So today’s challenge is to find a working scientist or PhD in some climate-related field who will agree with the idea that the climate science models do a good job of predicting the future.

Notice I am avoiding the question of the measurements. That’s a separate question. For this challenge, don’t let your scientist conflate the measurements or the basic science of CO2 with the projections. Just ask the scientist to offer an opinion on the credibility of the models only.

Remind your scientist that as far as you know there has never been a multi-year, multi-variable, complicated model of any type that predicted anything with useful accuracy. Case in point: The experts and their models said Trump had no realistic chance of winning.

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/155073242136/the-climate-science-challenge

Consider this. We (the Royal We) can turn men into women and women into men with hormone treatments. We can transplant organs. We can engage in genetic engineering. Yet no one has gotten off their ass to transfer “skinny” intestinal microbes to the stomachs of fat people.

Remember kids – don’t argue with women and statists. Or fat people. Agree and amplify. Fat people say it isn’t their fault. Okay, it’s not your fault. You are fat because of microbes. Those microbes are motivated by hate.

Why don’t fat people utilize affirmative action to bring in immigrant microbes that will make them skinny. The way more Muslims will make the Unite States better (aka, less white).

Since fat people choose to build a wall to keep out the immigrant microbes doesn’t that mean they are xenophobic, motivated by hate and fat by choice?

People who smoke cigarettes by choice are shunned, insulted, have to engage in their habit outside and pay higher health insurance costs.

Thus shouldn’t fat people be shunned, insulted, have to eat outside and pay higher health insurance costs?

Documenting such differences does not mean the discrepancies are responsible for obesity, however. To demonstrate cause and effect, Gordon and his colleagues conducted an elegant series of experiments with so-called humanized mice, published last September in Science. First, they raised genetically identical baby rodents in a germ-free environment so that their bodies would be free of any bacteria. Then they populated their guts with intestinal microbes collected from obese women and their lean twin sisters (three pairs of fraternal female twins and one set of identical twins were used in the studies). The mice ate the same diet in equal amounts, yet the animals that received bacteria from an obese twin grew heavier and had more body fat than mice with microbes from a thin twin. As expected, the fat mice also had a less diverse community of microbes in the gut.

Gordon’s team then repeated the experiment with one small twist: after giving the baby mice microbes from their respective twins, they moved the animals into a shared cage. This time both groups remained lean. Studies showed that the mice carrying microbes from the obese human had picked up some of their lean roommates’ gut bacteria—especially varieties of Bacteroidetes—probably by consuming their feces, a typical, if unappealing, mouse behavior.

To further prove the point, the researchers transferred 54 varieties of bacteria from some lean mice to those with the obese-type community of germs and found that the animals that had been destined to become obese developed a healthy weight instead. Transferring just 39 strains did not do the trick. “Taken together, these experiments provide pretty compelling proof that there is a cause-and-effect relationship and that it was possible to prevent the development of obesity,” Gordon says.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-gut-bacteria-help-make-us-fat-and-thin/

Of course this is all true. My disagreement is not with the problem, but with men’s reaction to the problem.

1. Becoming a loser and hiding behind video games is not the answer.

2. Becoming more woman-like is not the answer.

3. Whining on websites about how much everything sucks is not the answer.

4. Looking a white knight to sweep in and fix all of your problems is not the answer, and it doesn’t matter if his name is Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. (The systemic problems you want these men to fix can’t be fixed anyway.)

. . . . .

As much as some of you fragile snowflakes hate to hear this, everything in your life is your fault. This is good news, not bad news. This means you have the power to fix, or at least dramatically improve, any problem you encounter.

So yes, manning up will indeed help you address your chemical depression. There are all kinds of effective treatments for chemical depression. Manning up means doing those things, rather than sitting around and whining about how much your life sucks.

And yes, manning up will indeed help you find a new job (or start a small business) much faster if you’re laid off. When you man up, you’ll suck it up and get to work to find a new source of income. Soon, you’ll have one. If you don’t man up, you’ll go on food stamps and play video games and your problem will continue.

. . . . .

And you’re right; people don’t tell women to “woman up.” You know why?

Because most of the time, if a woman requires some true heavy lifting (figurative or literal), she’s going to rely on either a man to do it or government to do it (which is mostly funded by men).

As I’ve talked about many times, most women don’t have to woman up. Boyfriends, husbands, friend zone guys, and/or the welfare state will take care of them. As a man, I don’t really have the option of going to Match.com and finding some woman who will marry me and pay most or all of my bills for me for the rest of my life. Women do. As a man, I don’t have the option of having a baby or two pop out of my body and getting free money from my government because of it for as long as I want. Women do. Et cetera. Of course people don’t tell women to “women up.”

http://www.blackdragonblog.com/2016/12/26/young-men-dont-want-man/

On the Right, the temptation is to realize that the all of the assumptions that form the basis of our current society are lies, and therefore to go the exact opposite direction.

This is a strategic error.

The opposite of what we have now is the same mental state with a different starting direction.

Because it is the same mental state, whatever direction you take will lead to the same cycle, and opposite extremes will connect. That will re-create the same problems we have now, but also create the ultimate crypto-disaster scenario: we will think we have solved the problem, but in fact, will have made it more entrenched.

What this means is that we cannot avoid the crisis by attempting to be its opposite. We must find a different direction instead, and reach toward that instead of merely pushing away from what we know.

. . . . .

But the scary fact is that people are individuals, and romantic love was not about sexual attraction, but finding someone comparable to oneself with whom one could spend a lifetime. The romantics bonded their ideals intensely to death in order to achieve this time scale, and the vision of love they found was about what everyone hopes for: someone to grow old with and never feel out of place. This is compatible with genetic determinism because people are looking at inner traits of others, which starts with general race, ethnic, caste, class and social compatibility on a genetic level.

In this way, romantic love was utterly opposed to the idea of universalism, or that all people were essentially the same.

Instead, it sought the union of individuals matched in ability, inclination and aesthetics. This formed the basis for a lifelong friendship and partnership which could result in family and have that family be content because the parents just made sense together.

STEM-addicts/MRAs and others are caught in the utilitarian idea that all people are the same, and this perverts the ancient knowledge of biological determinism. Under the egalitarian ideal, people are basically the same and can be manipulated by the same incentives and punishments. Under the romantic ideal, in contrast, it is the exceptional and unique nature of people that allows two to match up as a couple and then a family. Biological determinism supports the latter — unique traits — over the former, which emphasizes uniform traits in denial of nature and reality.

http://www.amerika.org/politics/women-are-not-machines/

He was, for many, hailed as the God Emperor.

Two months ago, President-Elect Donald Trump had no more fervent group of loyal supporters than the Alt-Right. This was especially true during the worst stretch of the campaign after the Access Hollywood tape was released in October. Trump was condemned and disavowed by 1/4 of elected Republicans and 1/3 of the Republican Congress. He was written off as a sure loser by virtually all conservative pundits.

That was then. We’re still several weeks away from the inauguration, but now the bloom is already off the rose. There has been a shift in our thinking about Trump in the Alt-Right. It stems from two causes:

1.) First, the November 22 disavowal and condemnation of the Alt-Right with The New York Times, which was a major buzzkill. There was nothing new about that particular disavowal. At various points in the campaign, Trump had disavowed David Duke, Jared Taylor, William Johnson, James Edwards and the Ku Klux Klan. There had been a number of disavowals and a host of things (for example, Eric Trump saying David Duke deserved a bullet) that were set aside but not forgotten in the heat of the campaign.

There were many, many things that happened during the campaign which were glossed over for the greater good of victory. There was, for example, Trump’s explicit embrace of the LGBTQ community (he made a point to add the Q) as well as his promise of a “New Deal for Black America.”

For a year and a half, it did not escape our notice that Trump talked about The Blacks, The LGBT community, The Hispanics, but never once mentioned The Whites who, as it turned out, were the sole cause of his upset victory on November 8th. This was grudgingly accepted because it was thought at the time that Trump’s victory over the GOP establishment and Conservatism, Inc. would bring about a great change in the political landscape that would be “good for the Whites.”

http://www.occidentaldissent.com/2016/12/30/the-trump-honeymoon-is-already-over/

For libertarians, the time for schadenfreude is past. Satisfying as it has been to watch Hillary Clinton’s fatuous hack brigade flail about trying to explain why the voting public failed to give their heroine her due, we should now be content to let her wander the woods and float through gatherings of fellow millionaires. Politically at least, she is now an ex-person.

In looking over the commentary produced since the election, I worry that many libertarians are both underestimating and misunderstanding the nature of the threat Trump poses. Make no mistake: Hillary Clinton would have been an awful president, rivaling and probably surpassing the past two administrations for overall harm to the nation.

But: what we as a nation have elected instead is a very different proposition. Donald Trump has no core beliefs other than in his own all-encompassing competence, and he recognizes no authority other than the one beneath his gilded combover.

The sole hope coming out of the campaign was Trump’s sheer manic variability, which saw him contradicting himself not just from day to day, but sentence to sentence. It was possible—barely—to measure his egregiously awful statements on policing, trade, and civil liberties against others taking on bailed-out bankers and US military failures in the Middle East, and hope that there was a better side of his nature that might yet win out.

A month later, that fiction is no longer sustainable. Trump has made clear he will govern by drawing on the worst of both the establishment GOP and the fringier elements who have swarmed around his campaign: an unholy union first appearing in the naming of past RNC head Reince Preibus to be chief of staff, while placing Breitbart CEO Steve Bannon in the role of “chief counselor and White House strategist”—an equal position that is, crucially, not subject to congressional approval. In one stroke, Trump coopted the establishment, installing the empty-headed Preibus to repeat talking points at press briefings while leaving Bannon is free to plot in the darkness. Further, the arrangement takes away another fleeting hope: Trump, who is fickle even by the standards of small children, is often swayed by the last person he talks to; Bannon will make sure that person is him.

. . . . .

Within the structure of the federal government as presently constituted, there are no effective checks on his power to do so. President Hillary would have broken the law, and egregiously so, but as with her emails she would have recognized that what she was doing was wrong and made an incompetent effort to cover it up. Trump’s illegal acts will occur in the open, as they have for decades; he will dare anyone to stop him, knowing that once he’s in power there really isn’t anyone who will.

The Democrats won’t: as they’ve proven time and again, they love power too much to allow it to dissipate.

Obama had the chance to dismantle the post-9/11 security and surveillance state; he chose instead to ramp up both, prosecuting whistleblowers and leakers with a ferocity never before seen while wasting all his political capital on the narcissistic quest to get an already-disintegrating health plan passed.

The 2020 hopefuls—be it odious busybody Elizabeth Warren, discount-store Obama knockoff Cory Booker, nepotism case-study Andrew Cuomo, or any other—will want to preserve whatever they can of the imperial presidency out of the belief—growing inexplicably stronger each time it is shown to be misguided—that they can fix everything on their next Oval Office turn.

http://www.libertyunbound.com/node/1638

It certainly is tempting, however, to root for a candidate as obsessively vilified as Donald Trump. I’m tired of being told how outraged I’m supposed to be every time he opens his mouth. His critics in the media are a ghastly gallery of horror-movie clowns. Their instructions to us about our civic duties are a sick joke.

And their fawning over Hillary Clinton makes me want to vomit.

My attitude toward my fellow Americans — regardless of the demographic group to which they belong — is that they’re OK with me as long as they don’t push me around or steal from me.

I don’t believe that my best interests are at odds with other people’s nearly as often as the demagogues claim. I think that claim is a divide-and-conquer tactic, designed to keep us at odds with one another. I also believe that the political hustlers who commonly make it are the scum of the earth. No matter what party they happen to represent, they’re unworthy of my vote.

The only time when they want to make us feel (as opposed to think) is when they are trying to put something over on us — which, in my opinion, is nearly all the time.

Whenever politicians attempt to manipulate my emotions, I assume they’re trying to bamboozle me. Experience has shown me that I am seldom wrong.

The notion that because I can be lumped into a particular demographic group, I owe my vote to a candidate who transparently tries to play me like a fiddle, is just plainweird. It’s as strange as a young woman who’s decided she’s a cat, or a middle-aged man who spends all day in a giant crib. It’s pathetic weird. It’s deranged weird. It is, very frankly, unworthy-of-being-an-American weird.

http://www.libertyunbound.com/node/1614

Linkage: 24 March, 2020 – If Wuhan Virus Was Murdering Unborn Children With Kung Flu Instead Of Boomers Not One Libtard Would Give A Fuck. #CLSology

Linkage: 22 March, 2020 – Wuhan Virus Super Special Update Spectacular Extravaganza With Extra Racism (because everything is racism except for replacing white people #KillAllWhiteMen). #CLSology

Linkage: 10 March, 2020 – On Overcoming The Illusion Of The Importance Of Non-importance. #CLSology

Linkage: 3 March, 2020 – The Low Hanging Fruit of Twitter. #CLSology

Linkage: 25 February, 2020 – Frank Cervi’s Kampf? What About TGO’s Kampf? #CLSology

Linkage: 18 February, 2020 – People’s Republic of Fort Collins Photo Essay. #CLSology