TOM HARRIS AND DR. MADHAV KHANDEKAR:

“…The U.S. Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA), released last Friday, provides a superb illustration of journalist H. L. Mencken’s (1880-1950) claim:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

The 1,656-page NCA report, produced by a team from thirteen federal agencies, is riddled with imaginary hobgoblins. Especially mistaken is the NCA’s repeated reference to increased warming and extreme weather events, both in the recent past and in the future. The NCA asserts:

Observations collected around the world provide significant, clear, and compelling evidence that global average temperature is much higher, and is rising more rapidly, than anything modern civilization has experienced …

While NASA’s claim that there has been slightly more than 1 degree Celsius (1.8 deg Fahrenheit) of warming since 1880 is likely correct, there has been no additional warming since the new millennium. This is referred to as the “Global Warming Hiatus” by the climate modeling community. Contrary to the outputs of climate models that project continued warming, the Earth’s climate appears to be cooling down, with increasing cold weather extremes worldwide in the last six years.

The past two winters have been especially cold over North America. November 2018 set low temperature records across the contiguous U.S., with three winter storms as of November 28 and the coldest Thanksgiving Week in one hundred years. Among some of the cold records: 19 F (degrees Fahrenheit) was recorded at New York City’s Central Park on November 22, which was the park’s coldest Thanksgiving since 1871; on the same day, the temperature at the top of Mount Washington in northern New Hampshire fell to -26 F, the coldest ever recorded for November. This beat the previous record of -20 F on Nov. 30, 1958.

Extreme cold was also witnessed in many locales in central and eastern Canada on November 22. For example, Toronto’s Pearson Airport recorded -13.3 degrees Celsius (8 F), 0.9 Celsius (C) colder that the previous record set in 1989. Kingston saw -16.7 C (2 F), breaking the record set in 1880 by 2.7 C. Ottawa recorded -17.2 C (1 F), 1.6 C colder than the record (1895). And Algonquin Park experienced -22 C (-7.6 F), 1.4 C colder than the previous record set in 1929.

The NCA’s projections of catastrophic warming of 5 C over next 80 years is clearly at odds with the current cooling trend that appears to be the reality of climate change.

Even if warming resumes in the near future, a number of peer-reviewed papers now suggest that future warming would be about 0.5 C (0.9 F) to, at most, 1 C (1.8 F) by 2100. This is not dangerous in the least, and certainly not worth dedicating trillions of dollars to try to prevent it by attempting to reduce worldwide human-CO2 emissions…”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/new-u-s-climate-report-a-scientific-embarrassment/

Is Google Already Censoring Search Results?

“…Google employees debated whether to bury conservative media outlets in the company’s search function as a response to President Donald Trump’s election in 2016, internal Google communications obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation reveal.

The Daily Caller and Breitbart were specifically singled out as outlets to potentially bury, the communications reveal.

Trump’s election in 2016 shocked many Google employees, who had been counting on Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to win.

Communications obtained by TheDCNF show that internal Google discussions went beyond expressing remorse over Clinton’s loss to actually discussing ways Google could prevent Trump from winning again.

“This was an election of false equivalencies, and Google, sadly, had a hand in it,” Google engineer Scott Byer wrote in a Nov. 9, 2016, post reviewed by TheDCNF.

Byer falsely labeled The Daily Caller and Breitbart as “opinion blogs” and urged his coworkers to reduce their visibility in search results…”

https://dailycaller.com/2018/11/29/google-censorship-conservative-media/

Or worst political and media class of all time?

Michael Barone:

“…In the wake of the midterm elections, conservative analyst Yuval Levin saw no winners. “It is the weakness of all sides, and the strength of none, that shapes this moment.”

You can see what he means. President Trump hasn’t gotten everything he wanted — no Obamacare repeal, not even the wall — from the Republican House of Representatives. And on one issue or another he’ll probably get something from Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats he couldn’t get from Paul Ryan’s Republicans.

Now, maybe House Democrats will overplay their hand and help Trump win re-election in 2020. And maybe Democrats, faced with a crowded field of presidential candidates, will choose an unelectable nominee.

But even though Republicans gained Senate seats and are in good shape to confirm conservative judges, Trump is weakened by the results. Republicans lost just about every House seat he carried in 2016 by 5 percent or less. And he got only 46 percent of the popular vote.

Do the math. Forty-six minus five is 41. No way a 41-percent candidate gets 270 electoral votes in a two-way race.

It doesn’t have to be this way. CNN analyst Harry Enten points out that Trump’s job approval on the economy at this point is the second highest of recent presidents. But his overall approval is the second lowest. The obvious advice: Behave in a more dignified manner.

But Trump is not alone among national leaders in behaving in a way that makes him weaker than he might be. It seems to be a common, though not quite universal, ailment…”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/whos-to-blame-weak-leaders-weak-institutions-weak-voters

Late stage socialism. Note also Reuters calls Venezuela’s situation a recession. It is closer to total collapse of society.

“…After a woman died while connected to a respirator at a hospital in central Venezuela last month, one of her relatives punched the attending doctor in the chest, blaming her for the woman’s death.

“They think when there’s no equipment or antibiotics that it’s the doctor’s fault,” said the doctor at the Hospital Central in Maracay, 130 kilometers (80 miles) west of the capital Caracas. She requested anonymity for fear of reprisals.

Hospital Central was one of 62 percent of hospitals across the country where doctors say they have suffered attacks by frustrated patients’ relatives, as violent acts in Venezuela’s decaying medical system have become increasingly common, according to a study published on Thursday by a doctors advocacy group.

In addition, 45 percent of hospitals reported robberies and shootings, the report showed, in the latest sign of how Venezuela’s five years of recession have left the country’s hospitals, once among the best in Latin America, in dire straits…”

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-health-idUSKCN1NY2P5

Yesterday: Venezuela Economy Contracted 29.8 Percent in Third Quarter.

Comments on the latest government produced global warming report.

“If these claims [Summary Findings, Chapter 1] were true then how is it that the US has grown so prosperous since the 1900s? You have just finished stating that massive, historically unprecedented climate changes occurred in the past century, especially in the past few decades. It is a matter of historical record that throughout this period the quality of life in the US just kept going up and up. Now you say that the next increment of warming will be completely different and will lead to ruin across the land. No exceptions, no caveats, no qualifications: you are asking the reader to forget the pattern that held up to now and take your word for it that disaster is coming. If you really believe that, then you owe it to the readers to be convincing, not cartoonish and apocalyptic. As one example, the opening phrase “cascading disruptions and damages in interdependent networks of infrastructure, ecosystems and social systems” reads like a Hollywood disaster flick – i.e. fiction. You have a very evocative style, but it sets a tone at odds with the expectation that this is a serious scientific document.”

Andy May:

“…The U.S. Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4) Volume II is out and generating a lot of discussion. Volume II, Impacts Risks and Adaptation in the United States to climate change can be downloaded here (Reidmiller, et al. 2018). Volume I, published last year, on the physical science behind the assessment is here (Wuebbles, et al. 2017).

The mainstream media (MSM) is breathlessly reporting about it using the following template or something similar:

“[Volume II] of the Fourth National Climate Assessment shows how [America/city/state/poor/people of color/old people/young people, etc.] are already feeling the effects of climate change from [wildfires/droughts/floods/disease/hurricanes/etc.].

Examples of these statements can be seen in National Geographic, Science News, the New York Times, etc. These popular reports leave out some very important caveats.

1. The NCA4 results are from computer climate model runs, some of them implausible.
2. The climate models used to compute the effects of human influence on climate have never successfully predicted the weather, weather cycles (such as El Niño or La Niña events), or climate.

All climate models fail to predict the weather or climate, with the possible exception of the Russian model INM-CM4(Volodin, Dianskii and Gusev 2010). This model is mostly ignored by the climate community, presumably because it does not predict anything bad. As you can see in Figure 1, INM-CM4 matches observations reasonably well and that makes it an outlier among the 32 model output datasets plotted. This success also makes INM-CM4 the only validated model in the group…”

“…Climate change is real, climate has changed throughout the Earth’s history and will change in the future. Many times in human history climate has changed more rapidly than it is changing today, these changes are documented hereand here. Probably the best example is from the end of the last glacial period, 11,700 years ago, after the Younger Dyas cold period, when temperatures rose 5-10°C in just a few decades in the Northern Hemisphere (Severinghaus, et al. 1998). This is an astounding 9°F to 18°F in much less than 100 years. Humans adapted and even thrived during this change, which occurred at the dawn of human civilization. Despite this evidence, NCA4 insists that recent warming is unprecedented, this is a clear error in the report…”

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/11/28/an-assessment-of-the-4th-national-climate-assessment/

I agree with this. The Media are complicit out of naivete and a desire for ratings and readers.

“…Junk science — worthless theories or data presented as fact — can be found everywhere, from scientific journals to media reports. It’s become a profitable industry, where scheming researchers get taxpayer-funded grants to find specific conclusions, then those manipulated and fake conclusions are reported back to the public as if they are real, and then policies and recommendations are made that further cost people money.

A good example of this is “research” surrounding sexual assault statistics. Researchers at universities use taxpayer dollars to find out how many women and men are sexually assaulted on campus. They don’t specifically ask if anyone has been sexually assaulted, instead they ask about a wide range of behaviors the researchers then deem to be sexual assault, such as “unwanted” behaviors. The behaviors need not fit into a legal definition of sexual assault or rape, but if respondents answer “yes,” they are considered sexual assault victims.

These “researchers” then report unrealistically high numbers of women to be victims, and the media uncritically broadcasts the findings, which is why you repeatedly see reports that “1-in-5” women have been sexually assaulted during college.

Unscrupulous activists and lawmakers then use these junk findings to make harmful policies. The Obama administration cited the “1-in-5” statistics as justification for removing due process rights and basic fairness from campus sex assault tribunals…”

https://www.dailywire.com/news/38793/junk-science-everywhere-and-media-eat-it-ashe-schow

“…Educated on a legal loophole that lets migrant “families” with kids enter the United States, the Homeland Security Department reported Tuesday that men showing up with kids at the border has spiked 110 percent in just the last two years.

The department noted that children could be used by smugglers and drug traffickers to enter the country.

Families are also using fraud to game the immigration system. The department said that 170 families have been caught lying about their relationships to enter the U.S.

“This data does not show nor does DHS assert that all minors apprehended as part of a family unit are illegitimate, but it does indicate that there is a significant problem that provides DHS the needed authority to protect the best interests and welfare of all children,” said the department.

The statement was aimed at news reporting that has suggested the Trump administration is tear gassing and rejecting families…”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/dhs-110-surge-in-migrant-men-using-kids-to-enter-us-rampant-fraud

This is Straight up Child Abuse

Mom Dresses Six-Year-Old Son As Girl, Threatens Dad With Losing His Son For Disagreeing

“…Six-year-old James is caught in a gender identity nightmare. Under his mom’s care in Dallas, Texas, James obediently lives as a trans girl named “Luna.” But given the choice when he’s with dad, he’s all boy — his sex at birth.

In their divorce proceedings, the mother has charged the father with child abuse for not affirming James as transgender, has sought restraining orders against him, and is seeking to terminate his parental rights. She is also seeking to require him to pay for the child’s visits to a transgender-affirming therapist and transgender medical alterations, which may include hormonal sterilization starting at age eight…”

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/26/mom-dresses-six-year-old-son-girl-threatens-dad-losing-son-disagreeing/

STEPHEN MOORE:

“…What is it with the modern left and the mainstream media that makes them so enamored with predictions of the coming apocalypse? Perhaps it is thanks to the old rule of journalism that bad news sells newspapers.

The media has broadcast far and wide the latest primal scream by the federal government and hundreds of scientists that all life on earth by the end of the century could be severely threatened due to climate change. Chicago could turn into Phoenix and its desert conditions. Economic losses will eventually total trillions of dollars. Early death, food shortages, and pestilence will become the norm without “radical” changes in the way we live and use energy. The alarmist report warns that climate change is already destroying the planet, as evidenced by the strange occurrence of natural disasters that have almost never happened in history, like forest fires in California, hurricanes in Florida, and floods in other nations.

How could a government report prepared by hundreds of scientists and with the official imprimatur of the federal government be wrong? The obvious answer is that they have been consistently wrong for decades in predictions of environmental devastation. Anyone over the age of 50 knows that we have heard these sensational, false malthusian forecasts from the federal government, and that reality has contradicted them in almost every instance. Look at history and consider the track record.

In the 1960s, the world became captivated by the likes of media darling and Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, who warned of a population bomb as humans propagated like field mice. He said people will live elbow to elbow, leading to mass starvation, and there was a 50/50 bet that Britain would survive as a nation. India, we were told, was beyond saving. These false worries became the basis for some terrible population control strategies, like the gruesome one child policy of China.

In the 1970s, the infamous Club of Rome report on “limits to growth” in the world, which was sponsored and funded by the federal government, saw the planet not surviving much past the year 2000 due to poverty, pollution, starvation, overcrowding, climate change, and natural resource depletion. It was all so horrifying that people across the country started wearing lapel pins that said, “Stop the planet, I want to get off.”

In the 1980s, the Carter administration spent millions of dollars on the most comprehensive environmental report ever undertaken by the federal government, employing hundreds of top scientists from more than two dozen agencies. (Sound familiar?) The end product dismally concluded, “If present trends continue, the world in 2000 will be more crowded, more polluted, less stable ecologically, and more vulnerable to disruption than the world we live in now. Serious stresses involving population, resources, and environment are clearly visible ahead. Despite greater output, people will be poorer in many ways than they are today.”

When skeptics raised the red flag on these forecasts, they were accused of questioning the “settled” science of the day. Only a few courageous “deniers” such as my mentor, the great economist Julian Simon, had the courage to call out the report as fallacious from the start. Simon was right, and the federal government and the hundreds of scientists were dead wrong. The next two decades delivered the best period of global prosperity, pollution reduction, lower poverty rates, rising living standards, more food production, and falling energy prices in history…

and

Scientists should have the wisdom and the modesty to admit that we have no idea what will happen to our planet as climate change continues over the next century. There are too many variables to hazard a decent guess. But the one indomitable lesson of history is that giving the government more power is the most dangerous threat to the future of our planet….”

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/418441-another-government-report-is-dead-wrong-on-fragile-state-of-our

“…A new White House report, issued just last Friday, makes alarming projections about future global warming. Not only will it cost billions and billions in lost economic output, that report says, but thousands of lives as well. Time for mass panic? Nope. Just more fake science.02:2602:26

The new National Climate Assessment (NCA) report, the fourth since 2000, seems to suggest a coming climate disaster, to paraphrase the film comedy “Ghost Busters,” of “epic, even biblical proportions.” But its forecasts and models border on the absurd. At some point, the scientific malpractice in these global warming scare reports has to end.

Some of the projections sound like something kicked around in a Hollywood brainstorming session for a science fiction thriller, and not like the results of sober scientific reasoning and balanced statistical modeling techniques. We shouldn’t be surprised, however. The three reports that preceded this one were equally bad.

By the way, that’s not us speaking,  but actual climate scientists. They say the latest government climate change report does a disservice to Americans by once again politicizing science and ignoring both real data and history.

The report’s conclusions are so extreme as to be laughable. For one, it predicts that use of coal and other fossil fuels will destroy 10% of U.S. GDP by the end of the century. Those are nice projections, since none of those who made them will be alive to see them proven totally false…”

https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/global-warming-fake-science-agenda/

Abe Greenwald:

“…Global-warming activists predicted that Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement on climate change would claim innocent lives. Trump pulled out over a year ago, and the death toll from the American snub stands at zero. In France, however, violent protests against President Emmanuel Macron’s efforts to mitigate climate change have killed one person and injured 227.

On Saturday, French mobs were protesting a tax hike on fuel. And they, not Macron, are directly to blame for the death and destruction. But the fact that these massive demonstrations happened at all—that they involved some 283,000 protestors—shows how little anyone really worries about climate change.

Macron is trying to get France off of fossil fuels. The French government recently raised diesel taxes by seven euro cents and had planned to raise the gasoline tax by four euro cents. But it turns out that people—not just Americans—care deeply about melting ice caps and rising sea levels only under specific circumstances. Namely, when they can be blamed on the greed and stupidity of their political enemies. They find that they suddenly care a lot less when addressing climate change means shelling out a few extra euro cents. So the French came out in droves, lit bonfires, tore up some buildings, blocked streets, and chanted slogans.

Last year, Trump fought back against critics of the Paris withdrawal by saying, “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.” But he might have represented the citizens of Paris, too. “We no longer know what kind of car to buy, petrol, diesel, electric, who knows?” said one protester interviewed by the Guardian. “I have a little diesel van, and I don’t have the money to buy a new one, especially as I’m about to retire. We have the feeling those from the countryside are forgotten.”

Another protestor said that “the fuel tax was just the final straw.” He went on: “All we can do is show that people are angry, that they are not alone and that they can do something about it. I hope there is no violence, but people are angry. I can understand why, for years they have voted for things and nothing has changed for them.” The protestors, known as gilets jaunes, for their signature yellow vests, enjoy 79-percent support among the French working class, according to IFOP.

Meanwhile, as Parisians turn against the core ideas of the Paris agreement, Americans are worked up over the Trump administration’s seeming indifference to a new U.S. government report on climate change. The Fourth National Climate Assessment was prepared by “300 leading scientists,” according to CNN. And like all sober scientific documents, it’s packed to the gills with apocalyptic predictions for the coming century.

The U.S. economy could lose 10 percent of its GDP; crops will shrink, much ocean life will die off, and more people will have less food. Illness will spread, pollution will get worse, floods and wildfires will increase, and, naturally, many people will die. Now, imagine the public response in our own low-trust, grievance-obsessed nation if the Trump administration actually instituted a policy that required every American to pay up to keep that theoretical future at bay.

There’s a curious contradiction in climate activism. On the one hand, we’re told that the effects of climate change are already happening all around us—that we no longer have to wait for signs of devastation. On the other hand, huge resources swing into action to lay out disaster-movie scenarios of a dystopian future. If the effects of climate change are already so evident, why go to all the trouble of scaring us about what’s going to happen? Maybe because even sympathetic people don’t really believe—in their marrow—that anything alarming is currently happening. If they did, perhaps they’d give up their cars and shrink their lifestyles on the spot. But as it stands, they scream for government intervention and then protest when called to share in the cost…”

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/politics-ideas/the-paris-climate-discord/

Border agents routinely used tear gas during Obama administration, DHS data shows

Just in case you still think the media reports fairly and in an unbiased way.

“…Federal agents used tear gas on the U.S.-Mexico border dozens of times during the Obama administration, data from the Department of Homeland Security shows, despite growing outrage at the Trump administration from Democrats for using the substance against migrant caravan members over the weekend.

According to DHS data obtained by Fox News, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency has used 2-chlorobenzylidene malononitrile, commonly known as tear gas, 126 times since 2010.

During the Obama administration, tear gas was used on the border 26 times in 2012, 27 times in 2013, 15 times in 2014, eight times in 2015, and three times in 2016. That compares to 18 times in 2017 and 29 times in 2018 during the Trump administration…”

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/

From Buck Sexton:

1) mostly women and children
2) mostly valid asylum seekers
3) no known criminals
4) wont make it to the border
5) no external organizers
6) troop deployment not helpful
7) no threat to US personnel

Why has the caravan of migrants been unable to enter the U.S.? Because of a defended wall.

Victor Davis Hanson explains how Trump’s success and loss of support in the midterms mirrors western lore.

“…But as the centrists of the suburbs showed in the recent midterm elections, those who saw Trump as necessary in 2016 may now see him as optional in 2018 — and probably because of his successes rather than his failures. In other words, good times allow well-off voters to forget bad times. Success breeds options. They are freed to turn their attention to the controversial means that had achieved for them their desired ends…”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/outsiders-trump-shane-save-the-day-but-are-ostracized/

And what they tell us about journalism. Journalism is a joke.

Trump Loves Kids So Much He’s Tear-Gassing Them Dana Milbank, Washington Post

Tear Gas Used Once a Month at Border Under Obama Stephan Dinan, Wash Times

Where was the media outrage and moral preening when the Obama Administration was forced to use tear gas in similar circumstances? This tells you all you need to know about media and journalism in the U.S.

A defense of Brett Kavanaugh’s nominated replacement on the D.C. Circuit.

“…Writing in The Volokh Conspiracy in 2011, Rao discussed the predicament of a man named Mr. Wackenheim. By her description, Wackenheim was a dwarf living in France who allowed others to throw him for sport. This was his source of income. After several French cities banned the practice, he “challenged the orders on the grounds that they interfered with his economic liberty and right to earn a living.” Higher courts eventually upheld the bans, ruling that the practice of dwarf tossing offended human dignity.

As Rao explained, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy used similar justifications to support the country’s ban on burqas. The former president, she noted, said that the religious wear “runs counter to women’s dignity.” But as Rao rightly responded, “the debate focuses little on what Muslim women think about the full veil or why some of them wear it in public. Instead of associating dignity with religious choice, those who would ban the veil treat dignity as a different social ideal—one that measures up to majority standards of individual self-expression.”

“Respect for intrinsic human dignity, however, would favor individual choice,” the now-D.C. Circuit nominee added. “As with other similar theories, it is a short step from having substantive ideals of dignity to coercion of individuals in the name of these ideals.”

Rao’s argument is a serious one. Her point is that one can disagree with another’s choices, but dignity is about the right to make those choices instead of having the government make them for us.

If you only read about Rao’s work in Mother Jones, however, you might
you might have thought that Rao simply has a niche affinity for dwarf tossing…”

https://reason.com/archives/2018/11/26/

I like John James. I’m not sure if he is a good pick for this post.

“…As Nikki Haley’s days as US ambassador to the United Nations come to an end, President Trump is actively looking for a replacement. Among those reportedly being considered is John James, the businessman, Iraq War veteran, and former Michigan Senate candidate who ran against Sen. Debbie Stabenow in the midterm elections.

According to the Bloomberg report, “James was at the White House last week talking about an administration post with Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence, two people said.”…”

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis