I love this, even the music. We want all of them to do well... We need markets!

California proposes a plan to tax text messages

https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/12/tech/california-text-tax/index.html

“The energy the Social Justice Left devotes to denying basic scientific truths puts the persecutors of Galileo to shame.”

https://quillette.com/2018/12/11/progressive-creationism-a-review-of-a-dangerous-idea/

If suppressing certain news stories to influence campaigns is now a federal crime, then I have some very, very bad news for political journalists.

https://twitter.com/seanmdav/status/1072927201744560130

Report: Anti-Trump Women’s March ‘Melting Down’ over Claims of Antisemitism, Financial Irregularities

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/12/11/report-anti-trump-womens-march-melting-down-over-claims-of-antisemitism-financial-irregularities/

Spotify moving out of San Francisco because of high crime in the neighborhood around its office.

> I love this, even the music. We want all of them
> to do well... We need markets!

Guess what country takes the biggest leap here after 2000? (Hint: the country that most aggressively adopted protectionism while competitors adopted open borders on trade.)

"California proposes a plan to tax text messages"

The really interesting bit about that, which a lot of commenters seem to have missed, is the state's assertion that they can apply the tax retroactively. If the fee is $10 a month, and they make it retroactive over the past five years, every resident of California who has a phone will owe the state a payment of $600.

is the state's assertion that they can apply the tax retroactively

Good luck with that. Falls afoul of the US and California constitutions, as well as the principle of promissory estoppel.

And the robot uprising has begun.

Will she be fired? or will Mika claim liberal white female privilege? she should quit, or be fired. I was assured that was the gold standard by "journalists" who trolled thru a 15 year old's twit feed to find homophobic taunts and bring them to the surface last weekend.

https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/msnbcs-mika-brezezinski-apologizes-for-using-homophobic-slur-to-describe-mike-pompeo

"The doctrine, ever more radically and loudly insisted upon by the politically correct, that sex differences are only socially constructed is wrong. Get it? Wrong."

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/jordan-peterson-the-gender-scandal-in-scandinavia-and-canada

> Guess what

Golly little fella, you fabulously well-educated financial sooth-sayer, you: Is their a particular stock you think we should short?

Jesus Christ... The world's getting richer, and like a squeaking, sexless sixth-grader lost in High School, all you see is witless competition.

"The IPCC was established on the basis that CO2 is a threat, Morano says, so any other finding is not an option. The reason? Financial gain and a push for increased central planning, he says.

The idea was if they find CO2 is dangerous not only do they get to keep having annual meetings and budget increases and national media and go all over the world and keep this alive, but the U.N. gets to also be in charge of the solution. So what are the odds that the climate panel is ever going to find that we don’t have a climate crisis?”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/is-climate-change-science-settled-no-way-say-scientists_2735242.html

Ah, I get it.

Because the science isn't "settled" then climate change isn't happening.

Why anyone pays attention to Al Gore's cash-capture scheme or the oil and coal industries' apologists isn't a mystery; they both tell true believers what they want to hear.

Again, I suggest starting with the NASA earth sciences page, and ignore the pundits on both sides.

Two great comments.

> the robot uprising
> has begun

Design fault: Insufficiently googly.

https://mobile.twitter.com/chr1sa/status/1073263151670452224

That same NASA who denied there was a hole in the ozone layer for years and years?

"Again, I suggest starting with the NASA earth sciences page, and ignore the pundits on both sides."

Nah, you need someone with data that is actually reliable, and doesn't do political speeches on government time. Start here.

Point to CD— Government sustenance of the science & intellectual classes is exactly the problem.

"you need someone with data that is actually reliable"

But do I have to agree with him before I read his blog?

"Government sustenance of the science"

But I haven't been able to find anyone's private satellite photos showing the Arctic ice intact and/or increasing.

> have to agree with him

We have to bear incentives first in mind when weighing arguments.

1. Give it time... The headlines are choked with news from private space entrepreneurs.

2. What case are you making?... That there's no way you can avoid accepting all gummint-employee arguments as presented?

Sleepful in Seattle

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/315644/

I saw that Seattle school thing too IRA. And I don't believe it. I'm betting it is just a transient effect and in a year or two you will be right back at 6:50.

Well . . . bye!

Boy Scouts of America On Verge Of Bankruptcy After Gender-Neutral Name Change

"Jesus Christ... The world's getting richer, and like a squeaking, sexless sixth-grader lost in High School, all you see is witless competition."

What, pray tell, do you think is the reason "the world's getting richer"?

Wealth creation, and thanks for asking.

You totally thought the answer was "the paying agent," right?

"But do I have to agree with him before I read his blog?"

Do you have to agree with James Hanson before you read his? Look, at the beginning of all this back around 1990, I kept an open mind about it. I mentally compared it to the concerns about CFCs and atmospheric ozone that resulted in the Montreal Protocol. There was some pretty good scientific evidence supporting that. (Subsequent data have thrown some of it into question, but I don't see any good reason to go back on the Montreal Protocol now, except maybe to do carve-outs for Halon, which was never a big part of the problem.)

But the more I looked into it, the more I realized that it was in a whole different category, in terms of scientific legitimacy, from the ozone issue. I make the following observations:

1. James Hanson, Michel Mann, etc., are using mostly data from ground-based thermometers of unknown calibration, many of which have been moved numerous times, and for which record-keeping has been mostly spotty prior to WWII. Plus, there are large areas of the Earth not covered by ground-based thermometers. Not too many weather stations in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Further, ground thermometers are subject to well-known micro-climate phenomenea, as urban areas are known to generally be warmer than rural or wilderness areas.

2. You cannot get raw data from Mann et al. You can only get "adjusted" data, of which they refuse to reveal the nature of the adjustments. Christy's raw data, however is online. I've linked to it in these pages before, but I don't have the link handy now.

3. The IPCC and East Anglia models, if you go back to 1980 and put the initial conditions into them, fail to "predict" conditions that exist today; they over-estimate warming by a huge amount. Some investigators have done runs of those models where they put in completely random data as starting conditions. What they are finding is that, no matter what random data you start with, the models predict "hockey stick" warming, almost without exception.

4. It is knows, from the East Anglia emails, that Mann and his group made an attempt to make the Medieval Warming Period (the existence of which is supported by droves of historical evidence) disappear from their data, so they could make the claim that the 20th-century warming was unprecedented in human history. (It should also be noted that much historical evidence suggests that what would become Western civilization flourished during the Medieval Warming Period; Greenland was actually green, and wine grapes and citrus grew in England.)

5. In the 1970s, a lot of the same people who started the global-warming theory maintained that catastrophic global cooling was about to occur. Their proposed solutions for this were the exact same as their proposed solutions for global warming: deindustrialization, authoritarian government, a drastic decline in numbers and standard of living of the middle class, and a return to pre-modern conditions.

6. Christy uses satellite data that covers the entire Earth's surface, except for small areas centered over the poles. He acknowledges that global warming occurred in the 1980s and 1990s. His data showed that this rise stopped around 1998; since then the trend has been either flat or slightly declining, depending on whose analysis you look at. Further, Christy has several times accepted and incorporated criticisms of his methodology by opponents; yet none of these changes have resulted in his data changing very much.

7. Historical evidence suggests that the current warming period actually begin around 1810, prior to the time when the industrial revolution had begun to spread outside of Great Britain. There have been fluctuations; there appears to have been a cooling period in the 1870s and again in the 1930s. (And that 1930s period coincides with the Dust Bowl in North America.)

8. Past predictions by Hanson and other advocates have not come to pass. Manhattan is not under water, and Great Britain still gets snow in the winter. There has been no increase in hurricane frequency or severity in the North Atlantic; in fact, there has been a slight downward trend. Headlines alluding to the dollar value of damage caused by hurricanes are not scientifically useful; those values are mostly functions of coastal development and inflation.

9. In the era that we have had good satellite data (since about 1980), there is a pretty strong correlation between the "solar constant" (which measures the total amount of energy that the Earth receives from the Sun), and global troposphere temperatures as measured by Christy. The correlation is much stronger than the correlation between global CO2 emissions and troposphere temperature.

10. Climate researchers whose data tends to not support the party line have a hard time getting funding. Christy gets a lot of funding from private sources. Judith Curry was forced to resign her position at Georgia Tech, in part because she wasn't getting grants.

To sum it up: "climate change" happens. It always has happened, long before industrialization and long before homo sapiens walked the face of the Earth. We have to deal with it. However, there is no evidence that human activity is causing any of it. The people who say otherwise by and large are apologists and cheerleaders for totalitarian government. Their motivations are suspect, to say the least. Some people in France seem to have figured this out.

"However, there is no evidence that human activity is causing any of it."

I strongly disagree with that Cousin Dave. Humans cause all kinds of changes. But CO2 is a fairly weak example. Irrigation, cement, among other actions have far more significant effects. And by more significant I mean 100x or 1000x the effect.

The bigger issue is that increasing global temperatures are happening without any human interaction. (which you mentioned) So reducing the production of CO2 is pointless. Temps will rise even if production went to 0. Even if you wipe out all humans on the earth too. So if the goal is to keep the globe at a given temperature another solution must be chosen.

I agree with Cousin Dave.