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Guest essay by Eric Worrall h/t JoNova; Aussie Federal MP Keith Pitt has urged the coal rich Queensland State Government to disconnect from the national grid, to stop demand from states which make “poor decisions” from driving up electricity prices when their renewable systems fail to deliver. Imagine if states like California were cut off…

"A picture is worth a thousand words" is one of the dumbest aphorisms ever coined. Speaking as a former television producer, I'd say a picture takes a thousand words to explain. Take this much-circulated NASA satellite photo showing vast smoke plumes over the Amazon region:

Combined with a report from the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research that says the agency had detected 39,194 fires in the region, a 77 percent jump up from the same period in 2018, that picture has launched alarmed headlines around the world.

"Amazon rainforest is burning at an unprecedented rate," declares CNN. The Daily Beast gives us "Record Number of Wildfires Burning in Amazon Rainforest." Here's NBC News: "Amazon wildfires could be 'game over' for climate change fight."

Interestingly, when NASA released the satellite image on August 21, it noted that "it is not unusual to see fires in Brazil at this time of year due to high temperatures and low humidity. Time will tell if this year is a record breaking or just within normal limits."

So why are there so many fires? "Natural fires in the Amazon are rare, and the majority of these fires were set by farmers preparing Amazon-adjacent farmland for next year's crops and pasture," soberly explains The New York Times. "Much of the land that is burning was not old-growth rain forest, but land that had already been cleared of trees and set for agricultural use."

It is routine for farmers and ranchers in tropical areas burn their fields to control pests and weeds and to encourage new growth in pastures.

What about deforestation trends?  Since the right-wing nationalist Jair Bolsonaro became Brazil's president, rainforest deforestation rates have increased a bit, but they are still way below their earlier highs:

Various researchers have noted a U-shaped relation between environmental degradation and economic growth. As development takes off, levels of pollution and land degradation rise, but they begin to improve once certain thresholds of per capita incomes are attained. A 2012 study found, after parsing data from 52 developing countries between 1972 and 2003, that deforestation increases until average income levels reach about $3,100 per capita. As it happens, Brazilian per capita incomes reached $3,600 per capita in 2004,which is when deforestation rates began trending decisively downward.

While problematic deforestation is still taking place in the Amazon region, a 2018 study in Nature reported that the global tree canopy cover had increased by 865,000 square miles from 1982 to 2016. As Brazilians become wealthier, the deforestation trend in the Amazon will likely turn around toward afforestation, as it already has done many other countries.

* As it happens, this post is only about 430 words.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Stop Sharing Those Viral Photos of the Amazon Burning, says…Mother Jones, astonishingly enough.

Earlier: Don’t Panic: Amazon Burning Is Mostly Farms, Not Forests.

SOCIALISM MAKES A LOT OF THINGS (AND PEOPLE) DISAPPEAR: ‘Monopoly: Socialism’ Game Disappears From Target’s Website.

IT’S ALMOST AS IF HE HAS SOMETHING TO HIDE: Michael Mann Refuses to Produce Data, Loses Case.

TO BE FAIR, SOCIALISTS ARE NEVER HAPPY: Hasbro Has a New ‘Monopoly: Socialism’ Game and Socialists Are Not Happy.

DEAR LORD. THE THINGS THESE PEOPLE BELIEVE:  Spiders are getting ANGRIER because of evolutionary trick to survive ‘climate chaos’.

WHEN YOU UNDERSTAND THAT SNOPES IS JUST A DEMOCRATIC PARTY MESSAGE-CONTROL TOOL, IT ALL MAKES SENSE: A ‘Fact Checker’ Declares War On Satire: When we make fun of liberals, Snopes pretends to take us seriously and labels our jokes ‘false.’

If your job is to make people laugh, what do you do when your brand of humor is classified as dangerous?

I run the Babylon Bee, a satirical website, and we’ve had to face that question a lot lately. The “fact checkers” at Snopes.com—once a reliable source for distinguishing reality from urban legends—have been smearing the Bee as “fake news.” They don’t seem to have a problem when we make fun of Trump-worship, conservatives, fundamentalism and megachurches. But when we target Democrats and the left, suddenly we’re branded liars.

The most recent controversy began when Snopes published a thorough “debunking” of our satirical take on Georgia state Rep. Erica Thomas ’s false claim that a white man in a supermarket told her to “go back to where you came from.” Our humorous headline: “Georgia Lawmaker Claims Chick-fil-A Employee Told Her to Go Back to Her Country, Later Clarifies He Actually Said ‘My Pleasure.’ ”

Snopes knew this was a joke but questioned our “brand” of satire. The website called us “junk news” and a “ruse.” It accused us of intentionally “muddying the details” of a current event to “fool” people. . . .

This ugly dispute has demonstrated the danger of assigning authority to supposedly unbiased fact-checkers. They have the power to slap a joke they don’t like with a “false” rating and defame the authors as purveyors of lies and fakery. Last year Facebook threatened to forbid us to collect money from ads, and even to boot us entirely, after Snopes “fact checked” a piece of ours headlined “CNN Purchases Industrial Washing Machine to Spin the News.”

The Left understands and employs the power of mockery. And it wants to keep that power to itself.

HONG KONG CRISIS CONTINUES: Demonstrators confront Beijing’s disinformation campaign –including fake tweets. Remember, all the demonstrators ask is that Beijing honor the Sino-British Declaration of 1984 which guaranteed a distinct system of rule until 2047.

BREAKING NEWS: Check out Michael Yon’s website for his video updates. He posted his latest video today, a report on the civil unrest at Yuen Long train station.

RELATED: A recent StrategyPage.com podcast which analyzes the Hong Kong demonstrations and provides background on the crisis.

SNAPSHOT FROM 2008: The aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk anchors in Victoria Harbor, preparing for a port call in Hong Kong. Good photo — it caught the city in in the background.

HMM: U.K. Government ‘Extremely Concerned’ by Reports of China Detaining Hong Kong Consulate Employee.

PLUS: Crew Describe Climate of Fear at Cathay After Hong Kong Sackings.

Cathay, founded by an American and an Australian during British rule in 1946, was caught in the middle of the crisis 11 days ago, when China demanded it suspend staff involved in the protest movement.

The firm agreed, firing two pilots, but has since been plunged into turmoil after CEO Rupert Hogg was replaced last week.

Another pilot, Jeremy Tam, who is also a pro-democracy lawmaker, said on Tuesday that he and others had quit the airline as the internal political pressure was intolerable.

“That (China’s aviation regulator) has reached into Hong Kong and directly pressured a local airline is undoubtedly ‘white terror’,” he wrote on his Facebook page, using a popular Hong Kong expression used to describe anonymous acts that create a climate of fear.

“There have been resignations from frontline staff to the company’s CEO because of this political trial.”

The airline confirmed Tam was no longer an employee and said it could not comment on internal staff matters. China’s aviation regulator has not responded to Reuters’ requests for comment.

It looks like Beijing is trying to make examples of a few, trying to scare the rest of Hong Kong back into line. But the protests — already more than four months old — are probably too big for that.

Beijing can’t cave to Hong Kong without risking increased dissent on the mainland, but can’t pull off another blacked-out Tiananmen massacre because a few million smartphones would record the carnage.

It’s a helluva fix they’re in, and it couldn’t be happening to a nicer bunch of thugs.

MICHAEL YON EMAILS FROM HONG KONG:

Yesterday’s protest was massive. I have not even slept yet. Estimated 1.7m people. Crowds are notoriously difficult to estimate, but I will confirm it was absolutely massive, stretching for miles in pouring rain. Massive.

Hong Kong is China’s brain tumor. Do nothing…tumor grows. Operate…the procedure could kill the communist party.

This is very serious, Gentlemen. Do not underestimate what is happening here.

I won’t.

HEADLINE OF THE DAY: Moose crashes pool party, steals taco. Be glad he only took the taco. Moose bites can be pretti nasti.

SINGLE PAYER, SINGLE DECIDER: Canadian Health Care Refused to Pay for Disabled Father’s Care, but Happily Paid for His Assisted Suicide.

I am perfectly willing to believe that some school districts somewhere have spending too low to ever provide the education we expect in 2019.  But after sending my kids to a private school that did a fabulous job with kids and whose tuition was lower per student than the spending in most public schools, I have become suspicious of pleas for more and more money.  It seems that lack of money is ALWAYS the claimed problem at public schools.

In fact, I am increasingly convinced the problem is not lack of money but how the money is spent.  As the percentage of staff in most public schools who are administrators rather than teachers climbs over 50%, many public schools are doing exactly what every other government bureaucracy does -- starve spending for actual public services in favor of feeding a growing, increasingly well-paid administrative staff.

Here is this week's example.  Via Zero Hedge:

The Baltimore Teachers Union (BTU) has set up a donation page on their website to raise money and supply classrooms with fans this school year because of 60 Baltimore City School (BCS) buildings don't have air conditioning.

"It's no secret that Baltimore's students have had to weather the spectrum of extreme temperatures in their classrooms. We've all seen the photos of kindergarteners sitting in their coats and mittens at their morning circle. The reverse is true when school is back in session at the end of summer, when schools' internal temperatures have been measured at over 100 degrees. The Baltimore Teachers Union knows that educators' working conditions are students' learning conditions," BTU said on the donation page under the title "Donate to the BTU Fan Drive."

You see this all the time -- teachers begging the public for donations to help them through shortages of basic school supplies.  The blame is always put on public funding -- obviously Baltimore public schools are starved for cash and forced to beg for simple infrastructure items like fans.  But wait:

Of the 100 largest school systems based on enrollment in the United States, the five school systems with the highest spending per pupil in 2017 were New York City School District in New York ($25,199), Boston City Schools in Massachusetts ($22,292), Baltimore City Schools in Maryland ($16,184), Montgomery County School District in Maryland ($16,109), and Howard County School District in Maryland ($15,921). Maryland had one additional school system in the top 10, making it four of the top 10 school systems in the United States.

In the public recreation field, I call this borrowing from the infrastructure.  Infrastructure maintenance and spending is starved in favor of richer deals for growing administrative staffs.  That is why most major parks agencies have billions of dollars in deferred maintenance.  Transit agencies apparently do the same thing.

 

Kevin Drum published this map on his blog, which he says was originally from the Washington Post.  He does not include a link so I can't give any more background on the chart.  For example, I have no idea which surface temperature data set it is based on.

The fact that smart guy like Kevin Drum can publish this uncritically just demonstrates how little even vociferous global warming advocates actually understand about the issue.  Because all this chart does is reinforce a skeptic argument that the global surface temperature data set is corrupted and can exaggerate warming trend data.

Let's start with this:  I have read much of the IPCC reports and have skimmed the rest, and I can say with certainty that these reports contain no theory about how increasing the concentration of atmospheric CO2 from 0.03% to 0.04% causes warming of 2C or more focused in hotspots as small as a 50 mile radius.  There is absolutely no theory, and I would argue no way, that a general global warming trend of 1-1.5C per century is causing warming 2-3 times that rate narrowly over San Jose, California or Phoenix, AZ.

The fact that many of these hotspots are focused over urban areas is a good indicator that this temperature data set is corrupted with urban heat island biases.  This is a different kind of man-made effect but one which is local and is not the result of a global warming trend, and thus should not be in a database aimed at measuring this global warming trend.

Something like 10 years ago I saw a similar chart online based on USHCN measurement stations.  At that time, the chart showed a hotspot over Tucson

At the time, Anthony Watt was running his Surface Stations project to document the conditions of all the USHCN temperature stations (the crosses on the map) that formed the basis of the US global warming / temperature trend numbers.  So I drove down to Tucson to see the temperature station in the middle of that hotspot.  What I found was that the temperature station that 100 years ago was in a rural open field was now measuring the temperature of an asphalt parking lot in the middle of a large city:

As an aside, this was a fun project as I still see this picture reproduced in random places from time to time.  After this picture got some publicity, the government shut this station down and moved it to a better location.

But the point is that the hotspot on the temperature change map was both real and fake.  Real in the sense that Tucson was definitely hotter due to the change in land use, as are most all cities (just watch the weather in a city and they will often say that it will be a low of 45 in the city, and 40 in the outlying areas).  My son and I measured the urban heat island in Phoenix for a high school science project.  We found it to be as high as a 6-8F difference between city and the surrounding countryside at certain times of day.

But the hotspot was fake because this had nothing to do with global warming from CO2, and thus including this hotspot in the temperature data was exaggerating the global warming trend.  This is especially true since there are only a few data points, so this reading for Phoenix was averaged into the reading all over the Southwest and tended to raise the official temperatures for much of Arizona, not just in Tucson.  Where temperature stations are sparse, such as in northeast Montana, a single bad surface temperature station can corrupt the data for a large area.  This effect is even further exaggerated in places like Africa, where temperature stations can be hundreds of kilometers apart.

This is one reason satellite temperature measurement makes so much sense, as it is not subject to these sorts of biases (though it has other issues, including sensor drift and the fact that satellites can shift orbits and eventually die).  Whenever you see high temperature records today, they are usually set in the city at the airport, a big paved facility in the center of an urban area that 50 years ago was probably an open field.  There is a good chance the record has more to do with urbanization around the temperature measurement station than with global warming.

I believe the scientific community at NOAA and GISS have been almost criminally negligent with the surface temperature network over the last 30 years.  In the late 80's, when we became concerned with global warming, experts knew all to well about vast problems in how we measure surface temperatures.  We have invested tens of billions of dollars to fight global warming, but practically zero to measure it better.  We should have invested in a better, more reliable, less biased (in the scientific not political sense of that word) measurement system.  The amount of money we wasted in Solyndra would have paid for the upgrades, but we still have done nothing.  As a result, much of the warming signal is actually manual corrections to the raw data, undermining the signal to noise ratio of this critical metric and calling into question the bias (in the political not scientific sense) of these manual corrections (eg here and here).  For example, it turns out the past continues to cool.

Postscript Bonus:

The Danish Meteorological Institute, which has a key role in monitoring Greenland’s climate, last week reported a shocking August temperature of between 2.7C and 4.7C at the Summit weather station, which is located 3,202m above sea level at the the centre of the Greenland ice sheet, generating a spate of global headlines.

But on Wednesday it posted a tweet saying that a closer look had shown that monitoring equipment had been giving erroneous results.

“Was there record-level warmth on the inland ice on Friday?” it said. “No! A quality check has confirmed out suspicion that the measurement was too high.”

 

BRIAN CATES: “If you’ve followed SpyGate from the beginning – and I have – then you know that it came out months ago via anonymous sources in news reports that all of Hillary Clinton’s St. Dept. emails were being automatically copied & sent to a Chinese-related email account. So what changed today? Documentation was released that verifies these anonymously sourced prior news accounts.”

I TRY TO BE OPTIMISTIC BUT THEN I READ THIS: Lawrence M. Ludlow returned to teaching high school after a 35 year absence and found … well, the title of his piece in The American Thinker says it all – “Worse Than Ever: Government Schools After 35 Years.”

PETER THIEL: ‘Globalist’ Google Is In Bed With Chinese Military; Must Be Investigated By FBI and CIA.

THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise.

Leah Libresco is a statistician and former newswriter at FiveThirtyEight, a data journalism site. She is the author of “Arriving at Amen.”

Before I started researching gun deaths, gun-control policy used to frustrate me. I wished the National Rifle Association would stop blocking common-sense gun-control reforms such as banning assault weapons, restricting silencers, shrinking magazine sizes and all the other measures that could make guns less deadly.

Then, my colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States, and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way. We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence. The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns.

I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn’t prove much about what America’s policy should be. Neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun related-crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans. Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress. And in both Australia and Britain, the gun restrictions had an ambiguous effect on other gun-related crimes or deaths.

When I looked at the other oft-praised policies, I found out that no gunowner walks into the store to buy an “assault weapon.” It’s an invented classification that includes any semi-automatic that has two or more features, such as a bayonet mount, arocket-propelled grenade-launcher mount, a folding stock or a pistol grip. But guns are modular, and any hobbyist can easily add these features at home, just as if they were snapping together Legos.

As for silencers — they deserve that name only in movies, where they reduce gunfire to a soft puick puick. In real life, silencers limit hearing damage for shooters but don’t make gunfire dangerously quiet. An AR-15 with a silencer is about as loud as a jackhammer. Magazine limits were a little more promising, but a practiced shooter could still change magazines so fast as to make the limit meaningless.

The thing to understand is that gun control isn’t about saving lives. It’s about humiliating the deplorables and keeping them in their place. It’s culture war of the crassest kind.

So I just got a 24 hour ban from Facebook for Violating Community Standards, because I insulted the imaginary people of an imaginary country.  Which is kinda hilarious.

Long version. About a year ago an author friend of mine was putting up snippets of his alternative history story, in which the fictional country (Neu Saxony) experienced a terrorist attack.  One guy thought it was real, and a whole bunch of us ended up having fun arguing on behalf of our made up countries about who was really responsible.  It was pretty funny.

I ,of course, came to the aid of noble Krasnovia, a nation of peaceful sandwich makers, who were being falsely accused of these heinous crimes.  (We were obviously framed)

So a year later the memory reminder thing on FB is bringing this back up. Another friend of mine created this post:

Remember your brothers killed by Krasnovians. #OnlyGoodKrasnovianIsADeadKrasnovian

Now let me share with you the silliness which ensued, which resulted in my terrible violation of community standards.

• Eudyptes Diabolicus: the media never warns people about the krasnovian menace. I think they’ve been corrupted
• Jarrad E Truog: Eudyptes Diabolicus collusion
• Larry Correia: I am disgusted by your Krasnoviphobia.
• Jarrad E Truog: Larry Correia look man you weren’t there when the Horde cut down my men
• Eudyptes Diabolicus:  It’s not a phobia. It’s rational caution
• Larry Correia: Krasnovians are a proud people, known for their fine sandwiches, and genocide, but mostly the sandwiches.
• Cathe Smith:  If only they could approach the genocide with the same careful attention to detail that they approach sandwich making.
• Jarrade E Truog:  Larry Correia I didn’t think we had a Krasnovian Apologist here.
• Larry Correia:  I’m a member KAIR. Krasnovian American I something Relations.
• Jarrad E Truog:  I knew it.
• Cathe Smith: Krasnovian American Interfellowship Relations
• Jarrad E Truog:  The Neu Saxony princess was murdered by Krasnovian Separatists #NeuSaxonyStrong
• Larry Correia: That’s a conspiracy theory! There were Krasnovian immigrant members of the brave Uhlans lost that terrible day.
• Eudyptes Diabolicus: suicide assassins don’t get to be counted as “lost”
• CJ Hyatt: As a card carrying Mojavian, Krasnovia can ETADIK.
• Jarrad E Truog: LOL
• Harman Meyerhoff: Free Nogovia!
• Larry Correia: It’s sad, just because you invade a country and genocide a bunch of Pinelandians one time, everybody forgets about all the wonderful things Krasnovians have given to the world… like the waffle maker, or… uh… well, several different AK-47 variants.
• Jarrad E Truog:  I mean they are Communists so are they really people?
• Cathe Smith: Admittedly, the use of a waffle maker in perpetuating a genocide was a new spin on things.
• Larry Correia: Indeed, those Pinelandian dogs never saw that coming! HA HA! Oh, wait… err… I mean, that was a tragic misunderstanding over a border incident, in which the peaceful Krasnovians were unjustly attacked.

• Eudyptes Diabolicus: Just because those pinelandian scum are scum doesn’t excuse krasnovian aggression
• Cathe Smith: The Pinelandians aggressively planted Pinelandian pine trees on Krasnovian soil.
• Larry Correia: It wasn’t aggression. It was self defense! Our column of T-80s were just minding their own business when set upon by savage Pinelandian villagers.
• Jarrad E Truog: Were they minding their own business in Pinelandia?

And my comment which got deleted for violating community standards…

• Larry Correia: It was a “disputed” area, originally settled by peaceful Krasnovian sandwich makers, and then invaded and occupied by filthy Pinelandian goat rapists.

 

##

So there you go. I’m banned from Facebook for 24 hours. Rest easy everyone, Mark Zuckerberg is on the case! Facebook will not tolerate satirical posts about a bunch of genocidal sandwich makers saying cruel things about people from an imaginary country.

I will admit, when I saw the ban window pop up for my cruel attack on Pinelandians, it was the best laugh I’ve had in a while.

REMEMBER, THIS IS HOW SINCERE DEMOCRATS ARE ABOUT LIMITING “GUN VIOLENCE:” Democrats reject push to alert ICE when illegal immigrants fail firearm background checks.

BRITISH LAW ENFORCEMENT PRIORITIES: Police warn people mocking convicted drug dealer’s hairstyle they could be prosecuted.

THIS REALLY DOESN’T FIT THE NARRATIVE. Capitalism is Saving the Planet: Minnesota Forests Are Flourishing.

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 281 of David Friedman’s excellent 1996 book, Hidden Order:

The U.S. government does not exist; there is no benevolent elderly gentleman watching over us. What we call “government action” is not the act of a person but the outcome of a political marketplace. In that market as in others, rational individuals act to pursue their own ends – under a set of rules rather different from the rules governing the private market.

DBx: Quite so.

Those who wish to turn ever-more decision-making power over to government – and, hence, to take such power from individuals operating in their private spheres (including, but not limited to, private markets) – believe this bizarre notion: when Jones has the power to spend Smith’s money and to order Smith about, Smith’s welfare is improved compared to when the power to spend Smith’s money and to determine how Smith will act is reserved to Smith, with Jones’s authority confined to his – Jones’s – own business.

In private-property markets each individual has the power to say “no,” and when each individual says “yes,” that individual spends only his or her own money. Also, in private-property markets each individual’s choices are significant: if Smith chooses to buy a new car, Smith gets the new car that he chooses; if Smith chooses not to buy a new car, Smith gets no new car.

These basic features of private-property markets, along with a handful of other features that are embodied in the common law, ensure not that markets operate “perfectly,” but that the market process is always in action to generally improve the operation and outcomes of markets.

The political marketplace is nearly the exact opposite. In the political marketplace, Jones spends Smith’s money, and Smith has no real power to say no. Nor is Smith’s choices ever genuinely significant (unless, of course, Smith becomes one of the relatively small percentage of people who succeed in grabbing hold of political power).

If a malevolent all-powerful being were intent on designing a market that is destined to abuse the vast bulk of people, that devil could do no better than to impose on his victims majoritarian politics largely unconstrained by constitutional rules. This devil – being, of course, ill-mannered, and evilly-intentioned – would seek to destroy private-property markets.

SOCIALISM MEANS CARING: Let fat people die to save NHS money, says Michael Buerk.

MICHAEL YON: “Tonight I talked for about an hour with a ‘Google Snowden’ who will soon go public. A deep insider. Fascinating stuff. I cannot say much now other than pay attention to what is coming out starting in a week or so from now. Source said many interesting things about how Chinese are flooding into tech companies like Google, and some of the incredible techniques they can use to brainwash or at least mislead millions of people.”

I suppose we’ll wind up nationalizing Google, for national security reasons.

DANA LOESCH: Why Red Flag Laws Are Not A Good Solution To Mass Shootings.

The murderers in Parkland, Florida and Dayton, Ohio, are two recent examples. These two monsters were walking red flags with access to firearms and yet, with all of the laws available to adjudicate them ineligible to carry or purchase guns, they continued unabated until the unthinkable. They weren’t stopped.

In fact, the Parkland murderer was coddled by a school district that pretended a refusal to report crime (thereby suppressing their criminal statistics) was the same thing as reducing crime, and they received federal dollars for it. That murderer’s violent behavior (beating his adoptive mother, sending death threats to fellow students, and putting a gun to another person’s head, to list a few offenses) was so well known, teachers had a backup plan in case he decided to become threatening, and he was searched every morning after arriving at school.

We didn’t need red flag laws to get either of these individuals before they committed their crimes. According to numerous local reports, had the previous Broward County sheriff performed his duties, case number 18-1958 would not have been able to legally purchase the rifle he used to carry out his evil. From everything reported on the Dayton murderer, it seems barring him from legal purchase or possession of firearms by adjudicating him mentally unfit was entirely possible.

The point of red flag laws isn’t to protect the innocent, but to cast suspicion on anyone exercising their Second Amendment rights.