries. The crucial insight is to innovate their real cost down below fossil fuels. That way everyone will eventually switch. But telling the world’s poor to live with unreliable, expensive, weak power is an insult.

There is already pushback from the world’s developing countries, who see the hypocrisy for what it is: Egypt’s finance minister recently said that poor countries must not be “punished”, and warned that climate policy should not add to their suffering. That warning needs to be listened to. Europe is scouring the world for more fossil fuels because the continent needs them for its growth and prosperity. That same opportunity should not be withheld from the world’s poorest.

Jay Valentine writes an encouraging report at American Thinker Where Artificial Intelligence Can Expose Leftist Vote Fraud.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Artificial intelligence is an undefined term people throw around, scaring each other about impending doom. One reads stories about how A.I. applies facial recognition to end privacy. Other scares are about the government profiling people’s writing to find anonymous posters.

Our team has been applying artificial intelligence for over a decade.  There is zero intelligence in artificial intelligence. Zero.

A.I. is the concentration of massive computing power, integrating multiple data streams, really fast, to find subtle patterns or differences in those streams.

Here’s an example: when a customer calls an 800 number with a complaint, voice recognition instantly determines the person’s likely age. Or it can determine agitation. Or if that person speaks with a Spanish accent, it routes him to a Spanish language agent.  This makes for lots of data, hitting large processors, delivering insight, not intelligence.

A.I. is a technology game two can play. Remember those 2020 election voter rolls?

In early 2021, Sherriff David Clarke and Mike Lindell asked our team to load the Wisconsin voter rolls to find “anomalies.” You’ve read the stories about the 23,000 Wisconsin voters using the same phone number and thousands of voters with “codes” that cannot be read by traditional computers as their voter IDs. Our technology, Fractal Programming, found all that stuff for the Wisconsin voter team.

There was nothing “intelligent” in those data.  The only time we found anything coming close to the word “intelligent” was the lack of intelligence from secretaries of state, particularly Republicans.

There were the Alabama voters older than Genghis Khan, registered in 2020, who vote. There were the Missouri voters registered in the Branson hotel. There were the Texans who voted in person but their ballot later changed to absentee.

Remember that hapless Wisconsin voter whose voter ID was a single character, an apostrophe — such a small character that we thought it was a speck on our computer screen?

The original Wisconsin Fractal system grew almost overnight to a dozen or more states. What was supposed to be a limited proof of concept exploded into the largest election database in the world — and that was only for 12 or 15 states. We have the data for 25 more on deck.

We personally funded this growth.  We literally begged legacy election integrity organizations, advertising large voter databases, to use Fractal technology giving local integrity teams this unique compute power.  We offered them Fractal technology for free.  Crickets.

We learned that many legacy “voter integrity organizations” are all about raising tons of dough — zero interest in cleaning voter rolls.

With a dozen state voter integrity teams, we decided to do it ourselves.  Then something happened.

Election integrity teams are a stubborn lot.  Working from kitchen tables, in basements, holding meetings in coffee shops, using small computers and Excel, they share information, and the “intelligence” of what they find explodes.

When these citizen-investigators hit a wall, they don’t stop. They innovate. Their innovation discovered an analysis of voter rolls never before applied!

Snapshot analysis was invented.

Voter integrity teams in Wisconsin, Georgia, and Michigan downloaded multiple copies of voter rolls from different dates.  They started, by hand, parsing millions of records to identify changes across snapshots. Did a voter change his name? If someone moved, where did he go?

This is the equivalent, almost, of trying to count the grains of sand in your flower pot. But they did it.  These teams, mostly very charming ladies, asked the Fractal guys if we could perform snapshot analysis — at scale. Think billions of records!

What could we say?

Fractal analysis took voter rolls, some with 15 million registered voters, and compared each with the same voter roll from a different date. Then we compared them with three subsequent snapshots, then ten. Now some states compare over 50.

There is no conventional technology that can economically deliver this type of computing.

Taking a file of 15 million records, with 40 attributes per record, and comparing every cell against every other cell, across 50 versions is a compute near impossibility. It would require a data center the size of a city block, take weeks, and cost millions of dollars.

The Fractal team and integrity groups are doing this, at scale —
on computers you can hold in your hand.

The result is a new type of data analysis never applied to voter rolls.

Our commercial customers began using snapshot analysis immediately to track changes in how customers modify behavior, across scores of attributes, over time. It became a marketing windfall!

Voter registration data came alive as inactive voters magically became active, for a few days, voted, becoming inactive again. Phantoms lived!

Our diligent voter integrity team pals have no constraints. Their passion is like your dog seeing a squirrel — you cannot restrain them!  These teams recognized that databases from Melissa and NCOA and purchased databases were wildly inaccurate. But that’s all they had.

They introduced property tax records as the source of truth for all things address-related.

You may say your house is a business because you work from your basement, but the tax-collector makes the call.  Comparing property tax records with county voter registration records showed how overwhelmingly out of date and inaccurate voter files really are. And government tax records prove it!

Teams will be publishing numbers (not names) of voters who reside in convenience stores, prisons, flower shops, and laundromats. Every single one is getting a challenge!

When the press challenges the source — they will get to see the county property tax records. Oops!  One election team already challenged over 30,000 possible “phantoms”! Now they can do it with tax records. No appeal there!

We are loading all 3,200 counties’ property tax records — public files — and comparing them with the voter registration records in every county. With snapshots, think trillions of records here.

This is Project Omega.

Project Omega is taking every relevant public database, Fractalizing it, and placing it into the hands of citizens. For the first time, citizens can perform real-time analysis of databases, in the multi-trillions of records, from their phone.

The real fun is that they can compare snapshots and watch identities, locations, registration numbers morph over time. It’s like a movie of your data.

The next time you think artificial intelligence is a bugaboo, remember that it is a game two can play.  And the good guys, citizens, are beginning to use it, at scale, now.

Michael Baume writes at Spectator Climate change policy: a greater risk than climate change?.  Excerpts in italics with my bold. H/T John Ray

Pragmatism is belatedly beating carbon purity as the West seeks to survive the economic consequences of Russia’s monstrous Ukraine war. Only months after its Glasgow swearing of allegiance to the climate catechism that requires faith in scientifically untested computer-programmed prophesies, the West has seen the light – and the energy needed to power it.

• • By grabbing at the vilified, carbon-emitting economic lifeline of fossil fuels,
  • By rediscovering the energizing virtues of the spurned coal,
  • By embracing the scorned fracking in a desperate search for gas,
  • By re-opening the closed off-shore petroleum leases to keep industry working, and
  • By preferring ‘dangerous’ nuclear power to winters of freezing in the dark,

A severe dose of reality has slowed the West’s race to economic destruction. The two wheels of the climate change cart – the scientifically unprovable words ‘catastrophic’ and ‘irreversible’ – that is carrying the democratic world to economic subjugation under a Putin-Xi authoritarian axis, are looking increasingly wobbly.

These two words, the key to the climate debate, have never been
the subject of empirical, observed scientific proof.

There is little disagreement that there is climate change; the climate has always been changing. But ‘catastrophic’ and ‘irreversible’ (beyond a computer-generated ‘tipping point’) that occupy the central role as drivers of the claimed climate crisis, exist only in computer modelling of what many scientists, in good faith, believe to be the likely outcome of observable current trends. The dogma that ‘the science is settled’ on climate change requires a belief not in proven scientific facts but in the accuracy of scientists’ computer projections of the yet-to-be-demonstrated future consequences of observable facts.

So why should these scientists be believed? The traditional ‘scientific method’ of examining a theory provides the best, but by no means certain, prospect of believable outcomes. This involves surviving the ‘falsification’ principle of rigorous endeavours to refute the theory, so that the scientific consensus eventually accepts it as truth. That is the rock on which the climate change crisis rests. But as an article in last week’s Conversation noted, ‘even if scientists have repeatedly tried, but failed, to refute a given theory, the history of science suggests at some point in the future it may still turn out to be false when new evidence comes to light.’

After decades of steadily increasing support for the ‘climate crisis’ theory,
evidence to the contrary is raising its head.

This is in addition to the negative impact of repeated failures of a multitude of past official forecasts of impending climate disaster. Earlier this year, four leading Italian scientists from universities in Milan, Verona and Padua and the National Institute of Nuclear Physics, published a review of historical climate data, finding no clear positive trend of extreme events and concluding that the current fear of a ‘climate emergency’ is not supported by the scientific data.

Fig. 6 Fraction of the global earth under drought conditions D0 (abnormally dry), D1 (moderate), D2 (severe), D3 (extreme) and D4 (exceptional)

This means, they said, that altering our priorities with negative effects ‘could prove deleterious to our ability to face the challenges of the future, (and) squandering natural and human resources’. Their paper, A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming, is a survey of recent research (mirroring the IPCC’s approach) that appeared in the European Physical Journal Plus. ‘Since its origins, the human species has been confronted with the negative effects of the climate; historical climatology has repeatedly used the concept of climate deterioration in order to explain negative effect of extreme events (mainly drought, diluvial phases and cold periods) on civilisation. Today, we are facing a warm phase and, for the first time, we have monitoring capabilities that enable us to objectively evaluate its effects’.

These show that, ‘On the basis of the observational data, the climate crisis that,
according to many sources, we are experiencing today, is not yet evident.’

The scientists found that rainfall intensity and frequency was stationary in many parts of the world. Tropical hurricanes and cyclones showed little change over the long term, and the same is true of US tornadoes. Other meteorological categories including natural disasters, floods, droughts and ecosystem productivity showed no ‘clear positive trend of extreme events’. Regarding ecosystems, the scientists noted a considerable ‘greening’ of global plant biomass in recent decades caused by higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Satellite data show ‘greening’ trends over most of the planet, increasing food yields and pushing back of deserts

But the scientists nevertheless believe there is a need for action on the climate: ‘We should work to minimise our impact on the planet and to minimise air and water pollution…. How the climate of the twenty-first century will play out is a topic of deep uncertainty. We need to increase our resiliency to whatever the future climate will present us…

(But) we need to remind ourselves that addressing climate change is not an end in itself
and is not the only problem the world is facing.’

This cautionary note was echoed in a report quoted in the latest Weekend Australian from some of Australia’s most senior climate scientists led by UNSW Professor Andy Pitman. It warned that bank regulators, with little understanding of the uncertainty inherent in climate model projections, could cause ‘major systemic risk to the global financial system’ by their continued use.’ It is not science designed for the financial sector’, as physical climate models do not represent weather, so imposing a serious limitation in determining future climate risk for the financial sector. Yet Australia’s Reserve Bank will use network-derived climate scenarios in its internal analysis of climate-related risks. Most regulators, banks, insurers and investors are using projection-based scenarios ‘without fully accounting for uncertainty’.

This follows Pitman’s submission to APRA on its draft guidelines on climate risk that the corporate sector could be preparing for the financial costs of climate change based on misleading and flawed advice from the prudential regulator. ‘There is next to no capacity to provide advice to business on how the joint probability of multiple extreme weather events will change in the future.’

The only thing certain about climate science is uncertainty.

Bad Day for a Climate Alarmist

Newly elected Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, left, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau greet each other as they gather in the House of Commons to pay tribute to Queen Elizabeth on Sept. 15, 2022. PHOTO BY SEAN KILPATRICK / THE CANADIAN PRESS

John Iverson reports at National Post Canada Scaremongering about Poilievre could be the only move Trudeau has left.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Trudeau set the tone for the fall parliamentary session
when he ‘congratulated’ Poilievre on his victory last week

Pierre Poilievre and his team will be gratified by the first public opinion poll since he was elected Conservative leader, which gives his party a healthy five-point lead over Justin Trudeau’s Liberals.  While there was no sign of a surge in support from voters — Abacus Data has the Conservatives at 35 per cent support, up one point from its last survey — neither was there a drop in approval from Canadians queasy at some of the new leader’s more controversial rhetorical flourishes.

(The poll puts the Liberals at 30 per cent; the NDP at 17; the BQ at nine and the People’s Party at four).

Coletto says that since he did his research more than a year ago, it is likely the number of anxious voters has grown, as inflation and interest rates have risen. Poilievre’s mission is to corral the votes of those “falling behind…who are hanging by a thread” — people who feel the future holds more threats than opportunity.

Faced with an NDP that seems more focused on identity politics than the fate of working Canadians, Poilievre may be kicking in a rotting door, particularly if he turns down the volume on less mainstream ideas like support for the trucker’s convoy.

Climatists again fail to get a judge to order their program and thus bypass lawmaking by elected representatives. Denise Lavoie reports at The Virginian-Pilot Virginia judge dismisses youth climate change lawsuit.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

RICHMOND — A Virginia judge on Friday dismissed a lawsuit filed on behalf of 13 young people who claim that the state’s permitting of fossil fuel projects is exacerbating climate change and violating their constitutional rights.

The lawsuit filed by Our Children’s Trust, an Oregon-based nonprofit public interest law firm, asked the court to declare portions of the Virginia Gas and Oil Act unconstitutional. It also seeks to find the state’s reliance on and promotion of fossil fuels violates the rights of the plaintiffs, who range in age from 10 to 19.

But Richmond Circuit Court Judge Clarence Jenkins Jr. granted the state’s request to dismiss the lawsuit, finding that the complaint is barred by sovereign immunity.

That’s a legal doctrine that says a state cannot be sued without its consent. The state argued that sovereign immunity prohibited the plaintiffs’ claims because they sought to restrain the state from issuing permits for fossil fuel infrastructure and to interfere with governmental functions. The judge did not rule on the merits of the plaintiffs’ constitutional claims.

The lawsuit is one of five filed by Our Children’s Trust in states around the country. Lawsuits in Hawaii and Utah are in the early stages, while a lawsuit it Montana is expected to go to trial next year. A federal lawsuit filed in Oregon in 2015 remains in litigation after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the plaintiffs last year. They have since asked to file a more narrow amended complaint and are awaiting a decision.

Jenkins ruled from the bench and dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice, meaning it cannot be refiled again in the same court. Their attorney, Nathan Bellinger, said they will promptly appeal the ruling to the state Court of Appeals.

Ten of the plaintiffs — accompanied by their parents — listened in court as Bellinger said the state is knowingly contributing to the climate crisis by continuing to rely on fossil fuels as its main energy sources and polluting the atmosphere with greenhouse gas emissions. He asked the judge to allow the case to proceed to trial.

The lawsuit alleges that climate change has contributed to health problems experienced by the plaintiffs, including asthma and heat exhaustion. Four of the plaintiffs have become ill after being bitten by ticks, a population that has increased due to climate change, Bellinger said.

It also claims that Virginia has violated the public trust doctrine, which says that the state has a duty to hold certain natural resources in trust.

“These courageous Virginia youths … are turning to the judiciary to protect their fundamental rights,” Bellinger argued in court.

Bellinger said the Virginia lawsuit is the first to leave out a request for an injunction to require the state to take certain actions or to submit a remedial plan. Instead, it asked only for a declaration that the continued permitting of fossil fuel projects violated the plaintiffs’ rights.

But attorneys for the state argued that the plaintiffs are attempting to usurp the role of the state legislature and impose their preferred energy and environmental policies on the state.

“Simply put, this action belongs two blocks over at the General Assembly and not before this court,” said Assistant Attorney General Thomas Sanford.

After the court hearing, several of the plaintiffs spoke during a news conference where they held a large banner proclaiming, “Climate Justice in our Courts NOW!”

Footnote:  The thing about ticks was creative, and reminded me of this:

Alarmists: Global Warming Destroys Good Bugs and Multiplies Bad Bugs