Jts5665

The UN Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) is misleading policy makers by focusing on an implausible worst-case emissions scenarios, concludes a new analysis report published by the Clintel Foundation: “The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC“

The IPCC is hiding the good news about disaster losses and climate-related deaths and wrongly claims the estimate of climate sensitivity is above 2.5°C. Also errors in the AR6 report are worse than those that led to the IAC Review in 2010. concludes the report by The Climate Intelligence Foundation (Clintel), which was founded in 2019 by emeritus professor of geophysics Guus Berkhout and science journalist Marcel Crok.

Opposite of IPCC claims likely true

Another result: The IPCC ignored crucial peer-reviewed literature showing that normalized disaster losses have decreased since 1990 and that human mortality due to extreme weather decreased by more than 95% since 1920.

Clintel accuses the IPCC of cherry picking from the literature to claim increases in damage and mortality due to anthropogenic climate change, when in fact the opposite is likely true.

Rewrote climate history

The Clintel report is 180 pages long and the first serious international ‘assessment of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report. In 13 chapters the Clintel report shows the IPCC rewrote climate history, and emphasizes an implausible worst-case scenario, favoring bad news and ignoring good news.

“The strategy of the IPCC seems to be to hide any good news about climate change and to hype anything bad,” reported the Clintel press release.

The errors and biases that Clintel documents in the report are far worse than those that led to the investigation of the IPCC by the Interacademy Councel (IAC Review) in 2010. Clintel believes that the IPCC should reform, or be dismantled.

Clintel is a network of international scientists who analyzed several claims from the Working Group 1 (The Physical Science Basis)
and Working Group 2 (Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability) reports. This led to the latest report: “The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC”.

IPCC ignores 97% of all papers

Clintel explains how the IPCC ignored 52 out of 53 peer reviewed papers dealing with “normalized disaster losses” and found no increase in harms that could be attributed to climate change. Yet, the IPCC highlighted the single paper that claimed an increase in losses.

Cherrypicking, rewriting history

The IPCC also has tried to rewrite climate history by erasing the existence of the so-called Holocene Thermal Maximum (or Holocene Climate
Optimum), a warm period between 10,000 and 6000 years ago, and has introduced a new hockey stick graph, which is the result of cherry-picked proxies. The IPCC ignores temperature reconstructions that show more variability in the past, such as the well-documented Little Ice Age.

In its recent report, the IPCC also has grossly exaggerated sea level rise and CO2’s ability to warm the earth’s atmosphere and thus appears to have remained ‘addicted’ to its highest emissions scenario, so-called RCP8.5, which in recent years has been shown by several published papers to be implausible and thus should not be used for policy purposes.

Severely biased 

“We are sorry to conclude that the IPCC has done a poor job of assessing the scientific literature,” the Clintel scientists report. “In our view the IPCC should be reformed, and should include a broader range of views. Inviting scientists with different views, such as Roger Pielke Jr and Ross McKitrick, to participate more actively in the process is a necessary first step.”

If the inclusion of other views does not permitted, then the IPCC should be dismantled, the scientists say.

Reality: Future is far less bleak

“Our own conclusions about climate – based on the same underlying literature – are far less bleak. Due to increasing wealth and advancing technology, humanity is largely immune to climate change and can easily cope with it. Global warming is far less dangerous to humanity
than the IPCC tells us.”

Clintel also published the World Climate Declaration, which has now been signed by more than 1500 scientists and experts. Its central message is “there is no climate emergency”.

Clintel press release here.

Donate - choose an amount
5101520501002505001000

DIPLOMACY: Biden says he visited Northern Ireland ‘to make sure the Brits didn’t screw around.’

According to the transcript, Biden told party supporters at a private New York residence that he had visited Belfast “to make sure they weren’t — the Brits didn’t screw around and Northern Ireland didn’t walk away from their commitments.”

Those words drew predictable fire from the Democratic Unionists, the main pro-British party in Northern Ireland. The DUP has spent the past year blocking the revival of a cross-community government with the Irish republican Sinn Féin party in protest against trade rules that make it easier for Northern Ireland to trade with the Republic of Ireland, an EU member, than with the rest of the U.K. Power-sharing between British unionists and Irish nationalists was the central objective of the Good Friday deal.

“It’s unbelievable and frightening to think this man is the leader of the free world,” said Sammy Wilson, who criticized Biden’s remarks as both hostile to unionists and politically incoherent. “If you believe that there should be a special relationship between the U.S. and U.K., then at least show us some respect.”

Even the leader of Northern Ireland’s middle-ground Alliance Party, Naomi Long, was taken aback when told of Biden’s remarks.

Thanks goodness Biden is restoring confidence for the U.S. among our traditional allies.

Bear Grylls has said he is "embarrassed" by his past support of veganism, which he now says is bad for you and that his health has been transformed by only eating red meat, in the latest blow for the woke fad.

The post “Veganism is Bad for You and I’m Embarrassed I Promoted it – Now I Only Eat Red Meat,” Says Bear Grylls appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

The international press has maintained near-total silence on the escalating insanity of what is happening in Germany. Media outlets that routinely celebrate German progress towards energy transition don’t want you to know that Europe’s dominant industrial power has entered a deeply destructive political and administrative spiral from which it may never recover. The fault lies with the self-defeating and unworkable energy policies that have a death grip not merely on the Scholz government, but on the entire administrative state. Since completing the nuclear phase-out in the midst of an ongoing energy crisis and avoiding winter catastrophe thanks only to the accident of mild weather, our rulers are now forcing devastating changes to the so-called Gebäudeenergiegesetz, or the Building Energy Act, which regulates energy consumption in residential and commercial structures.

That sounds bland and boring, but it’s not. This latest turning of the screws aims to phase out traditional gas and oil heating, by mandating that all new heating systems installed after 2024 use no less than 65% renewable energy. In most cases, this can only be achieved by installing electric-powered heat pumps. Particularly in the case of many older buildings, the associated renovation costs will prove catastrophic, and unless they’re drastically revised, the rules will simply upset the housing market and destroy a great deal of personal wealth. Nor does the grid have any hope of powering these new heat sources, now or in the future.

In the midst of growing alarm and the seeming futility of all opposition, even some German establishment media have begun to voice unease. Today, Der Spiegel (of all magazines) published a lengthy piece on the origins, funding and rise to power of the “Eco Network” currently controlling German energy policy, and I want to discuss it in detail, because it is so revealing about so many things. It pulls together many separate threads, to show how policy behemoths originate and are set in motion in modern managerial states, and how they can remain impervious and even contrary to popular opinion even in allegedly democratic systems.

The Spiegel reporting takes a close look at the careers of several key characters behind the energy transition, among them the Green politician Rainer Baake, and Robert Habeck’s scandal-riddled right-hand man Patrick Graichen, who is the policy brains driving most of the current insanity.

The rise of the environmentalists in the Ministry of Economics began a full decade ago. For a long time, the view was that the state should impose as few rules as possible on the corporate sector … According to this logic, environmentalism and economic policy were seen as nearly mutually exclusive. It was not until 2013 that the dominance of free-market civil servants began to crumble.

At this time, Sigmar Gabriel of the SPD became Minister of Economics, and appointed an unusual state-secretary for energy1: Rainer Baake … The move was a surprise, because Baake is not a Social Democrat, but a Green. … As State Secretary in the Ministry of the Environment … Baake helped orchestrate the first legislation on Germany's nuclear phase-out. …

In 2012, Baake founded Agora Energiewende, probably the most influential think-tank advocating a carbon-neutral society in German politics. Patrick Graichen was at that time already Baake’s protegé. …

As the old-guard industry-friendly civil servants in the German bureaucracy began to retire, Baake filled their posts with Green technocrats wherever possible, such that when control of the Ministry passed to the centre-right CDU in 2018, the damage was done. The institutional momentum had already shifted towards climate change and begun to gather strength under its own power. The catchword for Baake’s political vision was the so-called “All Electric World,” one in which a grid powered entirely by renewables drives cars (electrical vehicles), heats buildings (heat pumps) and even powers industry (though here the solutions are much vaguer).

During his five-year tenure as state secretary, Baake appointed Graichen to head the Agora think-tank, which began churning out policy papers, sponsoring Green scientific research, and gathering an ever-growing crowd of loyal advocates and technocrats. This paid off:

Whenever energy and climate were discussed in Berlin [in the years after Baake’s resignation from the Ministry of Economics in 2018], Graichen’s name came up, often peddling unwieldy terms that only experts understand. The “merit order principle”, for example, or the “locked-in effect”. The red-haired man with the sonorous voice knew his way around this specialist world like no other. …

The ability appears to have come naturally to him. His mother worked in the Ministry of Development, his father for a while in the Ministry of Transport. He himself became involved in environmental issues as a schoolboy, initially in the youth organisation of BUND. In 1993, he began studying at the University of Heidelberg. In 1996, he joined the Green Party. In 2001, he became a consultant for international climate protection … and helped draft the Kyoto Protocol.

Graichen is straight from the German political establishment, and his was the first generation that saw significant Green penetration in the years around the turn of the millennium. We are witnessing the fruition of long-term environmentalist activism, stretching back to the 1970s.

In 2020, Baake … founded the Climate Neutrality Foundation (Stiftung Klimaneutralität) and began producing studies on the energy transition. In their papers, Baake and Graichen touch on almost every climate issue. They talk about the restructuring of industry, the expansion of wind power, and the heating transition.

Their work was financed in the background by two men: Bernhard Lorentz, who as head of the Mercator Foundation helped to bring the Agora think-tank to life. And Hal Harvey, an American lobbyist who has funded environmentalist and climate organisations around the world for almost three decades, helped among other things by the philanthropic billions of families like the Hewletts.

This is not the first time we’ve found unlikely American activists and philanthropists behind European – and specifically German – climate activism. Spiegel explains, ominously, that “Harvey sees Europe as the key to preparing a climate-neutral future” and that this reason “he directs millions … to support the likes of Baake and Graichen.” This man, who hardly appears in Anglophone media and doesn’t even have an English-language Wikipedia page, has been christened by Die Zeit as “the most powerful Green politician in the world.”

Harvey relies particularly upon think tanks to develop policy and warehouse political candidates when they’re out of power, and his immensely well-funded lobbying efforts can easily overwhelm the political discourse in smaller countries, which is probably one reason he’s so interested in Europe.

German think tanks such as Agora … or the Climate Neutrality Foundation … recruit researchers with the millions donated by their sponsors and steadily build expert influence. They shape the way politics and society think about environmental and climate protection – and fill their studies with legal proposals which include their favoured solutions. …

The influence of the Green support organisations is undisputed. They have given the party a great knowledge advantage in matters of climate protection. And with this knowledge, the party’s attractiveness as a problem-solver for one of the greatest crises of our time grew. … Other parties have neglected this area for a long time.

“Knowledge” is of course the wrong term to use here. “Policy prescriptions” is much better, and if Der Spiegel weren’t so addled by their own ideological preconceptions, they could write about this more clearly. It’s a three-step process. 1) Activists and regime-approved scientists identify and make noise about looming problems, and then 2) think tanks write pages and pages of legislative and regulatory solutions for them. All of this happens largely out of sight, until 3) politicians respond to the demand stirred up the activist arm, and having no real expertise or understanding of anything themselves, they have no choice but to enact the proposals that people like Graichen feed them.

Here, then, is the explanation for Robert Habeck’s stubborn idiocy since last Fall. As soon as the Greens entered government, he made Graichen his state secretary for energy, and it is Graichen and the army of technocrats he commands who have been behind every political disaster since. The farcical response to the energy crisis, where these people were actually forced to work contrary to their principles and buy enormous quantities of coal (from Russia no less); the botched but nevertheless completed nuclear phase-out; and, finally, the catastrophic changes to the Building Energy Act, which will immiserate millions of Germans and do absolutely nothing to change the temperature of Earth.

Graichen’s failures have made him many enemies, which is one reason he’s currently mired in a nepotism scandal. Yet all the negative headlines are powerless to change any of the insanity that is coming for us, for the simple reason that there are no other policies to implement and no other scientific or technocratic solution to turn to. Graichen and his wealthy backers have spent ten years filling all the political and intellectual pipelines with their preferred problems and their preferred solutions.

This is how you realise an agenda from the top down, and it is a key point on which Corona can be differentiated from the climate change farce. Over many years, the climate brigade have worked to fill academia and the bureaucracy with their ideas and their supporters. They took advantage of generational change and retirements to position their people, and they waited for an election to bring the right politicians to power and complete the circuit. The pandemicists of course followed the same path, but their mild mostly self-serving solutions were abandoned at the last moment in favour of much harsher, vastly more dangerous mass containment measures. The zeal for the novel response originated not with philanthropic lunatics and think-tanks over decades, but from within the bureaucracy itself. This lent the Corona coup much more power in the moment, but without any broader institutional or ideological support, the worst aspects of the virus suppression regime crumbled just as quickly and are now quietly repudiated everywhere.

The Green fanatics never had that level of insane messianic enthusiasm, but for the same reason, they’re going to prove much, much harder to drive out.

THE MAOIST MOUSE: Disney Reneges on Meeting with Uyghur Genocide Victims, Lawmakers Say.

A group of Uyghurs, their families, and advocates reached out to Disney to discuss the company’s friendly relationship with Beijing and its decision to shoot a film in the province where the CCP is oppressing the country’s Muslim minority. But while Disney initially agreed to meet, the company “suddenly cut off the correspondence” and have since “evaded meeting with victims of the Uyghur genocide,” according to a Tuesday letter from the lawmakers to Disney CEO Robert Iger, a copy of which was obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The letter comes as Congress steps up investigations into American companies’ willingness to cooperate with China. The House Select Committee on China is investigating Nike and Adidas for their reliance on Chinese slave labor, the Free Beacon reported. The letter is also the latest political dustup for Disney, which has been locked in an ongoing battle with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R.). 

Human rights groups attempted to schedule the aborted meeting on behalf of the Uyghur victims in order to discuss Disney’s live-action Mulan. The film was shot in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, ground-zero for the CCP’s mass human rights crimes against the Muslim ethnic minority.

Or as America’s Newspaper of Record put it in 2020: Disney Editing Blunder: This Uighur Concentration Camp Can Be Clearly Seen In The Background Of Mulan.

THAT’S THE GOAL: New EPA climate rules drive a stake thru the heart of natural gas & coal power plants.

LEAKED: Emails Show Biden State Department Sought to Protect China During Spy-Balloon Fiasco. “In other words, instead of punishing China for its insanely provocative violation of US airspace and sovereignty, Blinken had his lackeys pause major human rights and trade measures. That included already planned actions to sanction Chinese tech companies like Huawei and to combat China’s genocide of the Uyghurs.”

THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX says it will launch first commercial space station by mid-2025.

THIS IS FROM LAST WEEK, but I wanted to share these thoughts from a longtime space-community friend (who doesn’t work for SpaceX).

I was surprised at how far the first Starship test got. I was then utterly shocked at how tough the thing is. It is by far the sturdiest rocket, let alone spaceship, ever built. It blew up some engines. It kept going. It lost its hydraulic system and steering. It kept going. It spun (think of the Statue of Liberty at 39km altitude). but did not break up like every other rocket in human history would have. Then they blew explosive charges and put *holes* in the fuel tanks. It did not break up.

Finally it spun down into some thicker air and finally exceeded its design limits.
I do not think the media folks (who are exceedingly ignorant when it comes to engineering and probably cannot define the word ‘test’ let alone understand what it means) have a clue of how utterly, gobsmackingly incredible this test was.

I simply would not have believed you if you had told me a rocket could go through that list of insults and remain intact. Impossible! And yet… si move!

I look forward with anticipation to the next flight, and that may come sooner than I’d believed possible if I weren’t watching how fast the cleanup of the pad and infrastructure is moving at Boca Chica.

The only thing that might slow it is a bunch of backwards looking environuts who want to live in the Paleolithic rather than in a world where humanity is a space-faring species spread far and wide across the universe.

Too many of those, I’m afraid.

GONE GALT: After 20 Years as a Prosecutor in Illinois, I Quit.

Let me start with the positive. There is not a single day that has gone by that I have not felt truly honored to work with such an incredible group of people who spent every waking hour on behalf of victims. This opportunity has been a gift for which I have no words to explain the extent of my gratitude.

My partners, our Victim/Witness advocates, our Investigators, our support staff, the police officers and detectives, time after time I see each of you putting everything you have into helping people we encounter on the worst days of their lives. So often I see our personal lives, and indeed at times our own well-being, set aside just to do a little bit more on that last case for that last victim. It’s been nothing short of inspiring not as a lawyer, but as a person.

And yet, I’m leaving. Why could that be? The simple fact is that this State and County have set themselves on a course to disaster. And the worst part is that the agency for whom I work has backed literally every policy change that had the predictable, and predicted, outcome of more crime and more people getting hurt.

Read the whole thing.

Global food supplies face collapse if the use of nitrogen fertiliser is restricted under Net Zero requirements. Yet even the alarmists' models show nitrogen oxides make a negligible contribution to global warming.

The post Entire Global Food Supply at Risk From Disastrous Response to So-Called ‘Nitrogen Crisis’ appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

NASA data show no planetary warming over the past decade. Are we heading for cooling? 

Twitter account Zacki here tweeted on the northern and southern hemisphere sea land land surface temperature trend over the past decade, using NASA GISS data.

First lets begin with the northern hemisphere for the past 9 years:

There’s been no general rise in temperature, despite all the claims of a planet that is allegedly rapidly heating.

Next we look at the southern hemisphere:

What a surprise! Global warming isn’t global any more. As the chart shows, the southern hemisphere has in fact cooled over the recent years.

NASA may have to change the chart heading to: “Global cooling: monthly temperature anomaly”

Donate - choose an amount
5101520501002505001000

PERSONNEL IS POLICY: Biden Taps Economist Who Bemoaned Gas Prices ‘Too Damn Low.’

Making the lives of ordinary people worse isn’t collateral damage, it’s a goal.

DISPATCHES FROM THE MOST TRANSPARENT ADMINISTRATION IN HISTORY: As Hunter’s possible indictment looms, White House press office reportedly bars New York Post from Biden event today.

Sounds familiar… https://t.co/rtEaEldBNn pic.twitter.com/7tIy8UhzxU

— UnWokable (@UnWokablePod) May 8, 2023

WATCH: Sen. Kennedy Lights up Biden Energy Official With Question We’d All Like an Answer to on Climate Agenda.

[Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA)] was questioning Biden Deputy Energy Secretary David Turk. He was asking the questions that you should ask about budgeting, spending, and the Biden team’s nonsensical climate agenda.

“If we spend $50 trillion to become carbon neutral in the United States by 2050,” Kennedy asked, “Give me your estimate of how much that is going to reduce world temperatures.” Great question — what are we going to get if the Biden team spends all of that money from us, the American taxpayers, this way? What’s going to be the result?

Turk, of course, couldn’t answer the question. He looks like it never even occurred to him that that should be a question to which he should have an answer. But that’s the problem of the Biden administration, and the Democrats, right there. Because ultimately, that’s not how they think, and I don’t think they care. I think it’s about the money and the control the regulations give them. The “crisis” is secondary. They think the money is never ending—and they never have to justify what they’re doing with it.

Here’s the clip:

“If we spend $50 TRILLION on Global Warming how much will it reduce the world’s temperature?”

Avoids the question. pic.twitter.com/5ZJdA00ktI

— T (@Rifleman4WVU) May 3, 2023

MATT TAIBBI ON THE “FOREIGN/DOMESTIC SWITCHEROO:”

It’s the basic rhetorical trick of the censorship age: raise a fuss about a foreign threat, using it as a battering ram to get everyone from congress to the tech companies to submit to increased regulation and surveillance. Then, slowly, adjust your aim to domestic targets. You can see the subtlety: the original Stanford piece tries to stick to railing against “disinformation” and information from “foreign adversaries,” but the later paper circulated by Aspen slips in, ever so slightly, a new category of dubious source: “foreign or other adversarial entities.”

These rhetorical devices are essential. It would be preposterous to form (as Stanford did) an “Information Warfare Working Group” if readers knew the “war” being contemplated was against domestic voices. It would likewise seem outrageous to suggest, as Stanford did, that journalists respond to a domestic threat by taking a step as drastic as eliminating intra-title competition, and “forming partnerships with other organizations to pool resources.” But if you start by focusing on Russians and only later mention as an afterthought “other adversarial entities,” you can frame things however you want, from espionage to warfare. As reader O’Neill correctly pointed out, “they are now getting close to being explicit about the fact that their motivation for suppressing news is to fight domestic political adversaries.”

To be fair, it always was.

BREAKING: Kim Gardner Has Resigned.

Earlier on Thursday, we wrote about St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner seeking a motion to dismiss the an attempt to remove her from office. The process began on February 23 when the Missouri Attorney General’s office filed the quo warranto—which as my colleague Susie Moore explained, stemmed from “serious allegations of malfeasance on the part of her office”—after a request that Gardner resign immediately.

Then in late April, a St. Louis judge lowered the boom on Gardner, writing that her office was a “rudderless ship of chaos”:

[St. Louis Circuit Judge Michael Noble]….held that there was sufficient evidence to find that Gardner and Assistant Circuit Attorney Chris Desilets had acted with “intentional disregard for the judicial process” and announced that he would be appointing a special prosecutor to pursue a case of “indirect criminal contempt” against them both.

Garner’s filing failed on Thursday, however. But now, she has resigned.

As Tom Cotton wrote in 2021: Recall, Remove and Replace Every Last Soros Prosecutor.

This wide-ranging interview of The Spectator (UK) with Peter Boghossian[*] is really worth seeing:

Winston speaks to former Portland State University professor turned international philosopher, Peter Boghossian. Peter was a prominent new atheist author and expert on the Socratic method when he resigned his position at Portland over the percolation of ‘woke’ ideology into the university. In his resignation letter he described how the institution had become a ‘dogma factory’ which had ‘weaponized diversity, equity and inclusion’. Peter and Winston discuss progressive domination of the Academy, how woke spreads, DEI vs free speech, how to have constructive conversations and whether the new atheists led to woke culture.

I am comparatively insulated from the garbage he’s discussing, as even leftist academics at my institution view wokeism with a jaundiced eye. (My favorite was the hard-leftie who claimed wokeness is a capitalist plot to distract the underclass from the class struggle. I’m not sure he’s 100% wrong.) Still, one of the reasons this garbage could infect academia in the first place is a broader malaise as academia has ‘gained the whole world but lost its soul’ — in secular terms, has forgotten what it’s all about. To quote one of my colleagues, “higher education has become the largest Ponzi scheme in history”.

Mare later perhaps, as work calls…

[separator]

ADDENDUM Near the 39-minute mark, an amusing linguistic insight by Boghossian I must highlight: woke ideology relies on words (such as ‘inclusion’) having two meanings, the plain meaning everyone uses, and the ‘woke’ meaning. It’s a linguistic version of ‘motte and bailey’: The bailey is the woke meaning, the motte is the (plain) meaning everybody else attaches to the word.

(Image from BigThink)

When one translates wokespeak into a foreign language, only the plain meaning translates. So the wokesters abroad are reduced to using the English terms as loanwords.

[*] According to Ancestry.com, the somewhat droll surname “Boghossian” or “Boghosian” derives from Bolos, the Armenian counterpart of Paul.

DUKE STUDENTS FEAR HEARING CONTRARY VIEWS, BEG GROWNUPS FOR PROTECTION: A group of students at Duke University released an open plea insisting that a professor with whom they disagreed be disinvited from a law school event.

Send them home to their parents and tell them not to come back until they are mature enough to attend college.

TRYING TO WHISTLE UP A DANGEROUS MOB: TNR: SCOTUS is Lawless: Help Us Track These Dangerous Fascists. “As Ed said the other day when posting about Justice Alito speaking out on the Dobbs leak, this is all part of a spiraling cycle of political and physical intimidation of the court. Justice Alito believes it has marked them all as targets for assassination. The Left will knowingly pooh-pooh such notions, but then they also wiped the memory clean of one of their storm troops with the rifle looking for Justice Kavanaugh – like with a cloth.”

Related:

Unanimous … meaning Justices appointed by both Republicans AND Democrats. https://t.co/ZJ7stFhvyp

— Bex (@BexStreams) April 30, 2023

Also:

It’s almost as though left wing activist groups are feeding left wing media disinformation about the justices in a concerted campaign to undermine the credibility of one of the few institutions the left does not now control. https://t.co/wRuBDp24Oq

— Randy Barnett (@RandyEBarnett) May 2, 2023

Who are the billionaires who are funding this disinformation campaign with “dark money”? Maybe a reporter should look into this.

— Randy Barnett (@RandyEBarnett) May 2, 2023

In criticizing these stories, we need to start naming the reporters — and, ideally, the editors — involved.

Plus: Conservative Supreme Court justice hit pieces: We are being lectured on ethics by scoundrels.

SMOOTH:

"Does President Biden have any reaction to CIA Director William Burns meeting with Jeffrey Epstein in 2014?"

KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: "I'm just not gonna comment on that from here" pic.twitter.com/dd1pv8WOZP

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) May 2, 2023

HMM: Huge Development Means IRS Whistleblower Can Soon Explode Biden Family Scandals.

As explained above, while Section 6103 authorized the whistleblower to share confidential taxpayer information with two specific committees, he or she could not give that information to Lytle or any other attorney. Section 6103(f)(4), however, provides an important workaround by allowing the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and Finance Committee to “designate or appoint” an “agent” to inspect the tax returns and return information.

In other words, the committees could appoint the whistleblower’s attorneys as their “agents,” which would allow the whistleblower to discuss freely and fully the tax information with his lawyers. In turn, the whistleblower’s lawyers could brief the committees on those details, albeit in a closed session, which is precisely what Lytle suggested when he wrote that “with the appropriate legal protections and in the appropriate setting,” he would “provide a more detailed proffer of the testimony my client could provide to Congress.”

Thus, that last week the Ways and Means Committee authorized two of the whistleblower’s attorneys to inspect the tax material is huge: It sidestepped a protracted battle over the circumstances under which the whistleblower would testify. It also ensures the House committee can learn, on an expedited basis, the whistleblower’s accusations.

Faster, please.

FASTER, PLEASE: A sedan-sized microreactor could change billions of lives on Earth.

Earth’s only natural satellite, the moon, is 4.5 billion years old and roughly 240,000 miles away. The practical application for a microreactor on the moon may seem distant and the need hard to grasp, but Alaska presents an easier vision of pragmatic deployment of this technology.

“When we turn on the light switch in our homes, it turns on right away, right? So it is not the same for the remainder of the world,” said Yasir Arafat, a nuclear scientist who is project lead over MARVEL. “The demand for electricity and water is growing and it is very large compared to what we see in the United States. So how do we solve this? And everybody has different answers, but the answer I would like to provide is that it can be 24/7 reliable carbon-free electricity on demand, regardless of geographic location.”

That includes the United States’ own Alaska, where tiny hamlets have their own challenges.

I’d gladly host one in my backyard. Please, I’m begging you.

Here's your daily reminder that you don't actually own property if the government can seize it for not paying property tax:

OUR COLLUSIVE PRESS: Biden Cheat Sheet Shows He Knew What Topic Reporter Would Ask Him About.

DEADBEAT DAD: Hunter Biden Ordered to Appear in Court in Paternity Case.

WHY THE SILENCE ON BIDEN’S IMMIGRANT CHILD LABOR SCANDAL? The Daily Gouge points to Jim Geraghty’s analysis of the New York Times’ expose and explains the ensuing silence:

“This should have been, and should be, an epic year-defining scandal. Americans have intense disagreements about illegal immigration and what should be done in the situations of unaccompanied minors who cross the border. But no one with a lick of sense, an ounce of compassion, or an iota of respect for the law would contend that exploiting those poor kids in dangerous workplaces is the right answer.

“Any way you slice it, this outcome is just about the worst — much worse than a system that catches migrant teenagers and puts them on flights or other transportation, returning them to family members in their home countries. In fact, the Times found some evidence that the Biden administration punished lower-ranking government officials who noticed and attempted to call out the problem …

“… this is one of those stories that doesn’t provide any easy angle to blame Republicans. This widespread exploitation of teenagers is the result of the policies and decision-making of a Democratic administration. And I think news stories that don’t offer a ‘blame Republicans’ angle bore a lot of people who need the dopamine rush of knowing that all problems in this world can be traced back to Donald Trump, or Ron DeSantis, or Kevin McCarthy, or Mitch McConnell.”

The Daily Gouge has more to say on this issue and more, so keep scrolling.