SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: The Lancet’s Scientific Chicanery on Mortality Exposed by CO2 Coalition.

A deception perpetrated by The Lancet is another example of how once respected institutions of the scientific community are not above abandoning principle to advance the fearmongering of a planet warming to purportedly dangerous levels.

As reported in the CO₂ Coalition’s online newsletter, The Lancet published a study showing that cold-related deaths account for 10 times the number of deaths due to heat – a comparison similar to other research findings about the relative danger of temperature extremes.

However, The Lancet pulled a sleight of hand when depicting the data in a chart to accentuate deaths due to heat and diminish those from cold.

The Lancet politicizing the news? Unexpectedly! Discredited Lancet study gets even more discredited. “The British medical journal Lancet published a study of civilian casualties in 2006 that estimated Iraqi civilian deaths at more than 2% of Iraq’s pre-war population, around 655,000.  Later studies produced numbers of less than a quarter of Lancet‘s totals, and the authors of the study were largely discredited.  Now a research association has publicly rebuked Gilbert Burnham for not disclosing his methodology, and Burnham may face action from his employer, Johns Hopkins[.]”

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD, WITH NEWS YOU CAN USE: Are You At A Nursing Home Or The U.S. Senate Chamber? Nine Clues To Look For.

MARK JUDGE: Stop Making Excuses for Hunter Biden’s Behavior. It Hurts Others Fighting Addiction.

In 1993, Francis F. Seeburger, a professor of philosophy at the University of Denver, wrote a profound book on the thought processes of addicts called Addiction and Responsibility. We tend to focus on the damage addiction does. A cliché among empathetic therapists, eager to describe addiction as a standard-issue disease, is that “no one ever decides to become an addict.”

But that is not exactly true, Seeburger shows. “Something like an addiction to addiction plays a role in all addiction,” he writes. “Addiction itself . . . is tempting; it has many attractive features.” In an empty world, people have a need to need. Addiction supplies it. “Addiction involves the addict. It does not present itself as some externally imposed condition. Instead, it comes toward the addict as the addict’s very self.”

Addiction plays on our strengths, not just our failings. It simplifies things. It relieves us of certain responsibilities. It gives life a meaning. It is a “perversely clever copy of that transcendent peace of God.”

And it definitely empowers the wannabe artist:

LEAKED EMAILS EXPOSE BIDEN WHITE HOUSE’S ATTACKS ON THE FIRST AMENDMENT:

[Jim] Jordan concluded, “These documents, AND OTHERS that were just produced to the Committee, prove that the Biden Admin abused its powers to coerce Facebook into censoring Americans, preventing free and open discourse on issues of critical public importance.”

Based on the evidence, it’s hard to disagree with that conclusion. When private platforms choose of their own volition to censor or moderate certain content, that’s not a First Amendment matter. (It still might be wrong or overzealous, and we’re free to criticize their decisions.) But when they do so in response to aggressive pressure from governmental officials, that tramples all over the spirit of the First Amendment. So, with perhaps narrowly tailored exceptions for national security, it shouldn’t even be legal for government officials to lobby private platforms to censor the public.

This is an outrage — and the backlash should be bipartisan. After all, do Democrats really want Republicans lobbying private platforms to get them censored when they’re the ones in office?

Flashback: What was Harry Reid thinking when he ended the Senate filibuster for federal judge appointments? “Senator Mitch McConnell stood on the Senate floor and issued a warning to the Democrats who then controlled the majority. ‘I say to my friends on the other side of the aisle, you’ll regret this,’ McConnell, then the minority leader, told them. ‘And you may regret it a lot sooner than you think.’”

OLD AND CRUDE: Looking Back On The Golden Age of Driving.

We lived in our cars back in the Fifties and Sixties. We dined and went to movies in them hoping to get into a little hanky-panky, and some of us even went to drive-in churches. According to a wag disk jockey of the time named Emperor Hudson, their slogan was, “Come as you are, but stay in your car.” I didn’t go to a drive-in church, but I went through recaps on an annual basis back then.

And when I say driving, I am referring to accelerating, shifting, back-shifting, cornering, and braking—and occasionally, should the opportunity arise, going fast. As Alodus Huxley once said, “Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.” And when you think about it, not too many years before his day, 40 mph on a horse was about it for most people.

But for how long? As the late P.J. O’Rourke warned in 2009:

Cars didn’t shape our existence; cars let us escape with our lives. We’re way the heck out here in Valley Bottom Heights and Trout Antler Estates because we were at war with the cities. We fought rotten public schools, idiot municipal bureaucracies, corrupt political machines, rampant criminality and the pointy-headed busybodies. Cars gave us our dragoons and hussars, lent us speed and mobility, let us scout the terrain and probe the enemy’s lines. And thanks to our cars, when we lost the cities we weren’t forced to surrender, we were able to retreat.

Why, it’s as if, “At some point in the future, be it years, decades, or a century hence, the federal government will seek to ban driving.”

HOW IT STARTED: Community groups pressure City Council members to defund Oakland police.

—ABC7 News, June 15th, 2020.

How it’s going: Oakland NAACP Blames ‘Defund the Police’ for Rampant Crime in City.

—Newsweek, Friday.

STEVE HAYWARD: Hot and Bothered About Heat Waves.

Does anyone trust the scientific community after our experience with Covid? The most recent revelation that leading scientists published a paper concluding Covid arose from natural causes while privately communicating among themselves that they strongly suspected it leaked from a lab is yet another instance of politics driving “science.” Like Covid’s mortality figures, the climate science community is constantly revising the estimated global temperature record as “new data” is generated and computer models are “refined,” but somehow the revisions always go in one direction: lowering temperatures from several decades ago and raising recent temperatures, thereby providing a more dire picture of the “climate crisis.” Notice that we’ve progressed from “global warming” through “climate change” to the current “climate crisis” and even “climate emergency.”

Heck, the euphemism du jour has advanced to “global boiling,” as the Grauniad notes: ‘Era of global boiling has arrived,’ says UN chief as July set to be hottest month on record.

But then, they tried to warn us at the beginning of 2009. If only Barack Obama had listened: President ‘has four years to save Earth.’

UPDATE: Strangely, an awful lot of these “climate change” wildfire were started by arsonists, not excess CO2.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A MUCH BIGGER BLOG. John Nolte: The Six Reasons Hollywood’s in Real Trouble This Time.

Related: Why the Studios Are Risking Everything. An extended strike could kill off movie theaters.

CALIFORNIA DREAMING: Anchorage mayor proposes sending homeless people to Los Angeles this winter.

People experiencing homelessness in Anchorage, Alaska, may be sent to Los Angeles and other U.S. cities with warmer climates this winter amid a shortage of shelters.

Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson told reporters during a news conference this week that plane tickets would be purchased for unhoused people to be sent to cities where they have families who can care for them or where the climate is warmer.

“Last year was the most deadly year in history for people who were homeless, and now this coming year with this winter, we’re looking at possibly doubling that,” he said, noting that winters are extremely cold in Anchorage. “I have a moral imperative here and that is to save lives, and if that means giving them a few hundred dollars for an airline ticket to go where they want to go, I’m going to do that.”

No funding has been approved yet for the relocation program, which also operated last year, but Bronson didn’t anticipate any problems locating the funds. He said about 11 people took the offers last year.

“I think a ticket this morning to Los Angeles is 286 bucks, it cost us $100 plus or minus a few dollars every day to house someone, and we don’t have a place to put them in a large shelter this winter,” he said. “And remember, the objective, and it’s sad that we had to get to this, but we’re here to save lives, that’s my job.”

Hey, the mayor has said that “Los Angeles is and should remain a Sanctuary City and the LAPD should not be burdened with the federal government’s responsibility to enforce immigration law,” so I’m sure that any new homeless arrivals would be entirely welcome.

MARK JUDGE: Stop Making Excuses for Hunter Biden’s Behavior. It Hurts Others Fighting Addiction.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Family Torn Between Placing Grandpa In Hospice And Having Him Run For Senate.

FOIBLES:

Evergreen:

BOOK REVIEW: How Complete is the New Home Studio Recording: The Complete Guide?

My review of the how-to book co-written by YouTube stalwart Warren Huart (Produce Like a Pro), over at EdDriscoll.com.

OUT ON A LIMB: Congress is too old. New video from Reason TV:

LOST IN TRANSLATION: Springtime for AI.

A look at an inadvertently hilarious WWII documentary, 0ver at Ed Driscoll.com.

TOP SCIENTISTS WARN: SEA GODS ANGRY. Democrats Take A Page From Primitive Tribal Shaman, Blaming Their Enemies For The Weather.

One of the articles that Hillary Clinton cites in her tweet was published in Forbes. The piece reported:

“July 4th was Earth’s Hottest Day in Over 100,000 Years…”

That’s quite a claim, since we’ve only been able to track temperatures for the past 140 years. According to NASA:

“There are too few data before 1880 for scientists to estimate average temperatures for the entire planet.” 

Even for the past 140 years, it seems highly dubious to assume that the records are accurate enough to confidently declare that we experienced the hottest day in a century and a half this month. Does anyone think we actually have a precisely accurate idea of what the temperature was everywhere on the planet on, say, August 11th, 1893? How much less do we know what the global temperature was on August 11th, 1893 BC? So suffice it to say, the Forbes piece isn’t particularly strong evidence to support the idea that Trump voters are somehow making it hot during the summer.

Let’s take stock of what’s happening here. This is the kind of thing we often laugh about and then move on from, but we should really spend some time thinking about it. One of the most prominent Democrats in the country, a former Secretary of State and presidential candidate, just sincerely blamed her political opponents for making it hot outside. And she did it on the basis of no evidence whatsoever — in fact, she lied about what little evidence she did present.

On some level we’re used to the climate change hysteria, and constant claims that the world is ending. But what makes this so especially insane is that she’s claiming that not only does human activity change the weather, but that a relatively small group of humans can bring about substantial changes in the weather in the span of just a few years. This isn’t just “human activity has caused global temperatures to rise by 2 degrees in 150 years” or whatever. This is “we’re having a devastating heatwave because of what my political opponents did last Tuesday.”

We’re in full-on primitive superstition territory here. Blaming your enemies for a heat wave is the kind of thing you expect to hear from a tribal chieftain in a loin cloth in the Amazon somewhere. Though I think even most of them are too advanced at this point to believe in that sort of thing.

I’m pretty sure that Ayn Rand didn’t write The Return of the Primitive as a how to guide.

Related: Glenn on Our caveman politics.

(Classical reference in headline.)

DOG DAY AFTERNOON: Man who spent $20K to transform himself into border collie steps out for first-ever walk in public.

In a pair of surreal videos posted to his YouTube channel ‘I want to be an animal’, Toco was seen being taken out for a walk on a leash, sniffing at other dogs in a park and rolling around on the floor.

Toco’s grand debut — which was captured while he was filming a segment for a German TV station — seemed to be well-received by passers-by and other dogs, who appeared curious. It wasn’t clear whether they realised Toco wasn’t a natural-born dog.

“I became a collie, fulfilling a dream I had since I was a little child to be an animal!” subtitles at the beginning of the video read.

Ayn Rand didn’t intend for The Return of the Primitive to be a how-to guide.

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Hunter or Hunted Edition.

FRIDAY NIGHT NEWS DUMP: President Biden finally acknowledges his 7th grandchild.

Like the Soviet ambassador in Dr. Strangelove, his source was the New York Times:

Imagine being Hunter’s kid and growing up to find out you only got acknowledged by your family because some lady named Maureen Dowd wrote a column shaming them into it https://t.co/8lm4rhTNTJ

— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) July 28, 2023

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Just Stop Oil gets a taste of its own medicine.

…with the simplest of moves, Josh Pieters, 29, and Archie Manners, 30, had done what no one else had successfully managed to – they’d made a mockery of Just Stop Oil.

On Tuesday, in an artfully dilapidated church decorated with swathes of orange fabric and trailing plants (making the whole affair look like something between a summer soirée hosted by Fanta and a Christian influencer’s wedding), guests sat down to a (vegan) banquet. A harpist played as people sat at long tables. Then four paid actors burst in, setting off panic alarms attached to helium balloons which promptly floated up to the eaves…

“The people that they’re targeting are not responsible for their cause,” says Manners. “A single mother trying to get to work to feed her kids during a cost of living crisis, who might be on a zero hours contract, who might be late for work and therefore earn less money. That achieves precisely nothing when it comes to solving the climate crisis.”…

There is a sense they are even losing support among their own people. “None of us are taking them seriously — they are now just seen as posh kids on vacation,” says Jen, a former member of Extinction Rebellion, who asked to be referred to just by her first name. Jen feels Just Stop Oil is made up of people for whom protesting “seems to have become a bit of a middle class hobby”.

One satirist points out that the stunt was perfect because they literally raised an alarm on a group of climate alarmists.

Click over for video.

KINSLEY GAFFE: Kamala Harris: Killing Babies in Abortions is How You Measure “Progress.”

Margaret Sanger smiles, nods her head in approval.

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Climate Crazies Have Discovered That Summertime Is Hot.

WHERE’S HUNTER, FAT? How A Federal Judge Turned The Tables On Hunter Biden’s Sweetheart Plea Deal:

[U.S. District Court Judge Maryellen Noreika, a Trump apointee] smelled a rat. She understood that the lawyers were trying to paint her into a corner and hide the ball while forcing her to rubber-stamp their absurd bargain. Instead of being that rubberstamp though, she backed DOJ and Hunter’s lawyers into a corner by pulling all the details out into the open, explaining the very serious legal and constitutional issues with this unprecedented method of structuring what should have been a simple plea agreement, and demanding that the lawyers explain themselves, which they simply couldn’t to her satisfaction.

DOJ, attempting to save face and save its case, stated on the record that the investigation into Hunter was ongoing and that Hunter remained susceptible to prosecution under FARA. Hunter’s lawyers exploded. They clearly believed that FARA was covered under the deal because as written, the pretrial diversion agreement language was broad enough to cover it. When the parties attempted to paper over the many issues raised, Judge Noreika was not satisfied. She demanded extensive briefing on the constitutional and legal issues raised during the hearing, leaving no chance that Hunter will be able to wrap up this case with any degree of rapidity.

And so here we are. Hunter’s lawyers and DOJ are going to go off and try to pull together a new set of agreements, likely narrower and less novel in its arrangement to satisfy Judge Noreika and move the case. They will have to explain their conduct in a public briefing which may shed some light on the obviously tortured negotiations that led us to this place. And, fortunately, the chances of any agreement proceeding with the kind of blanket immunity the parties had in mind as they walked into court yesterday are essentially nil at this point.

Read the whole thing.

According to Claire McCaskell the judge has it all wrong, of course: Republicans Are ‘Trying To Indict a Father For Loving His Son.’

Related: Flashback: Biden Denies What Hunter Just Admitted In Court.

Hunter Biden’s admission of business ties with Chinese companies flies in the face of previous comments by the president.

“My son has not made money in terms of this thing about, what are you talking about, China,” Joe Biden said to then-president Donald Trump in an October 2020 debate.

“The only guy who made money from China is this guy,” Biden added, referring to Trump. “He’s the only one. Nobody else has made money from China.”

Biden lies? But he had given us his “word as a Biden!”

THIS IS CNN: CNN actually tweeted this! Come enjoy the comments.

Related:

RIP: Randy Meisner, founding member of the Eagles, dead at 77.