The continuing trend toward the loss of our freedom - free speech at the brink

 Jonathan Turley gets it right again.

Those who want to control speech deserve what they will get - tyranny.  The rest of us don't.

The Progressives' agenda is Repressive.

Here is JT's blog entry.

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We have previously discussed the alarming rollback on free speech rights in the West, particularly in Europe. The move to criminalize speech has led to an insatiable appetite for new limitations and broader prosecutions. Norway is an example of this headlong plunge into speech controls and crimes in the West. This week the legislature adopted (without even a vote) a new criminal law that punishes people for saying anything deemed hate speech toward transgender people in their own home or private conversations.

Minister of Justice and Public Security Monica Maeland declared victory because speech regulation must be “adapted to the practical situations that arise.” The “practical situation” includes speaking to your own spouse or family.

Birna Rorslett, vice president of the Association of Transgender People in Norway added allowing people to speak out against transgender values or issues “has been an eyesore for trans people for many, many years.”

Such speech controls in Europe have led to a chilling effect on political and religious speech. In their homes, people will often share religious and political views that depart from majoritarian values or beliefs. This law would regulate those conversations and criminalize the expression of prohibited viewpoints.

As we recently discussed, a poll in Germany found only 18 percent of Germans feel free to express their views in public. Notably, over 31 percent of Germans did not even feel free expressing themselves in private among friends. Just 17 percent felt free to express themselves on the Internet and 35 percent said that freedom to speak is confined to the smallest of private circles.

The most chilling fact is that European-style speech controls have become a core value in the Democratic Party. Once a party that fought for free speech, it has become the party demanding Internet censorship and hate speech laws. President-Elect Joe Biden has called for speech controls and recently appointed a transition head for agency media issues that is one of the most pronounced anti-free speech figures in the United States. It is a trend that seems now to be find support in the media, which celebrated the speech of French President Emmanuel Macron before Congress where he called on the United States to follow the model of Europe on hate speech.

For free speech advocates, we need to educate the public on where this road leads in places like Norway. What is at stake is the very right that has long defined us as a nation. Once we cross the Rubicon into speech criminalization and controls, Europe has shown that it is rarely possible to work back to liberties lost. We are moving into potentially the most anti-free speech period of American history — and possibly the most anti-free speech Administration. Many politicians are already arguing for citizens to give up their free speech rights in forums like the Internet. With the media echoing many of these anti-free speech sentiments, it will require a greater effort of those who value the First Amendment and its core place in our constitutional system.

Vitamin D3 supplements and cancer

 Here is a link to a paper at jamanetwork.com, "Effect of Vitamin D3 Supplements on Development of Advanced Cancer.

Here is the Findings.

In this secondary analysis of a randomized clinical trial with 25 871 patients, supplementation with vitamin D3 reduced the incidence of advanced (metastatic or fatal) cancer in the overall cohort, with strongest risk reduction in individuals with normal weight and no reduction among individuals with overweight or obesity.

Here is the Results.

Among 25 871 randomized VITAL participants (51% female; mean [SD] age, 67.1 [7.1] years), 1617 were diagnosed with invasive cancer over a median intervention period of 5.3 years (range, 3.8-6.1 years). As previously reported, no significant differences for cancer incidence by treatment arm were observed. However, a significant reduction in advanced cancers (metastatic or fatal) was found for those randomized to vitamin D compared with placebo (226 of 12 927 assigned to vitamin D [1.7%] and 274 of 12 944 assigned to placebo [2.1%]; HR, 0.83 [95% CI, 0.69-0.99]; P = .04). When stratified by BMI, there was a significant reduction for the vitamin D arm in incident metastatic or fatal cancer among those with normal BMI (BMI<25: HR, 0.62 [95% CI, 0.45-0.86]) but not among those with overweight or obesity (BMI 25-<30: HR, 0.89 [95% CI, 0.68-1.17]; BMI≥30: HR, 1.05 [95% CI, 0.74-1.49]) (P = .03 for interaction by BMI).

The ethics of forgiving student debt

 Jeff Jacoby gets it right at Jewish World Review.

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During the presidential primary campaign last winter, as Democratic candidates were promoting various plans to cancel federal student loan debt, one Iowa father's encounter with Elizabeth Warren captured the raw unfairness of the idea.

"My daughter's getting out of school. I saved all my money [so] she doesn't have any student loans," the man said. "Am I going to get my money back?"

"Of course not," Warren answered.

"So you're going to pay for people who didn't save any money, and those of us who did the right thing get screwed," said the father, visibly upset. "My buddy had fun, bought a car, went on vacations. I saved my money. He made more than I did, but I worked a double shift, worked extra. My daughter's worked since she was 10."

That exchange vividly illustrates the injustice of student-debt proposals that would, in effect, punish those who saved and worked more to pay for college, those who deferred higher education until they could afford it, and those who responsibly repaid their loans — by forcing them to pay for those who didn't. Even more outrageous, it would compel the two-thirds of Americans who didn't earn a college degree to help pick up the tab for many of those who did.

Of the nearly $1.7 trillion in student loan debt, according to the Federal Reserve, the vast majority, more than $1.5 trillion, is held by the US government. Since higher education correlates strongly with higher earnings, these college loans are concentrated among the relatively well-to-do. So an immense government program to forgive outstanding student debt would disproportionately benefit high-income people at the expense of those less fortunate. Democrats a year ago may have thought that offering a bailout to college-educated, upper-middle-class voters made political sense. But how can they still think so after an election in which the "blue wave" they expected never materialized, in part because of Republican gains among working-class Americans without college degrees?

Yet leading Democrats and progressives are doubling down. "Biden-Harris can cancel billions of dollars in student loan debt," Warren tweeted recently. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, claims that any college graduate's "first $50,000 of debt [can] be vanquished" through an executive order by the next president. On Wednesday, a coalition of 236 liberal organizations called upon Biden to issue that order upon taking office.

It is far from clear that billions of dollars of debt can be simply written off via presidential decree. But set aside the procedural question. A huge new student loan forgiveness scheme is indefensible as a matter of policy.

As noted, it would amount to a boon for the relatively well-off. But it would also treat similarly situated people dissimilarly. Imagine three 30-year-old neighbors, each of whom earns $50,000 — a construction worker who never went to college, a legal secretary with a two-year associate's degree and $2,000 in remaining student debt, and a software engineer who attended a four-year college and graduate school and still has $50,000 in unpaid loans. A bailout that erased $50,000 of student debt would give nothing to one of the neighbors, a modest $2,000 to the second, and a $50,000 bonanza to the third.

College loan forgiveness isn't just unfair. It is unnecessary. Some borrowers have a hard time managing their student debt, but the data make clear that this is not a national crisis. According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 70 percent of college loans are fully paid off within 10 years. Among borrowers with loan amounts between $5,000 and $10,000, fully 80 percent clear the debt within a decade.

For the typical American household paying down a student loan, the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances has found, payments amount to around 5 percent of income. According to Jason DeLisle, a specialist on higher-education financing at the American Enterprise Institute, a recent analysis of 4 million families' financial records by the JP Morgan Chase Institute calculated that the typical monthly student loan payment ranged between $144 and $203. For the median family, that amounted to 5.5 percent of take-home income.

Of course, there are borrowers who find themselves struggling to make their payments. But those borrowers can avail themselves of existing means to have their debt deferred, reduced, or even canceled. By one count, there are 13 major student loan forgiveness programs. Some are geared to people who work in public service, education, health care, or the military; others enable borrowers to have their payments capped at an affordable percentage of their discretionary income. Bottom line: The overwhelming majority of college loans are paid off, and help is available for debtors who get in over their heads.

Even amid the financial stresses triggered by the pandemic, the American people are not drowning in debt, college-related or otherwise. Bloomberg noted the other day that household debt payments are currently lower than they have been in decades. Which suggests that even if the government were to forgive all student loan debt, it wouldn't provide much of a fiscal stimulus.

What it would provide is an unstoppable demand for the government to wipe out other kinds of personal obligations. "Cancel rent. Cancel mortgage. Cancel student debt," Representative Ayanna Pressley tweeted in July. And why stop there? From Matthew Walther, writing in The Week, comes a call for a "debt jubilee" that would wipe out $50,000 of debt owed for anything at all: "credit cards, auto loans, remaining mortgage balances, and, especially, medical debts, which should be discharged without any limit."

Children send Santa Claus lists of things they want for free, but adults know that Santa isn't real. Santa isn't the federal government, either. Washington cannot magically make people's debts disappear; it can only compel other people to pay them. That may or may not be good politics, but it is certainly terrible economics.

The battle between good and evil in the United States

 Here is an editorial by the Editorial Board of The Epoch Times.

The Board is on target.

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When the founders of our newspaper fled a communist regime to come to America, they never expected that this great nation would one day become the focal point of the battle between communism and freedom.

Many Americans believe communism is an abstract concept, something that only affects faraway nations, without realizing that it has already arrived at our doorstep.

Communism has spread in America under names such as socialism, progressivism, liberalism, neo-Marxism, and so on, in a slow process over decades of systematic subversion by first the Soviet Union, and now the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

This cumulative battle for the future of America—and with it, the rest of the world—is now coming to a head in the U.S. presidential election.

This is a conflict that transcends partisanship and party affiliation.

Belief in God has always been fundamental to America. The early colonists fled here so that they could practice their religion freely. This nation was founded on the belief that we are all created equal by God and endowed by the Creator with our rights. The U.S. motto is “In God we trust.”

Belief in God and the principles derived from that belief are the fundamental reasons why the United States can enjoy freedom, democracy, and prosperity, and why the United States has become the nation it is today.

In this great tradition, voting is a sacred duty in which each citizen may take responsibility for who governs. This year, a record number of Americans voted to choose their next leader.

We have since learned that this process has been subverted. Numerous credible allegations of voter fraud have emerged, pointing to a systematic effort to change the outcome of the election.

The far-left and the communist devil behind it—the same force that Karl Marx once described as haunting Europe—are using lies, fraud, and manipulation in an attempt to deprive the people of their rights and freedoms.

One of the two major U.S. parties, the Democratic Party, is no longer the political party it used to be. Over the decades, it has gradually been infiltrated by the same Marxist ideology that has created the most brutal and repressive communist regimes in history.

Communist ideology, including socialism and its associated ideas, is not a normal ideology. It is the ideology that has caused the unnatural deaths of at least 100 million people.

The communist ideology uses seemingly righteous concepts, such as “equality” and “political correctness,” to confuse people. Its ideology has infiltrated all fields in our society, including education, media, and art. It unscrupulously destroys everything that is traditional, including faith, religion, morality, culture, family, art, education, law, and so on, and leads people to fall into moral depravity.

This is the ideology of totalitarianism, one that drives once-thriving nations such as Venezuela into the abyss and that was able to destroy 5,000 years of culture in China, where people went from a belief in the divine to a devotion to the state.

It is the systematic undoing of all that is good that humankind stands for. It stands diametrically opposed to goodness, fairness, truth, and compassion.

This not only has undermined people’s spirits and their righteous faith in God, but has dragged the American people and all of mankind to the brink of danger.
A Choice Between Good and Evil

This is a conflict that transcends party lines, a battle between whether we as Americans can stay true to our founding principles and follow God’s will, or whether we will be subjected to forces that seek to control and destroy our most fundamental rights.

This is not something we say lightly; because our newspaper’s founders lived through communist totalitarianism, they understand its destructive force.

As a media organization, we are independent and don’t take positions on political issues or candidates, but rather stand for truth and justice.

America has now come to the brink of falling into a communist abyss.

At the center of this battle is now President Donald Trump, who has clearly said no to socialism and communism and ended decades of appeasement of the Chinese regime by enacting a nationwide effort to counter its influence and infiltration.

Trump has confronted the CCP at this critical moment in history.

To communist China, the trajectory has been clear: Trump is an American president who values tradition and opposes communism, and as long as he leads, the Chinese regime knows it won’t succeed in its decades-long objective to overthrow America and, with it, the rest of the free world.

We have communist China at our gates, ready to take over. The CCP has carefully studied the U.S. system over the decades and now has successfully taken advantage of our open society and has infiltrated our country.

Internally, we have far-left groups such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter (which refers to the organization, whose founders describe themselves as “Marxists” and have ties to pro-CCP groups, not people broadly supporting black lives) organizing protests and riots. The movement is similar to the CCP’s Cultural Revolution, which destroyed the cultural heritage and traditions of the nation. It is an anti-American movement, just like the Cultural Revolution was anti-Chinese. The core of the movement’s ideology is no different from that of the communist movement in China, and it goes hand in hand with the CCP, ready to subvert America.

The impact of this election is far-reaching. It has made clear to people, governments, and organizations around the world that they must decide whether they stand with the communist devil or with tradition and universal values.

More and more people are now realizing that the 2020 U.S. election is not a two-party fight, not a dispute between Trump and Joe Biden, but a battle between tradition ​​and socialism, a battle between good and evil, a battle between the divine and the communist devil.

Sub-optimal choices concerning COVID-19 and some common sense

Here is a link to a paper by Budish "Maximize Utility subject to R ≤ 1: A Simple Price-Theory Approach to Covid-19 Lockdown and Reopening Policy".

The paper illustrates the non-think to date exhibited by most Politicians, Talking Heads, and "Scientists" such as Fauci and Osterholm.

Here are some excerpts.

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When eradication of an infectious threat is not feasible,

the second-best from a public health perspective is to minimize its spread. For example Dr.

Michael Osterholm writes: “As epidemiologists, we have two goals. The first is to prevent.

When that is not possible, the second is to minimize ...” (Osterholm and Olshaker, 2020, pg.

26). As emphasized in the introduction, however, the minimize objective makes it difficult

to think about tradeoffs if the interventions themselves are very expensive. This latter point bears emphasis. In the HIV pandemic, the minimize strategy entailed widespread public

education about safe sex, condom distribution, needle exchange, etc. — but no public health

expert recommended literally trying to minimize the spread of the virus by banning sex (or

banning non-monogamous sex, etc.). In the Covid-19 pandemic, however, the minimize

strategy has included not just the kinds of interventions that are relatively cheap like virusrisk

education, masks, testing, etc., but also much more severe and expensive measures which

have included banning many forms of social and commercial contact.

[The “economic cost of reducing spread” curve grows very steeply as R gets lower than

lower than 1.0, even if simple interventions are utilized, because of the increasingly-valuable

activities that have to be dropped.]

The public-health instinct expressed by Dr. Osterholm to eradicate if feasible, and otherwise
minimize, is a useful heuristic in the scenarios depicted in Panels D, E, and F. Specifically, if we
understand “eradicate if feasible” to mean feasible at a fathomable fixed cost, and “minimize” to
mean doing all of the cheap interventions, on the relatively flat part of the mitigation curve, as
fully as possible, then this heuristic gets to the optimal policy response in each of Panels D, E,
and F.

However, if the costs of interventions being considered grow large enough — as they clearly
have done in the Covid-19 response — then this instinct may lead to sub-optimal policy. This is
the case depicted in Panels A and B and that has been emphasized throughout this paper.
It therefore seems that Covid-19 required a novel play in the epidemiological playbook: maximize
societal utility subject to R <= 1. That is, get to R <= 1 as efficiently as possible, using either
simple interventions or targeted bans of activities with particularly poor utility-to-risk.
I want to close by emphasizing that this paper, at most, puts economics language on a formulation
that many medical experts have converged on as well. There were also several other
economists who, early in the pandemic, seemed to have in mind that getting to R <= 1 at the
lowest harm to societal utility is the appropriate formulation of the policy problem.

The case against lockdowns – the cure is worse than the disease

 A group of Irish Doctors presents the tradeoffs of lockdowns and finds them wanting.  They are a bad idea.  Here is a link to the paper.

Trust Government to make problems worse.

Some excerpts follow.

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Firstly, let’s briefly take stock of the current situation, with the benefit of 8 months of experience:

 • Mortality impacts from COVID-19 are now known to be within the envelope of previous recent significant respiratory seasons (e.g. 2000, 2015, 2018).2

 • Current pressure on hospital and ICU beds is comparable to previous winters.

 • Lockdown has not previously been employed as a strategy in pandemic management, in fact, it was ruled out in 2019 WHO and Irish pandemic guidelines,3 and as expected, it has proven a poor mitigator of morbidity and mortality (fig.1).

 • “Test and trace” becomes overwhelmed and loses effectiveness after a virus has substantially entered a population (up until 2019 it was not recommended by the WHO for this very reason).3 Tactical testing may still have a role e.g. for workers and residents in key environments such as nursing homes etc, ideally using dependable antigen testing rather than PCR. We believe that the virus is on its way to being endemic, and recommend that testing be reorganised and focussed in conjunction with clinical case evaluation, as per pre-existing WHO and Irish pandemic guidelines.

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The original purpose of lockdown was to "flatten the curve", protect hospital capacity for the provision of ongoing non COVID-19 care and reduce morbidity and mortality from COVID-19. Confidence in this strategy was based on reasonable assumptions, modelling and forecasts derived from the available data in the spring of 2020. We now have the benefit of experience and multiple published analyses reflecting real-world data and outcomes. A recent paper in The Lancet showed no correlation between lockdown measures and mortality outcomes: “Rapid border closures, full lockdowns, and wide-spread testing were not associated with COVID-19 mortality per million people”. 4 Notably, a large number of published preprint analyses converge on lockdowns having a minimal beneficial effect on mortality outcomes.5 6 7 8 9 10 

There is a dearth of published evidence indicating that lockdowns reduce overall mortality; a significant concern in itself, given the enormous negative impacts of lockdown. Sweden is particularly notable as a “control” country which largely followed the 2019 WHO Pandemic Guidelines, rather than pursuing the very new lockdown approach. With this strategy, they experienced a similar mortality impact to other European countries, when various key factors are accounted for. Below we see that Sweden had a relatively tiny impact compared to the Spanish Flu of 1918, and one which hardly stands out from more recent years (fig. 2). On current data, Sweden will essentially have a “normal” excess mortality in 2020 – with no real signal emerging versus prior years. Regardless of lockdown intervention, Ireland also exhibits no excess mortality versus prior years, even when zoning in on the first five months of the year (fig. 3).

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It is difficult to estimate the burden of non-Covid morbidity and mortality during 2020 and to predict the effects in the years to come. An April report from the UK ONS indicated that it will far exceed the number of deaths observed with, or due to COVID-19 (in the region of 50,000 for the UK so far): “Various evidence supports the estimate that 75% of elective care has been postponed…If this activity were cancelled entirely it would result in an estimated 185,000 additional deaths. This scenario does not account for other cuts to services that are known to have taken place already in many out-of-hospital services partially or fully, including NHS health checks, non-urgent primary care (dental and GP), de-prioritised community services, and some screening and vaccination programmes”. 15 It is crucial to note that COVID-19 deaths sadly occur in people close to or above life expectancy age. In contrast, lockdown-induced deaths will occur in people well below the life expectancy age. Therefore the “life years lost” as a result of lockdown could far exceed the number of those saved. Given that many publications demonstrate that lockdown has no significant impact on mortality – the life years lost due to lockdown will likely outweigh those saved by a huge factor.

Striking data from Public Health England, detailed excess mortality trends for the months leading up to November 2020.16 No excess mortality was observed in the hospital or care home setting. In contrast, all of the excess mortality occurred in the “home” or “other places” (fig. 6). In other words, the excess death for many months now, cannot be due to COVID-19, as the latter would dominate deaths in the hospital and care home settings. Rather, the inference is that excess death is now driven by the negative effects of lockdown itself.

In further support of this, it is clear that the excess death is dominated by the 14-44 and 45-64 age groups, and largely absent from the more aged groups (fig. 7). This is not the pattern of COVID-19 impact. We believe this pattern is consistent with lockdown-induced morbidity and mortality.

Cardiovascular disease is the world’s biggest killer, and fatal events are strikingly affected by speed of access to proper care. Lockdown interventions have seriously impacted this care. There are many published analyses now summarizing the impacts. For instance, a recent UK study “…recorded a 56% increase in the incidence of OHCA (out of hospital cardiac arrest) from 1stFeb to 14thMay, versus 2019” 17. Another study had similarly striking conclusions: “A retrospective analysis of 9 UK hospitals showed a decrease in admissions of 58% and a decrease in emergency department presentations of 53% after 23rdMarch 2020, when compared to the same period in 2019”18.

 Another study concluded: “Deaths in the home included a 35% excess cardiovascular deaths”, while another stated the COVID-19 pandemic resulted “in an excess of acute cardiovascular deaths, nearly half of which occurred in the community” 19. These impacts of lockdown, for cardiovascular deaths alone – could potentially exceed the COVID-19 mortality impacts over the longer term.

Cancer screening and treatment are additional crucial health pillars negatively impacted by the lockdown strategy. A recent UK paper captured the stark reality: “Results of COVID-19 disruption on cancer mortality range from 1,412 deaths for one month of assumed disruption to 9,280 deaths for six months of disruption” 20. Cancer screening has also been badly impacted: “the number of performed CT scans dropped by 28% in April, May and June 2020 compared to the same time last year, with the additional challenge that CT scanning has been used to diagnose COVID-19. MRI scanning has also decreased by 53%.” 21Just one cancer type e.g. colorectal, could have very significant numbers of life years lost: “Delays of 2/4/6 months across all 11,266 patients with colorectal cancer diagnosed per typical year via the 2 week wait pathway were estimated to result in 653/1,419/2,250 attributable deaths and loss of 9,214/20,315/32,799 life years respectively”. 22Another report calls out the major impacts and future loss of life years in the balance: “the weekly number of cancers detected decreased by 58%. The proportion of missing cancers ranged from 19% (pancreaticobiliary) to 72% (colorectal)”. 23The Irish Cancer Society published a submission to the Oireachtas on 17thJuly, which laid out the grim impacts that lockdown would have on increased cancer death rates into the future.24As with cardiovascular disease, the impacts of lockdown, for cancer deaths alone - may exceed the COVID-19 mortality impacts over the longer term.

Real Systematic Racism

 Walter Williams gets it right.  Here is his column.

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You present to a physician with severe abdominal pain. He examines you and concludes that your ingrown toenails are the cause of your abdominal distress. He prescribes that you soak your feet in warm water but that does not bring relief to your abdominal pain. Then he suggests that you apply antibiotics to your feet. Still no relief. Then the physician suggests that you wear sandals instead of shoes. Still no relief. The point of this story is that your toenails can be treated until the cows come home, but if there is improper diagnosis, then you are still going to have your abdominal pain.

The former superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, Meria Carstarphen, last year said, “White students are nearly 4.5 grade levels ahead of their black peers within Atlanta Public Schools.” In San Francisco, 70% of white students are proficient in math; for black students, it is 12% — a gap of 58%. In Washington, D.C., 83% of white students scored proficient in reading, as did only 23% of black students — a gap of 60%. In Philadelphia, 47% of black students scored below basic in math and 42% scored below basic in reading. In Baltimore, 59% of black students scored below basic in math and 49% in reading. In Detroit, 73% of black students scored below basic in math and 56% in reading.

“Below basic” is the score a student receives when he is unable to demonstrate even partial mastery of knowledge and grade level skills. How much can racism explain this? To do well in school, someone must make a kid do his homework, get a good night’s rest, have breakfast and mind the teacher. If these basic family functions are not performed, it makes little difference how much money is put into education the result will be disappointing.

In 2019, the racial breakdown of high school seniors who took the ACT college entrance exam and met its readiness benchmarks was 62% of Asians, 47% of whites, 23% of Hispanics and 11% of blacks. That helps explain a 2016 study by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce “African Americans: College Majors and Earnings.” It found that black college students were highly concentrated in lower-paying and less academically demanding majors like administrative services and social work. They are much less likely than other students to major in science, technology, engineering and math, even though blacks in these fields earned as much as 50% more than blacks who earned a bachelor’s degree in art or psychology and social work.

James D. Agresti, the president and co-founder of Just Facts has just published an article titled “Social Ills That Plague African Americans Coincide with Leftism, Not Racism.” Agresti writes: “Among all of the afflictions that disproportionately impact people of color, violence may be the worst. In 2018, blacks comprised 13% of the U.S. population but roughly 53% of the 16,000 murder victims.” The clearance rate for murders, where a suspect was identified and charged, declined from 92% in 1960 to 62% in 2018. For example, in Chicago, the clearance rate fell from 96% in 1964 to 45% in 2018. In Baltimore, the 2019 clearance rate was 32%. In 2015, when Baltimore experienced the highest per-capita murder rate in its history, the average homicide suspect had been previously arrested more than nine times. When crimes remain unsolved, it gives criminals free range and black people are their primary victims. By the way, most law enforcement occurs at the local level. The governments at these local levels are typically dominated by Democrats.

According to statistics about fatherless homes, 90% of homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes; 71% of pregnant teenagers lack a father figure; 63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes; 71% of high school dropouts come from fatherless homes; and 70% of juveniles in state-operated institutions have no father. Furthermore, fatherless boys and girls are twice as likely to drop out of high school and twice as likely to end up in jail. Dr. Thomas Sowell has argued, “The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.”

The bottom line is that while every vestige of racial discrimination has not been eliminated, today’s discrimination cannot go very far in explaining the problems faced by a large segment of the black community.

The threat of tyranny from the Liberal Intelligentsia

 Jonathan Turley cites another example that illustrates the danger of some in the Liberal Intelligentsia.  This kind of thinking is not rare, either among intellectuals or ordinary folk.

It is, perhaps, somewhat understandable if an uneducated, not too bright person has these kind of attitudes.  It is unforgivable on the part of academics and other supposedly smart people.  Make no mistake, otherwise brilliant people can be pretty stupid or disgusting.

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We have been discussing how the celebration of Joe Biden’s election as a “unifying” and “healing” moment has been lost on many who are calling for blacklists and retaliatory actions against anyone viewed as “complicit” in the Trump period. Indeed, for years, I have been writing about a rising McCarthyism in our country and the growing threat to both free speech and academic freedom. This hateful or unhinged rhetoric has on occasion come from law professors, but most academics have retained a modicum of restraint and tolerance. For that reason, it was disappointing to read a bizarre attack from University of Colorado Law Professor Paul Campus who compared my discussion of possible voting irregularities to Holocaust denial.

Professor Campus writes for a legal site called Lawyers, Guns and Money and clearly took umbrage over my discussion of recent challenges filed over the 2020 presidential election this morning. The segment addressed the recent ruling in Pennsylvania that the Secretary of State violated the law in extending a deadline. I also addressed President Obama’s comments about how these challenges may be undermining democracy. I noted that confirming the vote count only reinforces democracy, particularly in identifying problems for future elections.

My comments on the software controversy in Michigan was the focus of the posting and generally my statement that we need to review the actual evidence that emerges from these cases. I have repeatedly stated that I do not believe that the current challenges are likely to overturn the election of Biden as the president-elect. However, I have stated that there is no reason why these challenges should not be considered and problems addressed. There have been irregularities ranging from the improper order in Pennsylvania to a small number of identified deceased voters in Nevada to the controversy over the tally error in Michigan. Again, I have emphasized that these remain localized problems and there remains no evidence of systemic problems that would overturn the results in various states.

On the software, I have addressed the Michigan issue repeatedly in interviews and noted that the votes were given back to Trump and we do not know if such human error occurred outside of that district. I have repeatedly stated that it was caught and corrected. The Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson confirmed that an Antrim County clerk reported the glitch that miscounted 6,000 Trump votes as Biden votes. The wrong designation of Trump votes as Biden votes was quickly corrected. That is why I have repeatedly said that this was not a case of fraud or nefarious purpose. The point is that there is a valid reason to check to see if others made such mistakes of human error. The “vulnerability” of the system was a reference to the fact that there was clearly a stage where the ballots could be wrongly assigned by human error. (In this morning’s interview, one of the hosts repeated that this was human error and stated that this problem had no impact on actual votes. I had already noted that this involved one district and was attributed to human error. The host added that it appears that only five counties had computer issues and only one involved the Dominion software). The reason for noting that Dominion is used in many other districts and states was a reference to the allegations that if system is vulnerable to such human error, it could impact other ballot tabulations around the country.

Campus however ignores the very interview that he references and falsely claims that I am “going on national TV telling lies to promote a paranoid conspiracy theory believed by tens of millions of Americans: that the presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump by massive amounts of voter fraud.”

Every interview that I have given has included a statement that there is no such evidence and that it is unlikely that such evidence will emerge. However, while some were claiming the absence of serious irregularities within 24 hours of the race being called for Biden, I have noted that we are still waiting to see any underlying evidence in these cases. At the same time, I have criticized the Trump legal team (in the very interview Campos references) and previously said that it was time for the team to produce claimed evidence. I have also criticized President Trump for his rhetoric. Indeed, liberal sites have cited my interviews as expressing doubt over the evidence of widespread fraud.

Yet, Campos declared that this commentary amounts to Holocaust denial. (By the way, he includes a tweet from a person falsely suggesting that I failed to reveal that the software in Michigan may actually have been the result of human error. I said expressly in the interview that it appeared to be human error and that there was no evidence of any nefarious purpose). I argued that it would be useful, regardless of the findings, to look at the performance of new systems and software:

“What I don’t understand about this rush to end all challenges is what is being achieved here? People treating the president-elect as the president-elect. Most of us are supporting his going forward with the transition.

But we also don’t see the great harm to democracy in guaranteeing that votes were counted. If nothing else, not just for his election but for future elections. This is a very different election. We used new systems, new software; shouldn’t we take a look at that and resolve these questions?”

Campos however called for my termination for stating such views:

Should a history department continue to employ a Holocaust denier? Let me sharpen that up a bit: Should a history department continue to employ a Holocaust denier whose academic speciality is the Holocaust?…

To pursue this analogy further, Turley is the kind of mendacious troll who would just ask questions about whether the gas chambers and the death camps really existed, while of course acknowledging that many Jews — maybe even hundreds of thousands! — died because of “harsh conditions” in the concentration camps etc. etc. so you’re actually libeling him by calling him a Holocaust denier etc. etc. (BTW before anybody gets to that I don’t know or care whether Turley himself is Jewish, or whether he lost family in the Holcaust [sic] etc. etc. because the analogy is valid in any case m’kay snowflakes?).

Campos goes on to call for my shunning by my faculty and professors everywhere. He also notes that I would ideally be fired for such an interview:

“If Turley were a contract faculty member it would be appropriate to fire him immediately for promoting paranoid conspiracy theories directly related to his area of purported professional competence…. It’s s tricky question, but it’s a real one, and Turley should at a minimum be excoriated and shunned by anyone in legal academia in possession of a brain and a conscience.”

We have been discussing efforts to fire professors who voice dissenting views of the basis or demands of recent protests, including an effort to oust a leading economist from the University of Chicago as well as a leading linguistics professor at Harvard. It is part of a wave of intolerance sweeping over our colleges and our newsrooms.

It is therefore an ironic moment as someone who has been writing about the growing intolerance of dissenting views on our campuses and efforts to fire academic. Some have been targeted for engaging in what is called “both sides rhetoric” rather than supporting a preferred narrative or viewpoint.

Campos is arguing that it “would be appropriate to fire” any professor who stated that we should allow these challenges to be heard even though they have not and are unlikely to produce evidence of systemic fraud to overturn these results. That is a view of academic freedom and viewpoint tolerance shared by some in academia.

I am not the first academic that Campos called to be terminated for his views. In the end, I would defend Campos in his posting such views. Unlike Professor Campos, I do not believe that he should be fired for holding opposing views or even calling for others to be fired. That is the cost of free speech. Indeed, Professor Campos is the cost of free speech.

Update:

Notably, CNN Legal Analyst and Stanford Professor Rangappa has sent out a link for people to contact the law school over my interview, presumably to follow up on the calls for my termination. Just for record, I have criticized Rangappa previously for doxxing a student who criticized her and a baseless attack on Nikki Haley. She has also called for sanctioning Trump lawyers.

The consequences of “defunding the police” cannot be reversed easily

 From "Just The News".

The crime wave stemming from "defunding the police", the failure to back up Officers, the limitations put on enforcement, and the rush to charge Officers with crimes cannot easily be stopped. It's no longer an issue of money or saying you will reverse all these actions - Officers have little reason to expect reasonable treatment if they do the things that control crime, hence they will not.  Reputation is is the basis for credibility, and the reputation of politicians and many District Attorneys is, rightfully, gone.

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The Minneapolis City Council voted Friday to approve an additional $496,800 for the city's police department to help with the recent crime surge, which has grown after the city took away nearly $1 million over the summer during the "defund the police" wave.

After the May 25 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody sparked weeks of riots, the City Council cutting police funding and reallocate it to "violence interpreters" through the health department. The council also voted to dismantle the department and replace it with a community-based public-safety system.

Several months later, Police Chief Medaria Arradondo has said violent crime is up more than 20% compared to last year and 40% compared to two years ago. The police department is prepared to undergo a proposed budget cut of about $12 million and many officers are retiring or leaving the city's department.

“Our resources are hemorrhaging,” Arradondo said to members of the city council during a committee meeting Tuesday. “Our city is bleeding at this moment. I'm trying to do all I can to stop that bleeding and I'm hoping that having the funds to launch a citywide joint enforcement team initiative we can try to stop the bleeding in our city."

The Friday vote passed 7-6 vote, which will allow for a Joint Enforcement Team pulling in officers from the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office and Metro Transit Police to temporarily assist the Minnesota Police Department with violent crimes through the end of the year. The extra hands will cost the city about $496,800.

“Today we sent a clear signal that we will support Chief Arradondo and that we are ready to work collaboratively with our law enforcement partners and neighboring jurisdictions while continuing to implement concrete, transformative public safety measures," Mayor Jacob Frey said about the decision.

Math For All Ages

 Here is a link to a short video of Steven Landsburg discussing what it is like to be a mathematician.

Freedom is under-appreciated on the Left

 Jonathan Turley is on target.

The Left seems unwilling to give up Malice.

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The Lincoln Project is airing a commercial todaycelebrating the end of the politics of division and personal attacks as Twitter removed a tweet (with a skull-and-crossbones emoji) from The Lincoln Projectthat sought to target lawyers simply because they represent the Trump campaign. The crushing irony is magnified by the fact that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has called for liberals to start to assemble enemy lists of people who were “complicit” in the Trump Administration and the first entry was . . . you guessed it … the Republicans who founded the Lincoln Project. It is the reality of our doublespeak politics. Call it skull-and-crossbones civility.

The Lincoln Project called on its almost 3 million followers to hound and harass attorneys Carolyn McGee and Ronald Hicks for assisting the Trump team in its legal battle over mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania. The Lincoln Project tweeted, “Make them famous,” to its 2.7 million followers along with an emoji depicting a skull-and-crossbones. This is the targeting of lawyers who are doing their professional jobs in representing a client and raising allegations of voter irregularities. The Lincoln Project is clearly trying to unleash a campaign of harassment to deter them or other lawyers from taking such cases. Rather than allow the courts to simply rule on such legal challenges, the Lincoln Project is trying to scare off the lawyers.

Twitter stated: “The Tweet referenced is in violation of the Twitter Rules on abusive behavior. The account owner will be required to delete the violative Tweet before regaining access to their account.”

At the same time, the Lincoln Project is airing a commercial of how we can finally “put people before politics” as they pursue people who are supporting Trump in court.

In the meantime, the members of Lincoln Project are being moved from the resistance to the reactionary category in the aftermath of the election. When asked about AOC’s call for a black list, Sanders surrogate Nomiki Konst helpfully noted that the first on the list would be people like the former Republicans in the Lincoln Project. She said that those people like George Conway are the “perfect examples” of people to be cancelled despite their work against Trump. That did not take long. After spending millions in support of Biden, Knost and AOC are calling for all such figures to be listed and held “accountable.”

The contrast is evident across the political spectrum as leaders herald Biden as the “healer” while denouncing Trump supporters. Former first lady Michelle Obama denounced “tens of millions of people voted for the status quo, even when it meant supporting lies, hate, chaos, and division.” Media figures have called Trump supporters racists and compared them to Nazis after the election while rejoicing that the era of personal division is over.

Lists are being compiled. The Trump Accountability Project, led by staffers who worked for former Mayor Pete Buttigieg and President Barack Obama, is making lists of Trump administration officials to hound them out of any employment opportunities. Former Obama spokesman Hari Sevugan proudly tweeted “WH staff are starting to look for jobs. Employers considering them should know there are consequences for hiring anyone who helped Trump attack American values.

For those members of the Lincoln Project, it may be useful to remember the holds of our 16th President: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; … let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds…”

The destruction of free speech in America - tyranny appoaches

 Jonathan Turley gets it right, again.

Tyranny approaches.

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We have been discussing the calls for top Democrats for increased private censorship on social media and the Internet. President-elect Joe Biden has himself called for such censorship, including blocking President Donald Trump’s criticism of mail-in voting. Now, shortly after the election, one of Biden’s top aides is ramping up calls for a crackdown on Facebook for allowing Facebook users to read views that he considers misleading — users who signed up to hear from these individuals. Bill Russo, a deputy communications director on Biden’s campaign press team, tweeted late Monday that Facebook “is shredding the fabric of our democracy” by allowing such views to be shared freely.

Russo tweeted that “If you thought disinformation on Facebook was a problem during our election, just wait until you see how it is shredding the fabric of our democracy in the days after.” Russo objected to the fact that, unlike Twitter, Facebook did not move against statements that he and the campaign viewed as “misleading.” He concluded. “We pleaded with Facebook for over a year to be serious about these problems. They have not. Our democracy is on the line. We need answers.”

For those of us in the free speech community, these threats are chilling. We saw incredible abuses before the election in Twitter barring access to a true story in the New York Post about Hunter Biden and his alleged global influence peddling scheme. Notably, no one in the Biden camp (including Biden himself) thought that it was a threat to our democracy to have Twitter block the story (while later admitting that it was a mistake).

I have previously objected to such regulation of speech. What is most disturbing is how liberals have embraced censorship and even declared that “China was right” on Internet controls. Many Democrats have fallen back on the false narrative that the First Amendment does not regulate private companies so this is not an attack on free speech. Free speech is a human right that is not solely based or exclusively defined by the First Amendment. Censorship by Internet companies is a “Little Brother” threat long discussed by free speech advocates. Some may willingly embrace corporate speech controls but it is still a denial of free speech.

This is why I recently described myself as an Internet Originalist:

The alternative is “internet originalism” — no censorship. If social media companies returned to their original roles, there would be no slippery slope of political bias or opportunism; they would assume the same status as telephone companies. We do not need companies to protect us from harmful or “misleading” thoughts. The solution to bad speech is more speech, not approved speech.

If Pelosi demanded that Verizon or Sprint interrupt calls to stop people saying false or misleading things, the public would be outraged. Twitter serves the same communicative function between consenting parties; it simply allows thousands of people to participate in such digital exchanges. Those people do not sign up to exchange thoughts only to have Dorsey or some other internet overlord monitor their conversations and “protect” them from errant or harmful thoughts.

Russo’s comments mirror the comments of other Democrats who are seeking greater censorship. Indeed, in the recent Senate hearing on Twitter’s suppression of the Biden story, Democratic senators ignored the admissions of Big Tech CEOs that they were wrong to bar the story and, instead, insisted that the CEOs pledge to substantially increase such censorship. Senator Jacky Rosen warned the CEOS that “you are not doing enough” to prevent “disinformation, conspiracy theories and hate speech on your platforms.”

Again, as someone raised in a deeply liberal and Democratic family in Chicago, I do not know when the Democratic party became the party for censorship. However, limiting free speech is now a rallying cry for Democratic members and activists alike. At risk is the single greatest invention for free speech since the printing press. Russo’s comments reaffirms that the Biden Administration will continue this assault against Internet free speech. What is most unnerving is that Russo is denouncing such free speech as “shredding the fabric of our democracy.” There was a time when free speech was the very right that we fought to protect in our democratic system. It was one of the defining principles of our Constitution system. It is now being treated as a threat to that system.

Are those against Charter Schools racist?

 Here is Walter Williams on Charter Schools.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

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The academic achievement gap between black and white students has proven resistant to most educational policy changes. Some say that educational expenditures explain the gap, but is that true? Look at educational per pupil expenditures: Baltimore city ranks fifth in the U.S. for per pupil spending at $15,793. The Detroit Public Schools Community District spends more per student than all but eight of the nation's 100 largest school districts, or $14,259. New York City spends $26,588 per pupil, and Washington, D.C., spends $21,974. There appears to be little relationship between educational expenditures and academic achievement.

The Nation's Report Card for 2017 showed the following reading scores for fourth-graders in New York state's public schools: Thirty-two percent scored below basic, with 32% scoring basic, 27% scoring proficient and 9% scoring advanced. When it came to black fourth-graders in the state, 19% scored proficient, and 3% scored advanced.

But what about the performance of students in charter schools? In his recent book, "Charter Schools and Their Enemies," Dr. Thomas Sowell compared 2016-17 scores on the New York state ELA test. Thirty percent of Brooklyn's William Floyd public elementary school third-graders scored well below proficient in English and language arts, but at a Success Academy charter school in the same building, only one did. At William Floyd, 36% of students were below proficient, with 24% being proficient and none being above proficient. By contrast, at Success Academy, only 17% of third-graders were below proficient, with 70% being proficient and 11% being above proficient. Among Success Academy's fourth-graders, 51% and 43%, respectively, scored proficient and above proficient, while their William Floyd counterparts scored 23% and 6%, respectively. It's worthwhile stressing that William Floyd and this Success Academy location have the same address.

Similar high performance can be found in the Manhattan charter school KIPP Infinity Middle School among its sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders when compared with that of students at New Design Middle School, a public school at the same location. Liberals believe integration is a necessary condition for black academic excellence. Public charter schools such as those mentioned above belie that vision. Sowell points out that only 39% of students in all New York state schools who were recently tested scored at the "proficient" level in math, but 100% of the students at the Crown Heights Success Academy tested proficient. Blacks and Hispanics constitute 90% of the students in that Success Academy.

In April 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported that 57% of black and 54% of Hispanic charter school students passed the statewide ELA compared to 52% of white students statewide. On the state math test, 59% of black students and 57% of Hispanics at city charter schools passed as opposed to 54% of white students statewide.

There's little question that many charter schools provide superior educational opportunities for black youngsters. Here is my question: Why do black people, as a group, accept the attack on charter schools?

John Liu, a Democratic state senator from Queens, said New York City should "get rid of" large charter school networks. State Sen. Julia Salazar, D-Brooklyn, said, "I'm not interested in privatizing our public schools." New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio explicitly campaigned against charter schools saying: "I am angry about the privatizers. I am sick and tired of these efforts to privatize a precious thing we need -- public education. The New York Times article went on to say, "Over 100,000 students in hundreds of the city's charter schools are doing well on state tests, and tens of thousands of children are on waiting lists for spots."

One would think that black politicians and civil rights organizations would support charter schools. The success of many charter schools is unwelcome news to traditional public school officials and teachers' unions. To the contrary, they want to saddle charter schools with the same procedures that make so many public schools a failure. For example, the NAACP demands that charter schools "cease expelling students that public schools have a duty to educate." It wants charter schools to "cease to perpetuate de facto segregation of the highest performing children from those whose aspirations may be high but whose talents are not yet as obvious." Most importantly, it wants charter schools to come under the control of teachers' unions.

Majority rule is a stupid idea

 Here is Edwin Feulner on majority rule.

EF is on target.  There is a reason why the phrase "Tyranny of the Majority" was coined.

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People often refer to the United States as a democracy, but technically speaking, that’s not true. It’s a republic.

Big deal, you say? If you care about your rights, it is. The Founding Fathers knew their history well, so they knew better than to establish the U.S. as a democracy.

In a democracy, of course, the majority rules. That’s all well and good for the majority, but what about the minority? Don’t they have rights that deserve respect?

Of course they do. Which is why a democracy won’t cut it. As the saying goes, a democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner.

The Founders were determined to forestall the inherent dangers of what James Madison called “the tyranny of the majority.” So they constructed something more lasting: a republic. Something with checks and balances. A system of government carefully balanced to safeguard the rights of both the majority and the minority.

That led, most notably, to the bicameral structure of our legislative branch. We have a House of Representatives, where the number of members is greater for more populous states (which obviously favors those states), and the Senate, where every state from Rhode Island and Alaska to California and New York have exactly two representatives (which keeps less-populated states from being steamrolled).

Being a republic, we also don’t pick our president through a direct, majority-take-all vote. We have an Electoral College. And a lot of liberals don’t like that.

Their attacks on the College are nothing new, but the defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016 renewed their fury. After all, as they never tire of pointing out, Mrs. Clinton captured more of the popular vote than Donald Trump did. They see the Electoral College as an impediment to their political victories, therefore it’s got to go.

The latest attack comes via new lawsuits filed in federal courts in four states (Massachusetts, California, South Carolina and Texas). “Under the winner-take-all system, U.S. citizens have been denied their constitutional right to an equal vote in presidential elections,” said David Boies, an attorney who represented former Vice President Al Gore in the 2000 election.

I doubt Mr. Boies and his fellow attorneys are really ignorant of why we have an Electoral College. But it’s important that the rest of us know.

“The Electoral College is a very carefully considered structure the Framers of the Constitution set up to balance the competing interests of large and small states,” writes Hans von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission. “It prevents candidates from wining an election by focusing only on high-population urban centers (the big cities), ignoring smaller states and the more rural areas of the country — the places that progressives and media elites consider flyover country.”

Most people who watch the election returns know that a candidate must secure 270 electoral votes to win. That’s because there are 538 votes altogether. As the website for the National Archives notes, “Your state’s entitled allotment of electors equals the number of members in its Congressional delegation: one for each member in the House of Representatives plus two for your Senators.”

In short, the Founders were looking out for the people in “flyover country” long before there were airplanes to fly over them.

Were it not for the Electoral College, presidential candidates could act as if many Americans don’t even exist. They could simply campaign in a small handful of states with big populations. Who would care what the people in Iowa think? Or Wyoming? Or any number of other states with smaller populations?

The people in “flyover country” don’t get enough attention as it is, but without the Electoral College, they’d be completely at the mercy of the majority.

And let’s face it — that’s often not a great place to be. As the Austrian political philosopher Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn dryly observed in his book “Leftism,” the crucifixion of Jesus was “a democratic event.”

What the wolves want matters, but so does what the sheep wants. The Electoral College ensures that no one winds up on the menu.

Nir Shaviv on Climate Change Hysteria

Nir Shaviv is a full professor at the Racah Institute of Physics in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Let me begin by asking you a question. What is the evidence that people, like the proponents here, use to prove that we humans are responsible for global warming and that future warming will be catastrophic if we don’t get our act together?

The fact is that this idea is a misconception and the so called evidence we constantly hear is simply based on fallacious arguments.

To begin with, anyone who appeals to authority or to a majority to substantiate his or her claim is proving nothing. Science is not a democracy and the fact that many believe one thing does not make them right. If people have good arguments to convince you, let them use the scientific arguments, not logical fallacies. Repeating it ad nauseam does not make it right!

Other irrelevant arguments may appear scientific, but they are not. Evidence for warming is not evidence for warming by humans. Seeing a poor polar bear floating on an iceberg does not mean that humans caused warming. (Actually, the bear population is now probably at its highest in modern times!). The same goes to receding glaciers. Sure, there was warming and glaciers are receding, but the logical leap that this warming is because of humans is simply an unsubstantiated claim, even more so when considering that you can find Roman remains under receded glaciers in the Alps or Viking graves in thawed permafrost in Greenland.

Other fallacious arguments include using qualitative arguments and the appeal to gut feelings. The fact that humanity is approaching 10 billion people does not prove that we caused a 0.8°C temperature increase. We could have just as much caused an 8°C increase or an 0.08°C. If all of humanity spits into the ocean, will sea level rise appreciably?

In fact, there is no single piece of evidence that proves that a given amount of CO2 increase should cause a large increase in temperature. You may say, “just a second, we saw Al Gore’s movie, in which he presented a clear correlation between CO2 and temperature from Antarctic ice cores”. Well, what he didn’t tell you is that one generally sees in the ice cores that CO2 lags the temperature by typically a few hundred years, not vice versa! The simple truth is that Al Gore simply showed us how the amount of CO2 dissolved as carbonic acid in the oceans changes with temperature. As a matter of fact, over geological time scales, there were huge variations in the CO2 (a factor of 10) and they have no correlation whatsoever with the temperature. 450 million years ago there was 10 times as much CO2 in the atmosphere but more extensive glaciations.

When you throw away the chaff of all the fallacious arguments and try to distill the climate science advocated by the IPCC and alike, you find that there are actually two arguments which appear as legitimate scientific arguments, but unfortunately don’t hold water. Actually, fortunately! The first is that the warming over the 20th century is unprecedented, and if so, it must be human. This is the whole point of the hockey so extensively featured in the third assessment report of the IPCC in 2001. However if you would google “climategate” you would find that this is a result of shady scientific analysis - the tree ring data showing that there was little temperature variation over the past millennium showed a decline after 1960, so, they cut it off and stitched thermometer data. The simple truth is that in the height of the middle ages it was probably just as warm as the latter half of the 20th century. You can even see it directly with temperature measurements in boreholes.

The second argument is that there is nothing else to explain the warming, and if there is nothing else it must be the only thing that can, which is the anthropogenic contribution. However, as I mention below, there is something as clear as daylight… and that is the sun.

Before explaining why the sun completely overturns the way we should see global warming and climate change in general. It is worth while to say a few words on climate sensitivity and why it is impossible to predict ab initio the anthropogenic contribution.

The most important question in climate science is climate sensitivity, by how much will the average global temperature increase if you say double the amount of CO2. Oddly enough, the range quoted by the IPCC, which is 1.5 to 4.5°C per CO2 doubling was set, are you ready for this, in a federal committee in 1979! (Google the Charney report). All the IPCC scientific reports from 1990 to 2013 state that the range is the same. The only exception is the penultimate report which stated it is 2 to 4.5. The reason they returned to the 1.5 to 4.5 range is because there was virtually no global warming since 2000 (the so called “hiatus”), which is embarrassingly inconsistent with a large climate sensitivity. What’s more embarrassing is that over almost 4 decades of research and billions of dollars (and pounds) invested in climate research we don’t know the answer to the most important question any better? This is simply amazing I think.

The body of evidence however clearly shows that the climate sensitivity is on the low side, about 1 to 1.5 degree increase per CO2 doubling. People in the climate community are scratching their heads trying to understand the so-called hiatus in the warming. Where is the heat hiding? While in reality it simply points to a low sensitivity. The “missing” heat has actually escaped Earth already! If you look at the average global response to large volcanic eruptions, from Krakatoa to Pinatubo, you would see that the global temperature decreased by only about 0.1°C while the hypersensitive climate models give 0.3 to 0.5°C, not seen in reality. Over geological time scales, the lack of correlation between CO2 and temperature places a clear upper limit of a 1.5°C per CO2 doubling sensitivity. Last, once we take the solar contribution into account, a much more consistent picture for the 20th century climate changes arises, one in which the climate drivers (humans AND solar) are notably larger, and the sensitivity notably smaller.

So, how do we know that the sun has a large effect on climate? If you search on google images “oceans as a calorimeter”, you would find one of the most important graphs to the understanding of climate change which is simply ignored by the IPCC and alarmists. You can see that over more than 80 years of tide gauge records there is an extremely clear correlation between solar activity and sea level rise - active sun, the oceans rise. Inactive sun - the oceans fall. On short time scales it is predominantly heat going to the oceans and thermal expansion of the water. This can then be used to quantify the radiative forcing of the sun, and see that it is about 10 times larger than what the IPCC is willing to admit is there. They only take into account changes in the irradiance, while this (and other such data) unequivocally demonstrate that there is an amplifying mechanism linking solar activity and climate.

The details of this mechanism are extremely interesting. I can tell you that it is related to the ions in the atmosphere which are governed by solar activity and in fact, there are three microphysical mechanisms linking these ions to the nucleation and growth of cloud condensation nuclei. Basically, when the sun is more active, we have less clouds that are generally less white.

So, the main conclusion is that climate is not sensitive to changes in the radiative forcing.

This means that we are not required to “cool the economy” in order to cool earth. In Paris and Copenhagen the leaders of the world said that we should make sure that the total global warming will be less than 2°C. It will be less than 2°C even if we do nothing. There are several red flags that people do their best to ignore. The lack of warming in the past 2 decades is a clear sign that sensitivity is low, but people ignore it.

Last point. People say that we should at least curb the emissions as a precautionary step. However, resources are not infinite. Most people in developed nations can pay twice for their energy, but for third world nations? It would mean more expensive food, hunger and poverty, and many in the developed world actually freezing in winter. So in fact, taking unnecessary precautionary steps when we know they are unnecessary is immoral. It is even committing statistical murder.

Now the really last point, I am also optimist that humanity will switch to alternative energy sources in less than 2-3 decades just because they will become cheap enough, and just for the reason that people want to save money. Just like the price of computers has plummeted exponentially (Moore’s law— number of transistors doubles every 18 months) so does the cost of energy from photovoltaic cells (cost halves every 10 years). Once they will be really cost effective, without subsidies, suddenly we won’t be burning fossil fuels because it would be the expensive thing to do!

Let us use our limited resources to treat real problems.