It’s Wednesday, June 7th, 2023…and 79 years ago yesterday, thanks largely to the courage of Americans who are today a breed of increasing rarity indeed, the forces of actual Fascism had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day:
Thus was Patton given the opportunity to…
And now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, if ever you needed confirmation we live under a two-tiered system of injustice, consider this item, then ask yourself…
Deja Taylor, the Virginia mom of a 6-year-old boy accused of shooting his elementary school teacher back in January, is now facing federal drug and gun charges. Court documents filed Monday say Taylor bought a firearm from a gun shop in Grafton, Virginia in late July 2022 while “knowing that she was an unlawful user of a controlled substance.”
…how has Hunter Biden, whose abandoned laptop offers conclusive evidence he too purchased a firearm knowing he was an unlawful user of a controlled substance, not been similarly indicted?!? Boys and girls, can you say “corruption at the highest levels of government”? We KNEW you could!
Next, the Morning Jolt examines the curious case of…
“As the 2024 presidential cycle was taking shape, a handful of influential voices in the news media concluded that the key weakness of Ron DeSantis — and thus, the single most important measuring stick of the Florida governor for the duration of his presidential campaign — is that he has an allegedly glaring charisma deficit.
Mark Leibovich, The Atlantic magazine, November 30, 2022: “Just Wait Until You Get to Know Ron DeSantis. People who haven’t met him think he’s a hot commodity. People who have met him aren’t so sure.”
Jonathan Martin, Politico, January 17, 2023: “The GOP’s great hope to defeat Trump is hot on Fox but cold on the stump and in the VIP line.”
Michael Bender, the New York Times, March 10, 2023: “[DeSantis’] preference for policy over personality can make him seem awkward and arrogant or otherwise astonishing in person, depending on the voter and the success or failure of his one-on-one exchanges.”
Paul Waldman, the Washington Post, March 14, 2023: “DeSantis is so lacking in charisma that winning the presidency would be exceedingly difficult.”
For a lot of people in the mainstream media, a charisma deficit is the perfect candidate weakness to argue about because it is subjective and difficult to measure with any precision. For almost everything else a campaign and its staff do or attempt, there are numbers we can measure: What’s their level of support in the polls? How much money did they raise? How many donors do they have? How many campaign stops did the candidate make? Roughly how many people showed up? How much are they spending to air that campaign ad? How big is the television market? How many campaign offices, staffers, and volunteers do they have? How many doors have they knocked on? How many phone calls and texts have they made?
But a candidate’s charisma? That can’t be quantified or precisely measured. You can watch how the candidate does when interacting with groups and argue whether the attendees were enthralled or merely pleased. (I notice that more than a thousand people came to see DeSantis at a breakfast stop last week in Bluffton, S.C.) You can sit around and debate how he looks in photos, as Slate and Matt Lewis did. But you can’t go out and prove, through data, that a candidate was 12 percent more charismatic on Wednesday than he was on Monday.
And when DeSantis did a campaign stop in Iowa this past weekend, almost everything was covered through the lens of, “Is he being charismatic enough?”
Politico: “DeSantis — who has faced quite a bit of criticism for his aloofness — is out here doing retail politics, and he seems to be improving at it. ‘That’s an oldie but a goodie,’ DeSantis says as he signs a bumper sticker from his 2018 gubernatorial campaign.”
Bloomberg: “DeSantis, faced with pressure to improve his retail politics, worked crowds at U.S. Senator Joni Ernst’s Roast and Ride on Saturday — he stopped for ice cream with his children at a stand his super PAC set up in the parking lot at the Des Moines event, signed the side of his team’s touring bus and posed for pictures.”
The Financial Times: “DeSantis is also trying to convey a more human side to his candidacy. Critics have accused him of being too socially awkward and not investing enough in the ‘shaking hands and kissing babies’ side of retail politics that voters in early primary states crave.”
If DeSantis were the boring black hole of personality that these columnists describe, you’d figure that at some point it might have impeded his rise to where he is now. Apparently, he’s the kind of uncharismatic guy who becomes captain of the Yale baseball team, advances through the ranks to lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy, marries the attractive local-news anchor, and wins a seven-way GOP House primary in a rout. This alleged charisma deficit hasn’t stopped DeSantis from rising to the Florida governor’s mansion, winning reelection by 20 points, and starting in second place in the GOP presidential primary.
Does DeSantis strike some people as boring or stiff? Sure. Does DeSantis strike lots of people as boring or stiff enough to impede them from supporting him or voting for him? So far, no.
It feels fair to ask whether certain media voices are using “He lacks charisma” as a synonym for, “He doesn’t appeal to me, a person who has disliked him and opposed him from the first moment I heard of him.” A lot, if not quite all, of the people who are most eager to tell you about DeSantis’s crippling lack of charisma were never going to vote for him in the first place…
…The final version of the charisma argument is that somehow DeSantis is failing to, or is going to fail to, charm donors. You can find deep-pocketed GOP donors who have come away underwhelmed by DeSantis. Billionaire John Catsimatidis recently complained that DeSantis didn’t even return his phone call. (I suspect those with a ten-figure net worth are used to being treated extremely well, moving through the world in a constant bubble of obsequiousness.)
Isn’t that an indicator that a whole lot of Republicans are watching DeSantis and concluding, “Eh, he’s charismatic enough”?”
Two thoughts immediately come to mind: (i) Our Spidey Sense starts tingling every time we read or hear the MSM all parroting the same anti-Conservative talking points; and, (ii) we should note DeSantis won the seven-way GOP House primary sans any assistance from anyone named Trump who repeatedly evaded the Vietnam draft.
“Stop with all the existential-crisis talk. President Biden said, “Climate change is literally an existential threat to our nation and to the world.” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin also talks about the “existential threat” of climate change. National security adviser Jake Sullivan identifies an “accelerating climate crisis” as one reason for a “new consensus” for government picking winners and losers in the economy. Be wary of those touting consensus.
But what if the entire premise is wrong? What if the Earth is self-healing? Before you hurl the “climate denier” invective at me, let’s think this through. Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years—living organisms for 3.7 billion. Surely, an enlightened engineer might think, the planet’s creator built in a mechanism to regulate heat, or we wouldn’t still be here to worry about it.
The theory of climate change is that excess carbon dioxide and methane trap the sun’s radiation in the atmosphere, and these man-made greenhouse gases reflect more of that heat back to Earth, warming the planet. Pretty simple. Eventually, we reach a tipping point when positive feedback loops form—less ice to reflect sunlight, warm oceans that can no longer absorb carbon dioxide—and then we fry, existentially. So lose those gas stoves and carbon-spewing Suburbans.
But nothing is simple. What about negative feedback loops? Examples: human sweat and its cooling condensation or our irises dilating or constricting based on the amount of light coming in. Clouds, which can block the sun or trap its radiation, are rarely mentioned in climate talk.
Why? Because clouds are notoriously difficult to model in climate simulations. Steven Koonin, a New York University professor and author of “Unsettled,” tells me that today’s computing power can typically model the Earth’s atmosphere in grids 60 miles on a side. Pretty coarse. So, Mr. Koonin says, “the properties of clouds in climate models are often adjusted or ‘tuned’ to match observations.” Tuned!
Last month the coddling modelers at the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization stated that “warming El Niño” and “human-induced climate change” mean there is a “66% likelihood that annual average global temperatures will exceed the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by 2027.” Notice that El Niño is mentioned first.
Richard Lindzen, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lead author of an early Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, told me, “Temperatures in the tropics remain relatively constant compared with changes in the tropics-to-pole temperatures. The tropics-polar difference is about 40 degrees Celsius today but was 20 degrees during the warm Eocene Epoch and 60 degrees during Ice Ages.” This difference has more to do with changes in the Earth’s rotation, like wobbling, than anything else. According to Mr. Lindzen, this effect is some 70 times as great as human-made greenhouse gases.
OK, back to clouds. Cumulus clouds, the puffy ones often called thunderclouds, are an important convection element, carrying heat from the Earth’s surface to the upper atmosphere. Above them are high-altitude cirrus clouds, which can reflect heat back toward the surface. A 2001 Lindzen paper, however, suggests that high-level cirrus clouds in the tropics dissipate as temperatures rise. These thinning cirrus clouds allow more heat to escape. It’s called the Iris Effect, like a temperature-controlled vent opener for an actual greenhouse so you don’t (existentially) fry your plants. Yes, Earth has a safety valve.
Mr. Lindzen says, “This more than offsets the effect of greenhouse gases.” As you can imagine, theories debunking the climate consensus are met with rebuttals and more papers. Often, Mr. Lindzen points out, critics, “to maintain the warming narrative, adjust their models, especially coverage and reflection or albedo of clouds in the tropics.” More tuning.
A 2021 paper co-authored by Mr. Lindzen shows strong support for an Iris Effect. Maybe Earth really was built by an engineer (Only the GOAT…and before AND after time, for that matter!). Proof? None other than astronomer Carl Sagan described the Faint Young Sun Paradox that, 2.5 billion years ago, the sun’s energy was 30% less, but Earth’s climate was basically the same as today. Cirrus clouds likely formed to trap heat—a closed Iris and a negative feedback loop at work.
In a 2015 Nature Geoscience paper, Thorsten Mauritsen and Bjorn Stephen at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology reran climate models using the Iris Effect and found them better at modeling historic observations. No need for tuning. Wouldn’t it be nice if the U.N. used realistic cloud and climate models?
Earth has warmed, but I’m convinced negative feedback loops will save us. Dismissing the Iris Effect or detuning it isn’t science. Sadly, climate science has morphed into climate rhetoric. And note, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen explained in April that green spending “is, at its core, about turning the climate crisis into an economic opportunity.” Hmmm. “Catastrophic,” “existential” and “crisis” are cloudy thinking. Negative feedback is welcome.”
As is almost always the case when someone or some group acts contrary to what they surely know to be the truth, just follow the money. Think transgenderism and abortion, and Progressives’ seemingly insatiable desire to maim and slaughter the young and unborn.
Moving on, here’s an octet of items sure to pique the interest of inquiring Conservative minds:
(1). Since we’re on the subject of following the money, Andy McCarthy offers a primer on…
(8). We’d feel sorry for the young lady getting a zero for using the term “biological women”…if she didn’t get it in a class entitled Women’s Gender Studies in Pop Culture. As far as we’re concerned, anyone wasting their parents money taking such a useless course deserves a failing grade to better prepare them for what’s coming their way in life.
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s these direct from The Patriot Post…
…along with a couple forwarded by Andy Meyers:
Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with the Khan Memorial Revenge is a Dish Best Served Cold segment, as Townhall.com‘s Spencer Brown informs us the…
House Freedom Caucus Gets Its Revenge for Debt Deal
“There was a clash between Republican members of the House of Representatives on Tuesday afternoon as members of the House Freedom Caucus torpedoed a rule vote on the floor of the lower chamber, reportedly the first time such a procedural tactic had been used in years.
The vote was on the rule for H.R.463, House Republicans’ bill to prohibit the use of Federal funds to ban gas stoves, and it failed 206-220 with 12 members of the House GOP Conference voting against the rule: Reps. Andy Biggs (AZ), Dan Bishop (NC), Lauren Boebert (CO), Ken Buck (CO), Tim Burchett (TN), Eli Crane (AZ), Matt Gaetz (FL), Bob Good (VA), Ralph Norman (SC), Matt Rosendale (MT), Chip Roy (TX). House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) also voted against the rule in order to preserve his ability to bring the rule back to the floor for a vote at a later time.
The move to block the House from moving forward with consideration of the Republican bill was done as an act of protest against GOP leadership, launched by the 11 lawmakers to register their disapproval of the way the deal to avert a debt default was handled…”
Here’s the juice: We could be wrong, but if we read Chip Roy & Co. correctly, Kevin McCarthy just sampled merely the appetizer from the bill of fare the House Freedom Caucus plans on serving him.
Magoo
Video of the Day
John Stossel reveals yet another dirty, little secret about Socialism, the sophistry of its adherents to the contrary notwithstanding.
Tales of The Darkside
Konstantin Kisin explains why its proponents won’t entertain a debate on transgenderism while extolling the virtues of the greatest country in the history of the planet.
On the Lighter Side
Dave Rubin nails it: this IS complete and utter INSANITY!!!
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