Click with caution for August 30

The science is not settled. But its money stream is, and that's what counts. Climate Science’s Myth-Buster - It’s time to be scientific about global warming, says climatologist Judith Curry.

Dr. Curry "is a true climatologist."

She once headed the department of earth and atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, until she gave up on the academy so that she could express herself independently. “Independence of mind and climatology have become incompatible,” she says. Do you mean that global warming isn’t real? I ask. “There is warming, but we don’t really understand its causes,” she says. “The human factor and carbon dioxide, in particular, contribute to warming, but how much is the subject of intense scientific debate.”

Her personal blog is here, https://judithcurry.com/.

Because educating isn't the actual point. Destroying Independence of Thought is. My Childhood Schooling In The Soviet Union Was Better Than My Kids’ In U.S. Public Schools Today

Now that back-to-school season is in full swing, let me tell you about the single most pressing unmet need of my ethnic minority community: education. Like other Russian-speaking Jews, I am forever thankful to this country for taking me in and for giving me liberty. Yet when I talk to people in our community about their wishes and anxieties, they always express discontentment with U.S. schools.

“How is it,” some ask, “that we are all engineers, but our children can’t do basic math?”

"Happiness is love. Full stop." Harvard followed 800 people over the course of multiple decades and found 6 things that make people live longer, happier lives.

Here is the list, but read the whole thing:

1. Avoid smoking and alcohol.
2. Years of education. Education seems to increase good habits (and being surrounded by smart, ambitious people never hurts).
3. A happy childhood. It's huge. And surrounding yourself later in life with people who love you can help repair a difficult youth.
4. Relationships are everything. "Happiness is love. Full stop."
5. Coping skills. Stop projecting and stop being passive-aggressive. Use mature defenses like humor when life gets hard. (Yes, immature humor is still mature coping. You're welcome.)
6. 'Generativity'. Build a good life, a well-rounded self and then give back.

Hospital Staff Caught Euthanizing Hundreds of Patients: “If a Nurse Didn’t Like You, You Were a Goner”

More details are emerging of the scandal in which at least 450, and probably more than 650, people’s lives were ended as a result of being given dangerous amounts of unnecessary opiates.

The report of The Gosport Independent Panel into Gosport War Memorial Hospital found that only 45% of those administered terminal quantities of diamorphine (which can be appropriate in alleviating severe pain at the very end of life) were said to be in pain. Many of the case studies showed that even where pain was noted, it was not properly assessed, and the effect of medication was not monitored.

In 29% of cases, no reason or rationale was given for prescribing the lethal doses.

This was done in a first-world country with a completely mature socialist health care system.

They call it "green" energy because it takes so many greenbacks to buy it. Bloomberg: Sometimes, a Greener Grid Means a 40,000% Spike in Power Prices

The road to a world powered by renewable energy is littered with unintended consequences. Like a 40,000% surge in electricity prices.

Texas power prices jumped from less than $15 to as much as $9,000 a megawatt-hour this month as coal plant retirements and weak winds left the region on the brink of blackouts during a heat wave. It’s a phenomenon playing out worldwide. Germany averted three blackouts of its own in June and has seen prices both spike and plunge below zero within days as it swaps out coal and nuclear energy for wind and solar. In the U.K., more than a million homes lost power on Aug. 9, in part because a wind farm tripped offline.

I am evermore convinced that unimaginably high energy prices for ordinary Americans is not only unobjectionable to the American Left, but are actually a goal.

Gun control works. Except when it doesn't, which is all the time. Another Honest Liberal Pours Cold Water on Gun Control -- "Alex Kingsbury of the New York Times acknowledges that politicians who want to ban so-called assault weapons are engaging in a futile exercise."

There are currently around 15 million military-style rifles in civilian hands in the United States. …Acknowledging the grim reality that we will live among these guns indefinitely is a necessary first step…calling for military-style rifles bans — as I have done for years — may be making other lifesaving gun laws harder to pass. …Short of forced confiscation or a major cultural shift, our great-great-great-grandchildren will live side-by-side with the guns we have today and make tomorrow. …For context: In 2016 alone, more than one million military-style weapons were added to America’s existing civilian arsenal… America’s gun problem is far larger than military-style weapons, the mass killer’s rifle of choice. There are hundreds of millions of handguns in the country… The guns…are here to stay.
 
Not only is confiscation politically untenable — the compliance rates of gun owners when bans are passed are laughably low. The distribution of these weapons across society makes even their prohibition nearly impossible. In 1996, Australia launched a mandatory gun buyback of 650,000 military-style weapons. While gun ownership per capita in the country declined by more than 20 percent, today Australians own more guns than they did before the buyback.

Speaking of honesty in climate science, here it is. Finnish Scientists: Effect of human activity on climate change insignificant

A new paper published by researchers form the University of Turku in Finland suggests that even though observed changes in the climate are real, the effects of human activity on these changes are insignificant. The team suggests that the idea of man made climate change is a mere miscalculation or skewing the formulas by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

What!?!?! IPCC contributors and writer "skewing the formulas"? How could that ever be? Here is the error that is commonplace. People believe that the practice of science is a virtue, which I will more than readily grant. But then they assume that scientists are therefore unusually virtuous. No. Scientists are no more virtuous than anyone. They lie, cheat, and steal just as often as anyone.

This is the same error that the Left makes about government. Convinced beyond all reason that more government is better than less, more government is therefore a virtue. So it follows that those who do the governing - Leftist politicians and government bureaucrats, are therefore themselves virtuous.

Well, actually yes, they do believe that.