Real Science Says Pollution Reduction Heats the Planet

I got to talk to a Real Scientist over the weekend, and he proposed to me that one of the reasons for the recent increase in global temperatures is the reduction in pollution of the past half century. Less pollution in the atmosphere means that more solar radiation reaches the Earth's surface.

Was he right or wrong? Google says that maybe he is right.

A study published this month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters suggests that eliminating the human emission of aerosols—tiny, air-polluting particles often released by industrial activities—could result in additional global warming of anywhere from half a degree to 1 degree Celsius.

Of course, the article from Scientific American listed in Google Search Results says that "Cleaning up Air Pollution May Strengthen Global Warming." Bless their hearts. But whatabout the increase in global warming due to the previous achievements in pollution reduction? The scientists do not say.

But here is what I want to know. Do the climate models take pollution reduction, past, present, and future, into account and if so why not?

Another thing my Real Scientist friend suggested was that male potency has been negatively affected by NOx reduction. Oh no!

But, unfortunately, I cannot find confirmation of this in Google Search Results. So he might have been kidding me. Or maybe not. But you young chaps should probably not take any risks. Does that mean a sensible inhalation of nitrous oxide every now and again. No idea. Consult your physician.

Anyway, at least we have the comfort of knowing, from Dr. Fauci, that anyone not bowing and scraping to him as a Scientist is nothing less than a January 6 armed insurrectionist. Or at least I assume that is what he implied in his criticism of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). Cruz has suggested that Fauci should be prosecuted for lying about COVID stuff, in particular in respect of his testimony regarding the funding of "gain-of-function" research at the Wuhan lab. So Fauci responded:

“I should be prosecuted? What happened on Jan. 6, senator?”

Ain't Dr. Fauci special!

 

Girard, Scapegoat, Whitewash and Politics

For some time I have been reading around the notion of René Girard and the Scapegoat. The idea is that when a human society is hopelessly divided and involved in blame and revenge, it tends to resolve the problems by uniting against a single person, usually marginalized or diseased, and blaming that scapegoat for everything. Then, after the scapegoat is ritually killed, the community is "healed," ending the divisions and recriminations and blame and endless revenge. Until next time.

That is Girard's argument in Violence and the Sacred. In another book, The Scapegoat, he proposes another notion, that in our human religions and myths we get embarrassed about the crimes of our ancestors and our gods, and start to whitewash them. Because, after all, our ancestors and our gods could not have been that bad.

Girard uses a mistranslation of the death of Remus -- of Romulus and Remus and the founding of Rome -- as an example.

Romulus and Remus are contesting the kingship of Rome. Girard quotes a translation of Livy:

An argument ensues, which comes to blows; anger degenerates into a murderous struggle. It is, then, in the scuffle, that Remus falls dead.

Only, Girard writes, the Latin translated as "in the scuffle" is "in turba" which means "in the crowd" and "the word turba has an almost technical meaning; a crowd that is confused, perturbed, and disturbing" and Livy often uses the word "turba" to describe "collective murders." 

Do you see what he is describing here? Nothing to see here, only a "scuffle:" not a collective murder by the mob.

In a related topic, see reports on the current move by Wikipedia to delete its "Mass killings under communist regimes" page.

On the other hand, we note that our lefty friends spend a lot of their time hyping the crimes of imperialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, to represent the recent past as a violent and oppressive horror show in which the whole of society, except for activist lefties, is guilty.

I suppose that none of this is remarkable. If you are spinning the narrative of continuing the current regime you propose that it is all for the best, although maybe "mistakes were made." But hey, we don't want to be too hard on our ancestors. If you are trying to change the regime, then you want to present the regime's doings as a horrible crime.

I would say, in addition, that the scapegoat mechanism of re-uniting the society around the victimization of a single individual has been replaced with the victimization of a small minority group. Thus Girard writes about blaming the Jews for the plague in medieval Europe. Thus, in a divided and demoralized Germany after World War I Hitler and his propagandists united the Germans against The Jews.

In another context Girard discusses the murder of the Scandinavian god Baldr through the machinations of the trickster god Loki. He proposes that Baldr was probably a victim of the scapegoat mechanism but that the story of his collective murder by the whole community was covered up in later versions of the myth: the evil trickster did it.

If you try too hard to prove something you prove nothing. This is the case of the myth of Baldr: guilty people make too many excuses. They fail to realize that a simple excuse is more effective than many excellent ones. If you want to deceive your audience you had better not let them see what you are trying to do.

This story puts me in mind of our lefty friends. Don't you think that they try too hard to blame everything on guilty racist-sexist-homophobes. And imperialists and colonialists? I wonder why. 

Obviously, the scapegoat mechanism is connected with Nazi Carl Schmitt's notion of politics being the friend / enemy distinction, made "real simple" by Curtis Yarvin in the maxim: "there is no politics without an enemy." Politics, then is the uniting of the community against a common enemy. Just as in the distant past a community without an organized politics would combine against a scapegoat.

Being Thankful at Thanksgiving

I could be thankful that our Democratic friends are screwing up, big time, in the Biden age. But I won't. Whatever will be, will be on the politics front. Politics is about enemies, and I don't think of Democrats and Wokies as enemies. I just think of them as fools.

What I am thankful for is the continuing miracle of America. That despite everything, as they say, the flag is still there. That our great country muddles along, despite the folly of its leaders and the conceit of its educated class, and the dysfunction of the lower class that is a direct consequence of the folly and conceit of out betters.

Mind you, I find myself more and more accepting the line of regime critics like Ron Unz. His 11/22 piece is all about how the regime manages to silence its critics, and maintain its regime narrative.

Which we have seen Big Time in recent years.

I suppose that every regime gets to write the history, so long as it manages to win its wars. And the suppression of critics is a sign that the regime is sailing in choppy waters.

Meanwhile I am sitting in the airport at the departure gate and ordinary America is walking to and fro in front of me, everyone going somewhere for Thanksgiving. And the pilots are flying and the Ubers are 5 minutes away and all is right with the world even though our leaders are screwing up big-time on the COVID and economic policy front.

In a twisted way, I am glad that we have a full Dem administration from president to Congress. Because I think that whoever was in charge after COVID would be looking at the failure of the administrative state's lockdown and vaccination policy and the aftermath of Money Printer Go Brrrr in 2020.

And by the way, the inflation was already coded in when President Trump bullied the Fed into easing monetary policy in late 2019.

But now, according to the eternal law of politics, the post-COVID mess is all happening on the Dems' watch. It's only fair, because administrative government and easy money is the basic policy of the educated class and the educated class should be fully in power when the consequence of such policy is felt, good and hard, by the American people.

See, I think that if Trump were president right now then Republicans would be looking at a wipeout in 2022 and a 60-40 Time for a Change election in 2024. But he isn't. And they aren't. It feels almost like divine intervention.

My big thing is thinking about what comes after the rule of the educated class. Truth is, I don't know. Because the thing about the middle class, the main enemy of the educated class, is that we are not that interested in power. And yet politics is about power, taking state power to the enemy. How can you rule if you are not that interested in power?

I don't know. But I am thankful that in this tricky time things are not a lot worse.

Economic Policy Stupidity

I understand that the Biden drain of 50 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is merely a ploy to be seen to be doing something. But the markets are underimpressed so the oil price went up on the news.

I confess that I am finding the developing economic stupidity of the Biden administration hard to take. I feel that I paid my dues on the economic stupidity front back in the 1970s when I was 30ish.

I thought that everyone recalled the 1970s as a Never Again decade. Particularly if you were a Democrat, because the 1970s set up Ronald Reagan, the Amiable Dunce. Oh no!

But ruling classes return again and again to stupidity. And I think it is because the whole point of being a ruling class is to do the Henry V thing and send the nation once more unto the breach. Because?

Because politics needs an enemy, and an enemy deserves a war, and what are the people but cannon fodder for the ruler's heroic war against the enemy? Anyway, it will all be worth it!

I suppose I ought to congratulate our global rulers on the whole climate change war. Because it is a new kind of war. It is not a war of sending teenage soldiers into battle, but of giving billions and trillions to worthy green enterprises that no doubt richly reward their political pals in return. A world war with no butcher's bill. What's not to like?

The rulers get to go to cool global-elite conferences and the climate-warrior activists get to stage real cool peaceful protests. What's not to like?

And then the war on systemic racism provides the rationale for new trillions in domestic spending, and funding of the race warriors in ten thousand CRT and DEI programs. Really, what's not to like?

Hey, I know, let's play this game!

Let's declare war! On the greenies and the anti-racists.

If our lefty friends can have their Ally narrative, fighting for the Oppressed Peoples against the White Oppressors, then we can play the same game.

We few, we happy few, we band of Allies, fighting or the Climate Victims against the Green Oppressors!

Or, 

We few, we happy few we band of Allies, fighting for the Oppressed Parents against the CRT Oppressors!

But I think that there is a problem, and it is the problem that conservatives have had at least since the 1960s, or even further back to the 1930s New Deal.

You see, while our lefty friends really believe with a full heart that their politics will vanquish the monstrous enemies they are fighting, we ordinary folk don't believe that politics is the royal road to justice, but neither do we think that our liberal friends are enemies.

We just believe they are stupid. Like AOC. We don't think she is evil; we just think she is a foolish virgin that believes what she has been carefully taught, from Green New Deal to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).

And if politics is all about the enemy, and making war on the enemy, and then looting the enemy and handing out the spoils to the supporters, why not?  

You fill empty heads full of mush and then lead them to the breach, telling them they are saving the planet and bending the arc of history towards justice. As political leaders have done since the dawn of time.

But I just wish we weren't making the same old mistakes all over again.

Because ordinary decent people get their lives ruined by the strutting and fretting of the ruling class and its politics and its enemies and its wars and its looting.

Waukesha: Because Liberalism Made Things Worse

The important thing to understand about the Waukesha nightmare and the liberal meltdown on the criminal justice system is that liberals are in the position of the proverbial little Dutch boy, trying to save the country by plugging a hole in the dyke with his finger.

Maybe that worked in the story, but it doesn't work in real life.

The problem with the criminal justice system is not excessive bail. Or crazy Soros prosecutors. Or too many black men in jail.

The problem is the liberal welfare state, and in particular the way it has hammered blacks.

You can see that in the headline black victims.

Rodney King: "beaten by LAPD officers during his arrest, after a high-speed chase, for driving while intoxicated on I-210." Context: Resisting arrest.

Travyon Martin: "fatally shot in Sanford, Florida by George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old Hispanic American." Context: Martin was on top of Zimmerman, bashing his head, when Zimmerman shot him.

Michael Brown: "fatally shot by 28-year-old white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the city of Ferguson, Missouri." Context: Brown was suspected of a theft and wrestled for Wilson's gun.

George Floyd: "murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during an arrest." Context: Floyd was resisting arrest, and high on drugs.

Jacob Blake: "shot and seriously injured by police officer Rusten Sheskey in Kenosha, Wisconsin." Context: Blake was going for a knife when shot.

All of these victims were not just victims of police brutality, they were the logical consequence of the last 150 years of educated-class politics that treats the lower class as helpless victims unable to fend for themselves.

Item: I say that the cultural agenda since 1800 should have been to encourage farm-workers and industrial workers to become responsible middle-class citizens and grow out of any serf status lingering on from the Middle Ages -- or slave status lingering on from King Cotton.

Item: I say that the welfare programs passed in 1965 were exactly the worst thing to do when African Americans were emerging from a century of Jim Crow. It blitzed the black low-income family, and the black low-income family is still blitzed.

Item: I say that politics and government are only good for waging war and handing out loot and plunder. The more government, the more everything devolves into a war and the more the economy is reduced to a handout of loot and plunder.

Item: I say that humans are social animals, and that nearly all human social life should be enmeshed in a network of voluntary social, religious and cultural institutions, and not by government. I particularly mean that poverty should be managed by mutual-aid organizations and not by government.

I say that if you want to understand the politics of our liberal friends it makes sense if you realize that they have No Idea that the "items" above are the reason why blacks are in endless problems with family dysfunction and run-ins with the police. They have No Idea that mental illness and homeless problems issue directly from their politics that has hammered families and encouraged people to look for help from the government instead of their families.

So liberals want to lower bail requirements, because they see, before their eyes, how low-income people are oppressed by the criminal justice system. They just cannot see upstream that the overburdened criminal justice system is the consequence of their policies.

So liberals want to create housing for the homeless, because they cannot bring themselves to understand that people with broken lives, issuing from liberal policies, are blotting life out with drugs.

Obviously nothing can be done while our liberal friends are the ruling class, because they cannot see, will not see, that all these problems are a direct consequence of the wise and evolved policies that they have legislated and administered over the last century and more.

All is Narrative Including Civic Nationalism

The Zman has a post-Rittenhouse piece on Civic Nationalism, and he critiques it thus.

Civic nationalism is the argument that a country can be organized around a set of ideas, rather than people and land. The citizens, rather than connected by blood and history, are connected by ideas. 

Ideas being, e.g., the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

But, of course, "people and land" and "blood and history" are just as much ideas as the idea of equality and government under law.

They are all "narratives." And the Zman understands this:

Civic nationalism, to a great degree, is a reaction to the internationalism of Western ruling elites who are post-national. The post-nationalists want to eliminate borders and the national sovereignty. In their place will be international organizations, corporate agreements, and the administrative state. Civic nationalism is an effort to confront this old enemy of civilization with a nationalism free of past baggage.

In other words, the civic nationalists want nationalism without the Hitler baggage.

And narratives tend to be sacred narratives such as the Woke Religion narrative as described by Schellenberger and Boghossian. They have assembled a table of Woke Religion: A Taxonomy, describing -- for Racism, Climate Change, Trans, Crime, Mental Illness, Drugs, and Homelessness -- the Original Sin, Guilty Devils, Creation Story, Sacred Victims, The Elect, Supernatural Beliefs, Taboo Facts, Taboo Speech, Purifying Rituals, and Purifying Speech. It really is genius.

Now, my idea is that all politics is tribalism, and "fake" tribalism at that. I got this idea from reading C.R. Hallpike, who says that the original hunter-gather bands didn't have much of a tribal mentality. Tribalism, he writes, started when people started living the villages that were big enough that people didn't know all the other poeple in the village.

And, to put Nazi Carl Schmitt back in the mix, with his notion that politics is about friends vs. enemy, we can say that tribalism is about our good people vs. the enemy's bad people. 

See, once you get a society bigger than a band of kindred, where everyone is related to everyone else by blood, then people start to construct a tribal narrative that imagines everyone connected by blood. On the other hand, my Greek friend that was born into a village on a Greek hillside, talks endlessly of this cousin or that uncle or that grandparent.

So, in my view, all politics is based on a narrative of imagined kindred. It could be a clan which assumes that various groups of kindred are related by blood, and probably they are. But then we get to princely states where everyone is related by their loyalty to the prince. And then to the nation, which is a glorious story of blood and land. Or, if it is the United States it is the glory of its ideas, that all men are created equal and are delighted to live in a land ruled by laws and not by men.

Now our global overlords -- the "laptop whites" -- of which the Zman talks of the "internationalism of Western ruling elites" have a narrative of globalism, of "international organizations, corporate agreements, and the administrative state." So, they have a narrative of internationalism, and political and administrative institutions to go with it.

I say, with my Three Peoples theory that the tribe of the "laptop whites" is the community of all educated and credentialed people all over the world; the tribe of the middle class is the nation; and the tribe of the lower class is race or ethnic origin, or class. My Three Peoples theory is one of a number of Three Layer theories.

So it doesn't matter what the narrative is. The middle class will create and recreate a narrative of nation, that the nation in which they live is the best thing since sliced bread. Of course, as middle-class people get super-educated then they tend to adhere to the "laptop white" narrative of globalism and the over/under politics of Allyism and declare war on the middle class using the lower class as their street army.

Of course, all narratives tend to be forged in the furnace of war, when the Founding leaders construct a narrative to inspire their followers with a sense of belonging to a sacred "band of brothers." So, we should expect that the leaders of the middle class in the current Cold Civil War would be constructing a new narrative of nation. Which is exactly what Donald Trump was doing in the 2016 presidential election campaign.

Whether this new national narrative succeeds depends, of course, on whether the middle class can win the Cold Civil War that the educated class of "laptop whites" is conducting against it.

Rittenhouse Case Principals: White Working Class Meltdown

Like you I had not read much about the details of the Rittenhouse case. I knew that Kyle Rittenhouse had driven across state lines to Kenosha, Wisconsin, that he was trying to protect businesses from looters. And that he shot some rioters while retreating.

What I did not know it that the whole affair shines a spotlight on the collapse of the white working class.

I learned that Kyle's parents were divorced, with his mother living just across state lines from Kenosha. I learned that Kyle's father lived in Kenosha, had been a machinist but had got in trouble with drugs.

Kyle Rittenhouse is the terminus child of the hollowing-out of the American rust belt. A young white teenager from a broken home, raised by a struggling single mother. His father, according to reports, is a former machinist who was swept away into the Sackler-fed opioid crisis.

I learned that the rioters that interacted with Kyle were also white, and were not exactly exemplary young men. The three men that Rittenhouse shot were Gaige Grosskreutz, Joseph Roseenbaum, and Anthony Huber.

Says Andy Ngo:

Gaige Grosskreutz, the person armed w/a pistol who went after Rittenhouse & was shot in arm, says he’s a @ACLU legal observer. He has a long criminal history that includes a gun-related conviction.

Says Michelle Mark:

[Josesph] Rosenbaum spent roughly 15 years in prison in his early adulthood, according to Arizona prison records. Court documents showed that Rosenbaum was accused of sexually abusing five pre-teen boys in 2002, was indicted on 11 counts of child molestation, and eventually pleaded guilty to two amended counts of sexual conduct with a minor.  

The jury heard only select details about Rosenbaum's mental state before the shootings. Rosenbaum had been released from the hospital just hours before the Kenosha shootings, where he had been under psychiatric care following a suicide attempt.

Also:

[Anthony] Huber pleaded guilty in 2013 to two felony counts of strangulation and suffocation, and false imprisonment, court records showed. According to a criminal complaint, Rittenhouse's defense attorneys cited without the jury present, Huber had pulled a knife on his brother and grandmother, and choked his brother amid an argument about housecleaning.

These are all white guys, in case you didn't know.

In connection with Kyle Rittenhouse's father, I was reading a piece about America's drug problem:

According to data published by the Centers for Disease Control published this week, more than 100,000 Americans died of a drug overdose in the 12 months between April 2020 an April 2021.

In a country with a population of 330 million that is 30 per 100,000. The homicide rate, by the way was 7.8 per 100,000 in 2020.

And the drug problem is getting worse, because fentanyl and P2P are much stronger and easier to produce than before.

Today’s battle is against two synthetic drugs: one that kills with terrifying ease, another that creates zombified and desperate addicts almost overnight. 

Today, fentanyl is responsible for the majority of drug deaths in America. In tiny doses it gives users a high that resembles the blissed-out pain relief delivered by heroin or prescription pills. But it is far stronger and more deadly. In anything other than those microscopic quantities, it will kill you. The other drug central to the latest phase of the addiction crisis is methamphetamine, in particular a kind cooked up using a method known as P2P, which uses phenyl-2-propanone...

Our blindness to the potency of modern drugs also means we have ignored the spillover effects of addiction. The proliferation of homeless encampments in American communities of all sizes, [writer Sam] Quinones argues, is first and foremost a consequence of the new meth:  

We lordly educated class, with our credentials, our corporate or government jobs, our healthy families, we have no idea about life for the Other Half.

Hey, there's a poll out today, reported by Steve Cortes.

On the Economy, Biden has a 1% surplus approval [50% to 49%] from white college grads, and a stunning -54% deficit [20% to 74%] among [white] working-class.

Well, yeah. Because the educated got through the COVID crisis working at home and Zooming meetings. The working class lost their jobs, the dumb deplorables, the bitter clingers. 

As Gaetano Mosca writes in The Ruling Class, a competent ruling class makes sure to recruit from the lower classes. For various reasons, including a circulation of elites.

The thing to remember about government and politics is that the ruling class lives for its own power and conceit. The rest of the country is of interest only to the extent that it can be organized and bribed to support the ruling class or used as an enemy for the ruling class to fight.

UPDATE: Kyle Rittenhouse not guilty on all counts. Thank you, ordinary American jurors. We wouldn't be America without you.