Scares Are Their Business

By Rich Kozlovich

Once again we're seeing the outcome of alarming forecasts based on....wellllll....nothing, and I include all these coronavirus health claims.  Computer modeling isn't science. If used properly it's a part of science allowing scientist's speculations to be extrapolated very rapidly that would normally take long periods of time.  Unfortunately,  it's been the big tool to generate preconceived answers to promote unscientific ideological paradigms, and then calling it science.....or Saint Fauci calling himself "science".  

Well, modeling isn't science and neither is Fauci! 

Unfortunately the public is being fed a lot of horsepucky by a corrupt media, promoted by Deep State corruption.  Their history of alarm has a dismal record, but what is ever worse, those who are skeptical and have offered rational responses to their irrational claims are punished by having their grants revoked, lost jobs and they're vilified in the media and censored.    

Over the centuries this has played out.  Below is a list of 20 environment alarms that have shown to be false, from the old Institute of Public Affairs website that no longer exists, hence, the article no longer exists as far as I can tell.   The top 20 environmentalist alarms:

1. Population growth and famine, 1798
2. Timber famine economic threat, 1865
3. Soil erosion agricultural production threat, 1934
4. Fluoride in drinking water health effects, 1945
5. DDT and cancer, 1962
6. Population growth and famine (Ehrlich), 1968
7. Global cooling, 1970
8. Population growth and famine (Meadows), 1972
9. Industrial production, acid rain and forests, 1974
10. Electrical wiring and cancer, etc, 1979
11. CFCs, the ozone hole, and skin cancer etc, 1985
12. Listeria in cheese, 1985
13. Radon in homes and lung cancer, 1985
14. Salmonella in eggs, 1988
15. Environmental toxins and breast cancer,1990
16. Mad cow disease (BSE), 1996
17. Dioxin in Belgian poultry,1999.
18. Mercury in fish's effect on nervous system development, 2004
19. Mercury in childhood inoculations and autism, 2005
20. Mobile phone towers and cancer, 2008

Of course this isn't a complete list, and most certainly this fraudulent coronavirus scare would be at the top of the list, and some day it will be.  Just as soon as Fauci and that band of corrupt Deep Staters promoting all these mandates are exposed for who and what they are. 

COVID-19 school closures may cost U.S. economy trillions, study says

United Press International | Sep 9, 2020 | News | 1 

 New research Tuesday indicates that the interruptions to in-person classes at schools nationwide could cost the U.S. economy more than $15 trillion in the coming decades.  The analysis by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that U.S. economic growth could be 1.5% lower on average for the rest of the 21st century due to the school closures brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study links the lower economic growth with children acquiring fewer skills as a result of distance learning this year, even at just a slight deviation from normal.  “If the student [groups] in school during the 2020 closures record a corona-induced loss of skills of one-tenth of a standard deviation … the 1.5% loss of future GDP would be equivalent to a total economic loss of $15.3 trillion,” the authors wrote.

The total cost of missed schooling could ultimately amount to 69% of gross domestic product for the average country, the report by the intergovernmental economic organization showed.
The total loss figure assumes that only the current class of students will be affected by the closures and that students will resume normal schooling sometime next year.............To Read More...

The Democrats Will Wreck Everything

September 9, 2020  By Steve Feinstein

The cliché currently floating around is, “This is the most important election in the nation’s history.” That was said last time and the time before that, and it will be said next time too. Over the last 20 years or so, they have all been extremely important elections. As the chasm between the opposing parties widens and the governing philosophies diverge to an ever-greater degree, presidential elections have greater consequence in all areas: social, economic and tax policy, military readiness, high court judicial matters, and the environment and/energy.

In every single area, the quality of day-to-day life in America will decline precipitously if the Democrats regain control. (Note I didn’t say, “If Joe Biden wins the presidency.” That was intentional. If “Biden” wins, everyone knows he will be a figurehead, an inert surrogate of unseen, unelected Democratic operatives working behind the scenes, implementing Leftist policy, creating Leftist legislation, while Diminished Joe smiles and nods unknowingly.)

Let’s look at the major areas that the Democrats will ruin:.........If the Democrats assume power in this country, life will never be the same again. Every aspect of daily life will be worse..........To Read More....

The Failed Experiment of Covid Lockdowns

September 4, 2020 by Donald L. Luskin WSJ

Six months into the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. has now carried out two large-scale experiments in public health—first, in March and April, the lockdown of the economy to arrest the spread of the virus, and second, since mid-April, the reopening of the economy. The results are in.

Counterintuitive though it may be, statistical analysis shows that locking down the economy didn’t contain the disease’s spread and reopening it didn’t unleash a second wave of infections.

Considering that lockdowns are economically costly and create well-documented long-term public-health consequences beyond Covid, imposing them appears to have been a large policy error. At the beginning, when little was known, officials acted in ways they thought prudent.

But now evidence proves that lockdowns were an expensive treatment with serious side effects and no benefit to society.

TrendMacro, my analytics firm, tallied the cumulative number of reported cases of Covid-19 in each state and the District of Columbia as a percentage of population, based on data from state and local health departments aggregated by the Covid Tracking Project.

We then compared that with the timing and intensity of the lockdown in each jurisdiction. That is measured not by the mandates put in place by government officials, but rather by observing what people in each jurisdiction actually did, along with their baseline behavior before the lockdowns. This is captured in highly detailed anonymized cellphone tracking data provided by Google and others and tabulated by the University of Maryland’s Transportation Institute into a “Social Distancing Index.”...........To Read More.....

Recognizing the Deadly Impact of Economic Lockdowns

May 7, 2020 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

Last October, before coronavirus became the world’s dominant issue, I shared this clever Remy video to help make the point that policies designed to save lives can go too far. Indeed, if they do enough harm to the economy, they can actually cause additional death.

I’ve written about this tradeoff in the context of the coronavirus, pointing out that policymakers should look at total deaths, not just deaths from the virus.

In a column for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Professors Antony Davies and James Harrigan elaborate on these tradeoffs.

In times of crisis, people want someone to do something, and don’t want to hear about tradeoffs. This is the breeding ground for grand policies driven by the mantra, “if it saves just one life.”…Rational people understand this isn’t how the world works.

…Unfortunately, even mentioning tradeoffs in a time of crisis brings the accusation that only heartless beasts would balance human lives against dollars. …

Five-thousand Americans die each year from choking on solid food. We could save every one of those lives by mandating that all meals be pureed. Pureed food isn’t appetizing, but if it saves just one life, it must be worth doing. …Legislating…these things would be ridiculous, and most sane people know as much. How do we know? Because each of us makes choices like these every day that increase the chances of our dying. …

The uncomfortable truth is that no policy can save lives; it can only trade lives. Good policies result in a net positive tradeoff. But we have no idea whether the tradeoff is a net positive until we take a sober look at the cost of saving lives. …It’s time we took a sober look at what this shutdown is costing us.

Opining for the Wall Street Journal, Joseph Sternberg warns that all options are bad, but herd immunity may be the least-worst approach.

The experts might have been right the first time. …The stated goal was not to vanquish the virus but merely to try to control its spread so as not to overwhelm health-care systems. …Those opinions now are widely derided, often in insulting terms. Yet subsequent events suggest they’re mainly correct. …The trouble started in mid-March when “herd immunity,” previously the tacit or acknowledged endgame for most of the world, became a toxic phrase. Critics pointed out that allowing the virus to spread in a controlled manner would cost lives. …But if those experts have a more plausible plan than taking a controlled path to herd immunity, the world is waiting to hear it. …A vaccine is a year or more in the future, if one ever emerges. An effective mass test-and-trace regime would require a level of competence and focus that typically eludes modern governments.

The tradeoffs are especially important in poor countries.

A new report in South Africa, largely prepared by actuaries, finds that the health costs of the lockdown could be 29 times greater than the health costs of the virus. Here are some details in a story published by the Financial Mail.

The lockdown will lead to 29 times more lives lost than the harm it seeks to prevent from Covid-19 in SA, according to…a new model developed by local actuaries. …They have sent a letter…to President Cyril Ramaphosa…they call for an end to the lockdown, a focus on isolating the elderly and allowing children to go back to school, while ensuring the economy restarts so that lives can be saved. …The actuaries used a model comparing “years of lives lost” from Covid-19, to “years of lives lost” from the lockdown. …their model translated into a minimum of 26,800 “years of lives lost” due to Covid-19, and a maximum of 473,500 years. …The actuaries then used the figures predicted by the National Treasury to model the impact on poverty. … their model showed that the number of years lost owing to the economic contraction caused by lockdown lies between 14-million and 24-million.

I have no idea, of course, whether these numbers are correct. Especially since even the world’s biggest experts are still learning about the disease.

But the underlying methodology is sensible. Policies that cause a weaker economy (and South Africa already has plenty of those) will make a country poorer and its people poorer.

And poorer people in poorer nations will die at younger ages.

Somebody sent me this image, which helps to capture the health costs of lockdowns.

P.S. Back in 2012, I pointed out that the economy’s sub-par performance under Obama would lead to almost 60,000 premature deaths. I openly acknowledged that this back-of-the-envelope calculation was very speculative, but what’s not speculation is that richer societies are healthier societies.

Researchers warn the COVID-19 lockdown will take its own toll on health

As governments race to stem the spread of coronavirus through an unprecedented closing of schools, businesses and travel, some specialists fear the long term public health impacts of a depressed economy and shuttered society.

 

By M.B. PELL and BENJAMIN LESSER in NEW YORK April 3, 2020,

It’s the most dramatic government intervention into our lives since World War II. To fight the coronavirus outbreak, governments across the globe have closed schools, travel and businesses big and small. Many observers have fretted about the economic costs of throwing millions of people out of work and millions of students out of school.........

 

The longer the suppression lasts, history shows, the worse such outcomes will be. A surge of unemployment in 1982 cut the life spans of Americans by a collective two to three million years, researchers found. During the last recession, from 2007-2009, the bleak job market helped spike suicide rates in the United States and Europe, claiming the lives of 10,000 more people than prior to the downturn. This time, such effects could be even deeper in the weeks, months and years ahead if, as many business and political leaders are warning, the economy crashes and unemployment skyrockets to historic levels..........To Read More.....

Family reactions

Editor's Note: This was sent to me via e-mail and I have no idea who originally published it. But it's so good I can't help but publish it anonymously. So, enjoy! RK

After our daughter of fifteen years of age was moved to tears by the speech of Greta Thunberg at the UN the other day, she became angry with our generation “who had been doing nothing for thirty years.

So, we decided to help her prevent what the girl on TV announced of “massive eradication and the disappearance of entire ecosystems.”

We are now committed to give our daughter a future again, by doing our part to help cool the planet four degrees.

From now on she will go to school on a bicycle, because driving her by car costs fuel, and fuel puts emissions into the atmosphere. Of course it will be winter soon and then she will want to go by bus, but only as long as it is a diesel bus.

Somehow, that does not seem to be conducive to “helping the Climate”.

Of course, she is now asking for an electric bicycle, but we have shown her the devastation caused to the areas of the planet as a result of mining for the extraction of Lithium and other minerals used to make batteries for electric bicycles, so she will be pedaling, or walking. Which will not harm her, or the planet. We used to cycle and walk to school too.

Since the girl on TV demanded we need to get rid of our dependency on fossil fuels and our daughter agreed with her, we have disconnected the heat vent in her room. The temperature is now dropping to twelve degrees in the evening, and will drop below freezing in the winter, we have promised to buy her an extra sweater, hat, tights, gloves and a blanket.

For the same reason we have decided that from now on she only takes a cold shower. She will wash her clothes by hand, with a wooden washboard, because the washing machine is simply a power consumer and since the dryer uses natural gas, she will hang her clothes on the clothes line to dry.

Speaking of clothes, the ones that she currently has are all synthetic, so made from petroleum. Therefore on Monday, we will bring all her designer clothing to the secondhand shop.

We have found an eco store where the only clothing they sell is made from undyed and unbleached linen, wool and jute.

It shouldn’t matter that it looks good on her, or that she is going to be laughed at, dressing in colorless, bland clothes and without a wireless bra, but that is the price she has to pay for the benefit of The Climate.

Cotton is out of the question, as it comes from distant lands and pesticides are used for it. Very bad for the environment.

We just saw on her Instagram that she’s pretty angry with us. This was not our intention.

From now on, at 7 p.m. we will turn off the WiFi and we will only switch it on again the next day after dinner for two hours. In this way we will save on electricity, so she is not bothered by electro-stress and will be totally isolated from the outside world. This way, she can concentrate solely on her homework. At eleven o’clock in the evening we will pull the breaker to shut the power off to her room, so she knows that dark is really dark. That will save a lot of CO2.

She will no longer be participating in winter sports to ski lodges and resorts, nor will she be going on anymore vacations with us, because our vacation destinations are practically inaccessible by bicycle.

Since our daughter fully agrees with the girl on TV that the CO2 emissions and footprints of her great-grandparents are to blame for killing our planet, what all this simply means, is that she also has to live like her great-grandparents and they never had a holiday, a car or even a bicycle.

We haven’t talked about the carbon footprint of food yet.

Zero CO2 footprint means no meat, no fish and no poultry, but also no meat substitutes that are based on soy (after all, that grows in farmer’s fields, that use machinery to harvest the beans, trucks to transport to the processing plants, where more energy is used, then trucked to the packaging/canning plants, and trucked once again to the stores) and also no imported food, because that has a negative ecological effect. And absolutely no chocolate from Africa, no coffee from South America and no tea from Asia.

Only homegrown potatoes, vegetables and fruit that have been grown in local cold soil, because greenhouses run on boilers, piped in CO2 and artificial light. Apparently, these things are also bad for The Climate. We will teach her how to grow her own food.

Bread is still possible, but butter, milk, cheese and yogurt, cottage cheese and cream come from cows and they emit CO2. No more margarine and no oils will be used for the frying pan, because that fat is palm oil from plantations in Borneo where rain forests first grew.

No ice cream in the summer. No soft drinks and no energy drinks, as the bubbles are CO2. She wanted to lose some pounds, well, this will help her achieve that goal too.

We will also ban all plastic, because it comes from chemical factories. Everything made of steel and aluminum must also be removed. Have you ever seen the amount of energy a blast furnace consumes or an aluminum smelter? Uber bad for the climate!

We will replace her 9600 coil, memory foam pillow top mattress, with a jute bag filled with straw, with a horse hair pillow.

And finally, she will no longer be using makeup, soap, shampoo, cream, lotion, conditioner, toothpaste and medication. Her sanitary napkins will be replaced with pads made of linen, that she can wash by hand, with her wooden washboard, just like her female ancestors did before climate change made her angry at us for destroying her future.

In this way we will help her to do her part to prevent mass extinction, water levels rising and the disappearance of entire ecosystems.

If she truly believes she wants to walk the talk of the girl on TV, she will gladly accept and happily embrace her new way of life.

In the Land of No Consequence, Bad Behavior Festers

What’s the point of having political power if you can’t protect your own people from egregious attacks or punish lawbreakers?
 
Julie Kelly September 16th, 2019

Another day, another whopper by the news media and their handlers in the Democratic Party.
Shortly after the New York Times published a “bombshell” article over the weekend that described more graphic, decades-old sexual misconduct allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the paper was forced to post a significant correction to its original story..............

But by the time “America’s newspaper of record” sheepishly admitted its (intentional) error, the damage had been done. Democratic lawmakers and presidential candidates called for Kavanaugh’s impeachment while celebrities and columnists wailed about the patriarchy, white privilege and, of course, the Bad Orange Man. Willfully ignorant zombies on the Left continue to regurgitate the falsehood..............Rewriting History..........No Evidence? No Problem.........Empty Threats, Unkept Promises.............

Last I checked, Trump is in charge of the Justice Department. Bill Barr, a lifelong Republican, runs the department. Republican Senator Mitch McConnell controls the Senate and Graham chairs the judiciary committee. What’s the point of having political power if you can’t protect your own people from egregious attacks or punish those who break the law to do so?

This isn’t a harmless game or an opportunity for pointless Twitter banter from the president. It’s time to follow through on empty threats and promises and stop this dangerous cycle. At this point, Republicans have no one to blame but themselves..............To Read More...

Increased Carbon Dioxide Boosts Crops, Not Weeds!

Paper Reviewed

 Kaciene, G., Kiksaityte, A., Januskaitiene, I., Miskelyte, D., Zaltauskaite, J., Sujetoviene, G., Sakalauskiene, S., Miliauskiene, Juozapaitiene, G. and Juknys, R. 2017. Different crop and weed performance under single and combined effects of elevated CO2 and temperature. Crop Science 57: 935

One of the tactics utilized by climate alarmists in their attempt to disparage or downplay the growth-enhancing benefits of atmospheric CO2 enrichment is to suggest that weeds will become ever more aggressive in the future as the air's CO2 content continues to climb, making them greater threats to the wellbeing of both natural ecosystems and farming operations. But is this contention correct?

To determine whether elevated carbon dioxide levels and higher temperatures will “differentially affect crop and weed species,” Kaciene et al. grew peas, barley, and the weed wild mustard in a controlled environment under ambient carbon dioxide levels of 400 parts per million (ppm) and elevated levels of 700 ppm and 1400 ppm under ambient and elevated temperatures.

The researchers found higher carbon dioxide conditions elevated the growth and water use efficiency of pea and barley plants, while the wild mustard experienced insignificant gains. The researchers concluded, “crops … take a considerably higher advantage from elevated carbon dioxide compared with weed species,” even under conditions of elevated temperatures. ...........To Read More....

Life in fossil-fuel-free utopia

Life without oil, natural gas and coal would most likely be nasty, brutish and short.

Paul Driessen

Al Gore’s new movie, a New York Times article on the final Obama Era “manmade climate disaster” report, and a piece saying wrathful people twelve years from now will hang hundreds of “climate deniers” are a tiny sample of Climate Hysteria and Anti-Trump Resistance rising to a crescendo. If we don’t end our evil fossil-fuel-burning lifestyles and go 100% renewable Right Now, we are doomed, they rail.

Maybe it’s our educational system, our cargo cult’s easy access to food and technology far from farms, mines and factories, or the end-of-days propaganda constantly pounded into our heads. Whatever the reason, far too many people have a pitiful grasp of reality: natural climate fluctuations throughout Earth history; the intricate, often fragile sources of things we take for granted; and what life would really be like in the utopian fossil-fuel-free future they dream of. Let’s take a short journey into that idyllic realm.

Suppose we generate just the 25 billion megawatt-hours of today’s total global electricity consumption using wind turbines. (That’s not total energy consumption, and it doesn’t include what we’d need to charge a billion electric vehicles.) We’d need more than 830 million gigantic 3-megawatt turbines!

Spacing them at just 15 acres per turbine would require 12.5 billion acres! That’s twice the land area of North America! All those whirling blades would virtually exterminate raptors, other birds and bats. Rodent and insect populations would soar. Add in transmission lines, solar panels and biofuel plantations to meet the rest of the world’s energy demands – and the mostly illegal tree cutting for firewood to heat poor families’ homes – and huge swaths of our remaining forest and grassland habitats would disappear.

The renewable future assumes these “eco-friendly alternatives” would provide reliable, affordable energy 24/7/365, even during windless, sunless weeks and cold, dry growing seasons. They never will, of course. That means we will have electricity and fuels when nature cooperates, instead of when we need it.

With backup power plants gone, constantly on-and-off electricity will make it impossible to operate assembly lines, use the internet, do an MRI or surgery, enjoy favorite TV shows or even cook dinner. Refrigerators and freezers would conk out for hours or days at a time. Medicines and foods would spoil.

Petrochemical feed stocks would be gone – so we wouldn’t have paints, plastics, synthetic fibers or pharmaceuticals, except what can be obtained at great expense from weather-dependent biodiesel. Kiss your cotton-polyester-lycra leggings and yoga pants good-bye.

But of course all that is really not likely to happen. It would actually be far worse.

First of all, there wouldn’t even be any wind turbines or solar panels. Without fossil fuels – or far more nuclear and hydroelectric plants, which rabid environmentalists also despise – we couldn’t mine the needed ores, process and smelt them, build and operate foundries, factories, refineries or cement kilns, manufacture and assemble turbines and panels. We couldn’t even make machinery to put in factories.

Wind turbines, solar panels and solar thermal installations cannot produce consistently high enough heat to smelt ores and forge metals. They cannot generate power on a reliable enough basis to operate facilities that make modern technologies possible. They cannot provide the power required to manufacture turbines, panels, batteries or transmission lines – much less power civilization.

My grandmother used to tell me, “The only good thing about the good old days is that they’re gone.” Well, they’d be back, as the USA is de-carbonized, de-industrialized and de-developed.

Ponder America and Europe before coal fueled the modern industrial age. Recall what were we able to do back then, what lives were like, how long people lived. Visit  Colonial Williamsburg and Claude Moore  Colonial Farm in Virginia, or similar places in your state. Explore rural Africa and India.

Imagine living that way, every day: pulling water from wells, working the fields with your hoe and ox-pulled plow, spinning cotton thread and weaving on looms, relying on whatever metal tools your local blacksmith shop can produce. When the sun goes down, your lives will largely shut down.

Think back to amazing construction projects of ancient Egypt, Greece or Rome – or even 18th Century London, Paris, New York. Ponder how they were built, how many people it took, how they obtained and moved the raw materials. Imagine being part of those wondrous enterprises, from sunup to sundown.

The good news is that there will be millions of new jobs. The bad news is that they’d involve mostly backbreaking labor with picks and shovels, for a buck an hour. Low-skill, low-productivity jobs just don’t pay all that well. Maybe to create even more jobs, the government will issue spoons, instead of shovels.

That will be your life, not reading, watching TV and YouTube or playing video games. Heck, there won’t even be any televisions or cell phones. Drugs and alcohol will be much harder to come by, too. (No more opioids crisis.) Water wheels and wind mills will be back in fashion. All-natural power, not all the time.

More good news: Polluting, gas-guzzling, climate-changing cars and light trucks will be a thing of the past. Instead, you’ll have horses, oxen, donkeys, buggies and wagons again … grow millions of acres of hay to feed them – and have to dispose of millions or billions of tons of manure and urine every year.

There’ll be no paved streets – unless armies of low-skill workers pound rocks into gravel, mine and grind limestone, shale, bauxite and sand for cement, and make charcoal for lime kilns. Homes will revert to what can be built with pre-industrial technologies, with no central heat and definitely no AC.

Ah, but you folks promoting the idyllic renewable energy future will still be the ruling elites. You’ll get to live better than the rest of us, enjoy lives of reading and leisure, telling us commoners how we must live. Don’t bet on it. Don’t even bet on having the stamina to read after a long day with your shovel or spoon.

As society and especially big urban areas collapse into chaos, it will be survival of the fittest. And that group likely won’t include too many Handgun Control and Gun Free Zone devotees.

But at least your climate will be stable and serene – or so you suppose. You won’t have any more extreme weather events. Sea levels will stay right where they are today: 400 feet higher than when a warming planet melted the last mile-thick glaciers that covered half the Northern Hemisphere 12,000 years ago.

At least it will be stable and serene until those solar, cosmic ray, ocean currents and other pesky, powerful natural forces decide to mess around with Planet Earth again.

Of course, many countries won’t be as stupid as the self-righteous utopian nations. They will still use fossil fuels, plus nuclear and hydroelectric, and watch while you roll backward toward the “good old days.” Those that don’t swoop in to conquer and plunder may even send us food, clothing and monetary aid (most of which will end up with ruling elites and their families, friends, cronies and private armies).

So how about this as a better option?

 

Stop obsessing over “dangerous manmade climate change.” Focus on what really threatens our planet and its people: North Korea, Iran, Islamist terrorism – and rampant poverty, disease, malnutrition and early death among the billions who still do not have access to electricity and the living standards it brings.

 

Worry less about manmade climate cataclysms – and more about cataclysms caused by policies promoted in the name of controlling Earth’s climate.

 

Don’t force-feed us with today’s substandard, subsidized, pseudo-sustainable, pseudo-renewable energy systems. When better, more efficient, more practical energy technologies are developed, they will replace fossil fuels. Until then, we would be crazy to go down the primrose path to renewable energy utopia.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death. (August 2017)