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Source; From a friend online......
Psychometric intelligence research has its origins in the later 19th century. Simplifying ruthlessly, it was noticed that students who did well on certain intellectual tasks – specifically, tests – tended to do well on all of them. Conversely, students who were very bad at one test tended to do poorly on all of them. This was not expected; in the athletic sphere, for example, we do not generally assume that good boxers will also be good marathoners.
More specific research showed that the results of certain kinds of tests were more closely correlated with each other than the results of other kinds of tests. Tests which require their takers to memorize a span of digits and manipulate shapes in their mind will generate similar results for the same students, while other tests which (for example) ask them to recall sports trivia will yield more varied results. Statistically, there seems to be a general intelligence factor which explains the cross-test variation; conceptually, there is within the human brain a corresponding general cognitive capacity, which drives these correlated results. People who do well on cognitive tests tend to have other interesting traits as well, most markedly faster reaction times and much broader vocabulary, than people who do poorly on them. They also tend to accumulate in different professions, have different lifestyles, and other things. Measuring intelligence via testing is not, in other words, a mere circular exercise in identifying people who test well. Loosely speaking, intelligence is something like the processing capacity of the human brain, and it varies substantially across individuals.
Some object that intelligence is a false construct of psychological research and is in some sense not real. A lot of objections to intelligence research are rooted in unscientific left-wing concerns about social justice. Others stem from a general skepticism that truly intelligent people are actually a thing, because it is hard to conceive of what is going on in the heads of people who are much, much smarter than we are. Here, it helps to consider the other end of the spectrum. There are people – many of them – whom we recognize as just not being very smart. In modern society, this segment of the population is most visible because of their problems with literacy. The limited intellectual capacity of these people is expressed in many ways, including their employment prospects, their life choices and their social status. The much greater intellectual capacity of people on the other end of the spectrum is the opposite phenomenon, though the options of such people are much less constrained. The IQ 160 person can choose to be a day laborer or a university professor, whereas for the IQ 75 person, university professor isn’t really an option. Higher IQ is thus rather weakly predictive of professional status at the individual level, but the professions themselves have a fairly clear IQ stratification, some professions are more cognitively demanding than others.
Also, to a point, higher intelligence correlates with very well with better overall health. Our brains are simply part of our bodies, and those with healthy, well-functioning brains are more likely to have healthy, well-functioning bodies.
Intelligence, like general health, is also substantially heritable; smart people tend to have smart children. The mechanisms, however, appear to be very complicated. Some extremely intelligent people have parents of merely middling intelligence. In these cases, high IQ results from fortuitous gene combinations; its correlation with overall health will be much lower, and the children of these people are unlikely to be nearly as intelligent as them.
So, because IQ is relatively easy to measure and has been studied for a long time with well-replicated results, it’s a very useful metric, but it is also often overemphasized. We are speaking here of one psychological trait among many. The so-called “big 5” personality traits also matter for human behavior and achievement. These are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism and agreeableness. And of course, a wide range of non-psychological factors have their own role to play, including things like social background, education and physical appearance. What makes things even more complicated, are the various ways intelligence itself correlates positively or negatively with all of these other things.
“Evidence for measurable intelligence is overwhelming...It is disheartening that there are so many incorrect beliefs about intelligence. I cannot think of another topic in psychology that is the subject of so many widespread misconceptions.”—Russell T. Warne
“We presently live in an age of profound unreason, in which we are increasingly compelled to believe and accept, even celebrate, patent absurdities, evidence or reason to be damn.”— J. Scott Turner
wokism is built upon an ideological certitude about the origins of inequality. The whole ideology stands or falls on this empirical claim. Therefore, the greatest taboo in woke society is to consider alternative explanations for inequality, particularly those that implicate natural differences in the distribution of traits among racial groups.
Disinformation about innate group differences gets in the way of constructing sound social policy. Specific policies based on premises that conflict with scientific truths about human nature tend not to work, often doing harm. One such premise is that the distribution of innate abilities is the same across different groups, that there are no innate differences among groups. That assumption is blatantly wrong.
So often when the outcomes that policies are supposed to produce fail to occur, the fault for the discrepancy has been erroneously assigned instead to society which assumes that more programs, money, regulations or court decisions can make the differences go away. That assumption is also blatantly wrong. Some group differences are intractable and government policies can only tweak the difference a little. Let’s focus on 2 sorts of differences: those between men and women and those between blacks and whites.
Observable truths:
I. Variation within groups is greater than the variation between groups. Psychological and cognitive dimensions of both sexes and all races fall everywhere along the range. Intelligence does not come in one color or sex, and neither does any other human ability. Alas, intelligence may be less like cholesterol levels and more like height, which can be altered society-wide over long stretches of time by changes, but very little by a single individual whose genes were set in place of birth. One can still improve one’s life, sometimes substantially, through well-chosen, self-directed choices and changes in behavior. But no matter how much one might desire, there are limitations. By not acknowledging how crucial intelligence is in economic and social spheres, we do a great deal of harm to those with lower levels of intelligence. Denialism does nothing to make society fairer, freer, more prosperous or more egalitarian.
II. On specific human attributes, it is possible to specify a continuum running from "low" to "high," but not a score running from "bad" to "good." that lend themselves to simple comparisons. And all of us use a weighting system that favors our group's strengths.
Further comments will be limited to the arts and sciences.
Women have a small part in the history of the arts and sciences. Even in the 20th century, women got only 2% of the Nobel Prizes in science and 10% in literature. The Fields Medal in mathematics has been earned by only men. Male dominance of the greatest achievements in science and the arts is fact. The question is whether sex-specific characteristics are at work.
Mathematics offers an answer. Through high school, girls earn better grades in math than boys, but boys do better on standardized tests. The difference is modest, but the male advantage continues to increase, exponentially, as the focus shifts from means to extremes. Evolutionary biologists explain that men have developed elevated 3-dimensional visuospatial skills and women an elevated ability to remember objects and their relative locations--differences that show up in tests. Men consistently exhibit higher variance than women on characteristics including visuospatial abilities, meaning that there are proportionally more men than women at both ends of the bell curve. Another answer is that someone with a high verbal IQ can easily master algebra, geometry and calculus in an ordinary math test. Elevated visuospatial skills are most useful for difficult items. If males have an advantage in answering those comparatively few really hard items, the increasing disparity at the extremes becomes explicable. Yet most psychometricians conclude that men and women have the same mean IQ. But, even after adjusting for body size, men have larger brains than women. Magnetic-resonance imaging has revealed parts of the brain's parietal cortex associated with space perception are proportionally bigger in men than in women.
This pattern demonstrates what should be obvious: there is nothing inherent in being a woman that precludes high math ability. But there remains a distributional difference in male and female characteristics that leads to a larger number of men with high visuospatial skills. The difference is evolutionary, physiological and historical. Male advantage is most pronounced in abstract items and in abstract domains of accomplishment. For example, in the abstract field of philosophy, no woman has been a significant original thinker in any of the world's great philosophies. In the abstract field of mathematics the number of great female mathematicians numbers two. In the other sciences, the contributions of great women have usually been empirical rather than theoretical.
In the arts, literature is the least abstract and the most rooted in human interaction; visual art and musical composition are the most abstract. Women have been represented among great writers virtually from the beginning. Women are represented less in visual artists or composing. Social restrictions undoubtedly come into play, but the pattern of accomplishment is strikingly consistent with the respective strengths of male and female cognitive repertoires. Another aspect of male-female differences that bears on accomplishment is motherhood. The experience of parenthood is more profoundly life-altering for women. Extensive empirical study has demonstrated that women are more attracted to children, respond more intensely emotionally and get more and different kinds of satisfactions from nurturing them. These behavioral differences have been linked with biochemical differences between men and women.
Thus, for biochemistry and neurophysiology reasons of being female, many women with the cognitive skills for achievement also have something else they want to do in life: motherhood. In the arts and sciences, 40 is the mean age at which peak accomplishment occurs, preceded by years of mastering the discipline, precisely the years during which most women bear children. Among women who have become mothers, the possibilities for accomplishment shrink because, for innate reasons, the distractions of parenthood are greater. My point is that accomplishment at the extremes commonly comes from a single-minded focus that leaves no room for anything but the task at hand.
A study of 2,000 people who were identified as extraordinarily talented in math at age 13 and were followed up 20 years later. The women came of age in the 1970s and 1980s, when women were actively socialized to resist gender stereotypes. By their early 30s, both the men and women had become exceptional achievers, receiving advanced degrees in roughly equal proportions. Only about 15% of the women were full-time housewives. Among the women, those who did and those who did not have children were equally satisfied with their careers. Yet women with careers were 4.5 times as likely as men to say they preferred to work less than 40 hours a week. Men placed greater importance on "being successful in my work" and "inventing or creating that will have an impact," while the women found greater value in "having strong friendships," "living close to parents and relatives" and "having a meaningful spiritual life.” Both constructed satisfying and meaningful lives that took different forms. The different forms, which directly influence the likelihood of achievement, are consistent with differences between men and women that have biological roots.
Why do men and women differ at the highest levels of accomplishment: Men take more risks, are more competitive and are more aggressive than women. Studies document the hormonal basis of personality differences that bear on sex differences in extreme and venturesome effort, and hence in extremes of accomplishment. Just one more of the ways in which science is demonstrating that men and women are really and truly different, a fact so obvious that only intellectuals could ever have thought otherwise.
Turning to race, Harvard geneticist richard lewontin originated the idea of race as a social construct. In his words: "racial classification is of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance." If correct, then statistical analysis of genetic markers would not produce clusters corresponding to common racial labels. It’s been tested and lewontin was wrong. Analyses confirm the genetic reality of group identities going under the label of race or ethnicity. All but 5 of the 3,636 subjects fell into the cluster of genetic markers corresponding to their self-identified ethnic group. When a statistical procedure, blind to physical characteristics and working exclusively with genetic information, classifies 99.9% of the individuals in a large sample in the same way they classify themselves, it is hard to argue that race is imaginary.
Of all the intractable differences identified, one is a hot button like no other: the IQ difference between blacks and whites. Yet there is no technical dispute on the core issues. Yet there is an enduring and substantial IQ difference between black and white and Asian populations in the US, a controversial finding that has nevertheless what stood various criticism over many years. There is not a definite answer as to why this is so and the failure to understand this disparity has social and economic consequences. Harvard's Fryer and the University of Chicago's Levitt comprehensive study of black and white children over the first 4 years of school found that blacks lose substantial ground relative to other races per school year. By the end of 3rd grade there is a large black white test score gap that cannot be explained by observable characteristics. Family wealth is unlikely to have changed much over the 4 years of this study so this can hardly explain as the effect.
The American Psychological Association published on this matter in 1996. Cultural bias in IQ tests does not explain the difference; and the tests are equally predictive of educational, social and economic outcomes for blacks and whites. Such assertions are fact within the scientific community. The size of the black-white difference since the 1970’s has: (1) On educational achievement tests has narrowed significantly. (2) On convergence in scores on the most highly "g-loaded" tests--the tests that are the best measures of cognitive ability--has been smaller, and may be unchanged, since the first tests were administered 100 years ago.
Regarding the difference in educational achievement, on the SAT gaps in the verbal and math tests in 1972 were 1.24 and 1.26 standard deviations respectively. They’ve dropped by 0.37 and 0.35 standard deviation. The results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress are similar. For ages 9, 13 and 17, the black-white differences in math of the NAEP test in 1973 were 1.03, 1.29 and 1.24 standard deviations respectively. 9-year-olds’ difference hit 0.73 standard deviation in 2004. But almost all of that convergence had been reached by 1986, when the gap was 0.78 standard deviation. 13-year-olds’ gap dropped by 0.45 standard deviation in 1986. 17-year-olds’dropped by 0.52 standard deviation in 1990. In the reading test, the comparable gaps for ages 9, 13 and 17 as of the NAEP test in 1971 were 1.12, 1.17 and 1.25 standard deviations. Those gaps had shrunk by 0.38, 0.62 and 0.68 standard deviation respectively in 1988. They have since remained unchanged.
Larry Hedges and Amy Nowell examined trends for high-school seniors by comparing 6 large data bases from 1965 to 1992. The black-white difference on a combined measure of math, vocabulary and reading fell from 1.18 to 0.82 standard deviation in that time, a reduction of 0.36. So black and white academic achievement converged significantly through the 1980s and since then has stayed the same. Further, the IQ difference of about one standard deviation is effectively unchanged since the first black-white comparisons 100 years ago. The case for an unchanged black-white IQ difference is straightforward. From WWI to the present, there is no statistically significant change, remaining about 1.0 to 1.1 standard deviations. The Armed Forces Qualification Test, a statistically relevant measure, confirms a black-white difference of 0.97 standard deviation. The substantial convergence that had occurred in academic tests has at best been minimally reflected in IQ scores, and at worst not reflected at all.
In academic achievement or IQ are the causes of the black-white difference environmental or genetic? Surely environment plays a part but, is biology also involved? Why should cognitive ability be the sole heritable trait that is immune from racial differentiation?(1). Obvious environmental factors such as income, parental occupation and schools explain only part of the absolute black-white difference and none of the relative difference. All races of students from affluent neighborhoods are separated by as large a proportional gap as are those from poor neighborhoods. However, some claim environmental causes work with cultural explanations instead of socioeconomic status to cause a phenomenon labeled the "stereotype threat” as defined by Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson. It’s thought by some, erroneously, that the stereotype threat explains the black-white difference. Reality shows only that it increases the usual black-white difference. If one eliminates stereotype threat, the usual difference remains.
From a theoretical standpoint, cultural explanations offer ways of looking at the black-white difference when socioeconomic explanations reach a dead end. From a practical standpoint, however, the cultural explanation points to a cause of the black-white difference that is as impervious to manipulation by social policy as causes rooted in biology. If there is to be a rapid improvement, some form of mass movement with powerful behavioral consequences would have to occur within the black community. Absent that, gradual cultural change can only be effective after decades of effort.
Comprehensive evidence for the above appeared in the journal Psychology, Public Policy and Law. An article titled Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability by Rushton and Jensen based their conclusion on 10 categories of evidence that are consistent with a model in which both environment and genes cause 50% to 80% of the black-white difference. What percentage of the IQ difference is genetic? A methodology is now available. In the United States, few people classified as black are actually 100% African descent (the average American black is about 20% white). To the extent that genes play a role, IQ will vary by racial admixture. Using genetic markers allow for taking a large sample of racially diverse people, give them a good IQ test, and then using genetic markers to create a variable that no longer classifies people as "white" or "black," but along a continuum. Analyzing the variation in IQ scores according to that continuum would be close to dispositive. Much of the evidence reviewed by Rushton and Jensen bears on what we can expect about future changes in the black-white IQ difference.
Comparing black and white mean scores on a battery of subtests does not find a uniform set of differences; nor a random assortment. The size of the difference varies systematically by type of subtest. Some of the largest differences are found on subtests that have little or no cultural content, such as ones based on abstract designs. In 1927, Charles Spearman proposed a hypothesis to explain the pattern. Spearman conjectured that the black-white difference would be greatest on tests that were the purest measures of intelligence, as opposed to tests of knowledge or memory. For example, 2 items in the Wechsler and Stanford-Binet IQ tests are known as "forward digit span" and "backward digit span." The subject's score is the number of digits that he can repeat without error on two consecutive trials. Digits-forward is a straightforward matter of short-term memory. Digits-backward makes your brain work much harder. The black-white difference in digits-backward is about twice as large as the difference in digits-forward. It is a clean example of an effect that resists cultural explanation. It cannot be explained by differential educational attainment, income or any other socioeconomic factor. Parenting style is irrelevant. Reluctance to "act white" is irrelevant. Motivation is irrelevant. There is no way that any of these variables could systematically encourage black performance in digits-forward while depressing it in digits-backward in the same test at the same time with the same examiner in the same setting.
Arthur Jensen tested Spearman's hypothesis. He summarized the results from 17 independent sets of data, derived from 149 psychometric tests. They consistently supported Spearman's hypothesis. Subsequent work on Spearman's original conjecture has confirmed it. No matter how analyzed, a single factor kept dominating the results. It is now established that there is an inheritable component of IQ. A variety of studies have found correlations such as brain-evoked potentials, brain pH levels, brain glucose metabolism, nerve-conduction velocity and reaction time. It has been determined that a highly significant relationship exists with the volume of gray matter in specific areas of the frontal cortex, and that the magnitude of the volume is under tight genetic control. In short, we now know that captures something in the biology of the brain. So, the size of the black-white difference represents a biologically grounded and highly heritable cognitive resource. When those two observations are put together, a number of characteristics of the black-white difference become predictable, correspond with phenomena we have observed in data, and give us reason to think that not much will change.
One implication is that black-white convergence on test scores will be greatest on tests that are least g-loaded. Literacy is an example: People with a wide range of IQs can be taught to read competently, and it is the NAEP reading test in which convergence has reached its closest point. Spearman's hypothesis explains why the convergence that has occurred on academic achievement tests has not been matched on IQ tests, the source of the black-white difference lies in skills that are hardest to change. It points to a valuable underlying mental ability which cannot be coached.
Another implication is that the "Flynn effect" will not close the black-white difference, the increase in IQ scores over time. If IQ scores are so malleable that they can rise steadily for several decades, why should not the black-white difference be malleable as well? The evidence has grown, and now seems persuasive, that the increases in IQ scores do not represent significant increases in g. If the black-white difference is concentrated in g and if the Flynn effect does not consist of increases in g, the Flynn effect will not do much to close the gap. A study by Dutch scholars found "the implications of the Flynn effect for black-white differences appear small."
Taking the black-white IQ difference as a whole, 2 facts beyond much doubt. 1st, the conventional environmental explanation of the black-white difference is inadequate. Poverty, bad schools and racism, which seem such obvious culprits, do not explain it. Insofar as the environment is the cause, it is not the sort of environment we know how to change, and we have tried every practical remedy that anyone has been able to think of. 2nd we are left with an IQ difference that has, at best, narrowed by only a few points over the last century. Nothing in the history of this difference, or in what we have learned about its causes suggests that any faster change is in our future.
Many are living a lie, basing the futures of society on the assumption that all groups of people are equal in all respects, a lie so many who profess to believe it in public do not believe it in private. A lie so many scholars choose to ignore what is already known and choose not to inquire into what they suspect. We enable ourselves to continue to live the lie by establishing a taboo against discussion of group differences. In the public-policy debate, witness the contorted ways in which even the opponents of policies like affirmative action frame their arguments so that no one can accuse them of saying that women are different from men or blacks from whites. Witness the unwillingness of the mainstream media to discuss group differences without assuring that the differences will disappear in a better world. The taboo arises from an admirable idealism about human equality. If it did no harm, there would be no need mention it. But taboos have consequences when people are fearful of exploring them. Consider that organizations are riddled with people who have been promoted to their level of incompetence because of pressure to have a staff with political correctness. Shouldn’t we be worrying about the effects on the quality of their skills and efforts? It would be helpful to know the answers, but we will not so long as the taboo against talking about group difference prevails.
How much damage has the taboo done in education? Christina Hoff Sommers has argued that willed blindness to the different developmental patterns has led many educators to do pervasive damage to the way our elementary and secondary schools are run. James McWhirter, a black Columbia university linguist and New York Times columnist has lamented that affirmative action dehumanizes black students, leaving them “in over their heads nationwide.” Richard Sander in Stuart Taylor found that of the students attending elite law schools 52% of blacks were in the bottom 10th of their class with only 8% in the top half.
Few have been willing to pursue this issue lest they be required to talk about innate group differences. Similar questions can be asked about the damage done to medical care, whose practitioners have only recently begun to acknowledge the ways in which ethnic groups respond differently to certain drugs. How much damage has the taboo done to our understanding of America's social problems? The part played by racism in creating different outcomes in black and white poverty, crime and illegitimacy is not the raw disparity we observe but, what remains after controlling for group characteristics. For some outcomes, sex or race differences nearly disappear after a proper analysis is done. For others, a large residual difference remains. In either case, open discussion of group differences would give us a better grasp on where to look for causes and solutions.
The taboo has crippled our ability to explore the ways in which groups respond to the world--which means almost every political, social or economic topic of any complexity. Shouldn’t we be honest and start talking about group differences openly? About the nature of different virtues? About differences between cultures? About differences between political ideologies? Even listing the topics of an inquiry into the nature of group differences is stifled today. A truly open and free society would puncture that irrational fear of differences, which will favor all groups in some measure, and none of which is large enough to frighten anyone who looks at them dispassionately. For every implication one might seize upon, another gives fodder to the other. Talking about group differences obligates all of us to renew our commitment to what Jefferson had in mind as a self-evident truth that all men are created equal. Steven Pinker put that ideal more succinctly saying: "equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group."
Many educational outcomes are tractable even if group differences remain unchanged. Dropout rates, literacy, numeracy, discipline, teacher performance, the quality of the curriculum and academic performance within a given IQ range is tractable. Group differences shouldn’t discourage improving schooling for children getting bad educations due to policies that ignore differences that are impeding, not facilitating, progress. Creating double standards ensures that some will never see others as their equals. Intentions notwithstanding, today's policies create separation, condescension and resentment. It need not be. Any genuinely applied single set of standards would find that performance really is distributed indistinguishably across different groups. But getting to that point will require us to jettison an apparatus of liberal laws, regulations and bureaucracies that has been 40 years in the making. That will not happen until the conversation has opened up. In careful honest analysis of problems lies the hope that they might be solved.
The ideological precept underlying wokism is not scientifically supported. No matter how much people are punished for telling the truth, denied jobs, kicked off social media, or called names, and no matter how much honor is bestowed on those who defend woke lies, the facts will not change. Different ancestral populations are genetically distinguishable. They have different distribution of traits, including measured IQ and athletic abilities. Almost every remotely plausible environmental explanation for these differences has been repeatedly tested in both natural and control experiments, and have the same patterns of differences appear every time. As of yet, there is nothing that seriously casts doubt on the hereditarian explanation, and if it weren't for political implications this wouldn't be controversial.
As Charles Murray stated, we can start by stop being afraid of data that tell us a story we do not want to hear, stop the name-calling, stop the denial and start facing reality. And as Christianity preaches, remember we are all God’s child, and therefore all treated with dignity.
"...sweeps of the genome across human populations...Dozens or hundreds of ethnic differences will be found in traits such as collectivism, clannishness, aggressiveness, facility, or the ability to delay gratification."--Jonathan Haidt
"A heterodox movement that does not support free inquiry into genetic differences among races and their potentially effect on outcomes is guaranteed to fail."--Nathan Cofnas, University of Cambridge
1. However, asking this question obviously conflicts with deeply held social ideals about the inherent equality of all humans which unfortunately in the process embraces phantom ideological phenomenon such as systemic racism, micro-aggressions, and toxic whiteness. Of course, pointing out the essential irrationality of this ideology is to court liberal ire and hate. Is science the victim of a societal reaction against reason, or is science the cause of our age unreason?
Further reading:
https://spectator.org/crts-pernicious-effect-on-scientific-research/
Source; Sent from an on line friend..........
The national climate ASSessment, compiled by 14 federal agencies, is little other than a climate alarmist’s gospel. Yet Americans have become less impacted or alarmed by the apocalyptic predictions that never quite materialize.
In an effort to scare Americans into buying the left-wing'ss climate alarmism, which dubiously and tellingly can only be addressed through ever more government control of the economy, the report warns of the astronomical cost of climate change without massively expensive government intervention.
According to the report, climate change is costing the U.S. economy $150 billion annually. How, exactly? Well, climate change supposedly makes for more severe weather events (except when it doesn’t because they tell us climate change has little to do with the weather), therefore costing Americans even more of their hard-earned cash. Then again, $150 billion annually is a bargain compared to the left-wing/democrats’ flawed green new deal. That had an original price tag of $93 trillion over 10 years.
The climate report basically says Be afraid, folks, because it’s only going to get worse! Droughts, hurricanes, floods, and fires will be rising in frequency — that’s the dire scare tactic of the climate alarmists.
Never mind the data that simply doesn’t back up those alarmist threats. The fact of the matter is that coping with events has always been a reality for humanity. Furthermore, as the climate warms, it actually has benefited humanity in key ways, such as food production. Another is reducing death, cold kills nine times more people than heat.
Demonstrating just how woke the national climate ASSessment is, there are entire sections focused on diversity and equity. It even has a section ridiculously asserting that indigenous people had developed a holistic earth-friendly culture that can be harnessed to better react to climate change. It’s that old left-wing lie that everything was perfect, peaceful, and harmonious in North America before those foolish and reckless white Europeans arrived.
This is not science; it’s a cult(1). The report attempts to connect all of Americans’ lives to climate change, claiming that everything from their emotional well-being to their physical health to their bank accounts are under dire threat thanks to climate change. If that isn’t cultish thinking, then what is?
The report focuses on the inequitable impact of climate change on lower-income people and minorities. When in the history of the world has the climate not had an inequitable impact on people with lower incomes? This is not due to climate change but is purely the economic reality of the haves and the have-nots.
The pathetic irony is that biden’s regiem is making everything cost more via product regulations. If it wasn’t for the regulatory commissars making the cost of goods rise, then it would be easier for lower-income Americans to afford to adapt to any changing climate.
In the end, again their biggest bogeyman is the fossil fuel industry, which is essentially blamed for everything to the point that the language of social justice is applied as if it’s a battle of good vs. evil.
The truth is, without fossil fuels, life on planet earth would be much more difficult. Lives would be shorter and death would be much more common, and all the wonderful technologies that we take for granted, like readily available clean water, would not be possible. Indeed, the actual injustice is the concerted effort by climate cultists to demonize fossil fuels, which still provide the only cost-efficient means for humanity to adapt to a changing climate. They are truly anti-human and driven to return us to serfdom.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Sixth Assessment Report is based on self-admitted flawed models, resulting in alarming claims about extreme weather that are not supported by the actual data. The IPCC projects too much warming for the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The IPCC also predicts contradictory increases in extreme weather events such as increases in both droughts and floods, neither of which have occurred during periods in the past when it was a warm or warmer than today. Importantly, the IPCC report ignores natures role in climate change and the fact that history shows warm periods are better for human life than cold periods. The fact is that society is flourishing during the present modest warming.
A study published in the peer-reviewed journal Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics says the Sun, not greenhouse gases, drives climate change. The research, by 23 scientists in the fields of solar physics and climate at universities and research institutes in 14 different countries, involved a comprehensive analysis of the 16 published solar output datasets. The researchers found the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) uses a very small number of solar irradiance data sets, data sets with uniformly “low solar variability,” to support its conclusion solar activity plays a negligible role in climate change. Using the broader, more comprehensive series of data sets, the researchers conclude: “most, if not all, of the long-term temperature changes are due to natural factors.”
Solar data from NASA’s ACRIM sun-monitoring satellites matches temperature data from the most reliable data sets well, indicating almost all recent warming can be explained by solar activity with very little contribution from human greenhouse gas emissions. The IPCC ignores the NASA ACRIM data and other data sets in favor of those that support the hypothesis of human responsibility for climate change.
Commenting on the IPCC’s approach to examining solar irradiance as a factor in climate change, Ronan Connolly, Ph.D. and the Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences (CERES), said: "The IPCC is mandated to find a consensus on the causes of climate change. I understand the political usefulness of having a consensus view in that it makes things easier for politicians. However, science doesn’t work by consensus. In fact, science thrives best when scientists are allowed to disagree with each other and to investigate the various reasons for disagreement. I fear that by effectively only considering the datasets and studies that support their chosen narrative, the IPCC have seriously hampered scientific progress into genuinely understanding the causes of recent and future climate change."
This is all about The Great Reset through Climate Socialism. It’s the international leaders’ push to exploit the supposed existential threat of climate change to get people to foolishly "reimagine capitalism”(2). The aim of those pushing the Great Reset (GR) is to impose socialism worldwide, especially on energy production and use, which is the foundation of the modern world.
The GR has been a long time coming. It is the latest manifestation of the flawed and failed 19th-century ideological attempt to give dictatorial power to unaccountable bureaucrats not beholden to democratic election cycles or bound by laws and the expressed wishes of people.
If the GR comes to pass, it will be too late for people to do anything about it. Any resistance will be castigated by sheeple on social media and in the mainstream media. Social media will shut down the accounts of any who object and will shut out their voices. After the GR, "resistance will be futile," to paraphrase Star Trek’s Borg.
The much-hyped Green New Deal, biden’s extravagantly wasteful "Build Back Better" infrastructure plan, and the Democrats’ grotesque $3.5 trillion budget bill are domestic down payments on the global GR, exactly what Eisenhower warned about.
That brings us to ICCC-14 and climate change. Politicians, bureaucrats, politically connected profiteers and crony capitalists, luddites, and activist scientists (those wedded more to leftist political causes or their own funding interests than to the scientific method) have repeatedly said climate change "poses an existential threat to human existence," "threatens the collapse of civilization," "will be catastrophic for human life," and other such overblown BS! The GR is their answer to that fake threat. Only if we give liberal elites all the levers of power, unfettered by inconvenient elections and unhampered by scientific investigations or reflective thought, can we supposedly save the Earth from 2 degrees of warming which they claim will bring untold death and disaster to people and the environment.
Those claims and the self-appointed climate emperors truly have no clothes; they do not have the facts on their side. Approximately 50 top experts in climate science, energy economics, and public policy—In other words—“experts” testifying to the lie that the statement climate change poses an existential threat to human existence is!
These include William Happer, Ph.D., professor emeritus in the Dept of Physics at Princeton University and founding board member of the CO2 Coalition; Lord Christopher Monckton, former special advisor to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher; and Patrick Moore, Ph.D., a cofounder of greenpeace who currently serves as a director at the CO2 Coalition and a senior fellow at The Heartland Institute, Neil Frank, Ph.D., Madhav Khandekar, Ph.D., and Willie Soon, Ph.D; economists and statisticians Ross McKitrick, Ph.D., and Benjamin Zycher, Ph.D.; and nonprofit advocates for the poor and minorities E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., and Derrick Hollie.
GR is unnecessary and economics and history show it is dangerous, almost certain to cause far greater harms than any realistically possible beneficial effects. History proves that the ideological belief in the existence of benign, selfless philosopher-kings are and have always been few and far between, if they have ever existed at all outside of fairy tales and philosophical tomes.
Science should inform our choices, including political choices, but scientists should not dictate our decisions, as Eisenhower noted. No individual scientist or subgroup of scientists has full and complete knowledge or a monopoly on the truth. Nor do scientists have any special insight into what any particular person or society should value or what level of risk and types of tradeoffs people should be willing to accept to obtain or preserve those values.
Once a person, by means of his evaluative capacity, recognizes that there is a common feature that is present in multiple perceptions of the same reality, he is then able to use his intellect to isolate that common feature and consider the intelligible structure or pattern itself, apart from perception and sensation. With that in mind, we know that experts serve an important role in that they assist us in analyzing matters beyond our common understanding. But experts are mere fallible humans. When they are controlled by their biases, flawed in their analysis, or misguided by incorrect data, then we must reject their conclusions.
As the climate changes — which it has throughout earth’s history — humans are far better suited to adapt through the free market than under the tyranny of government.
"No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated...Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race...I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned...Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts...It does not matter who you are, or how smart you are, or what title you have, or how many of you there are, and certainly not how many papers your side has published, if your prediction is wrong then your hypothesis is wrong. Period.....If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part"-- Richard Feynman
Nevertheless, The Securities and Exchange Commission, ignoring its legal mandate to ensure corporate transparency, accurate reporting, and the prevention of fraud and insider trading, has proposed rules mandating every publicly traded corporation adopt woke climate standards and goals accounting for the carbon dioxide emissions throughout its supply chain. Then, companies need to set goals to reduce emissions. Biden’s supposedly independent SEC has gone full-on woke on climate change. The SEC has gone full on political in the remaking of America's market economy into one controlled by authoritarian elites.
Stepping well outside its legal mission, the SEC has decided IT knows what the managers of publicly traded companies, portfolio and fund managers, and investors should care about. Forget about making profits for companies and their shareholder-owners, a company’s financial condition and prospects based on business and market measures, or providing a secure, comfortable retirement for pensioners. The SEC says all of that should take a back seat to climate change.
The SEC has no particular expertise in climate science, no evidence it is staffed by people known to be able to predict the future in general, or even future weather in particular. Nonetheless, the SEC is taking it upon itself to dictate to investors and businesses that they must account for climate change, based on the commission’s opinion that it affects every corporation’s business prospects and that investors should know about it.
The SEC’s proposed rules would require publicly traded companies to track and report on the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from their own operations and those of companies in their supply chain and the electric utilities that supply them power. Companies will have to report on how climate change is affecting their businesses now, how it is likely to affect them in the future, and what they are doing in response, including steps they are taking to reduce non-toxic greenhouse gas emissions.
These rules will take billions dollars away from businesses’ core operations, to carry out the SEC’s mandate that it predict future climate, for its fiscal effect on their operations and act as their brothers’ keepers by tracking their power companies’ and suppliers’ emissions as well as their own. Where are all the oracles, seers, and carbon accountants companies will have to hire to tell the future and audit their own and other companies’ expected emissions?
Many products sold by publicly traded companies, like clothing, food, electronics and cell phones for example are manufactured overseas. The sources for these items are not under the purview or control of the SEC and are unlikely to waste money tracking CO2 emissions from their production activities, much less from the source of their electricity and supply vendors just because the SEC wants their corporate American customers to waste resources tracking such emissions. That will complicate the corporations’ supply chain reporting. The reports could therefore be woefully incomplete, opening the companies up to SEC investigations for lack of compliance and transparency, and to activists’ protests or lawsuits for inadequate or incomplete reporting. Expect the SEC to use big companies to throw their weight around to make producers comply. The producers could tell their corporate SEC climate overlords to take a flying leap, selling their goods elsewhere, such as burgeoning markets in China, India, and Brazil. That would raise prices of all these goods in the United States by reducing supplies, further fueling inflation, which is already out of hand. In addition, we can expect the current U.S. supply chain crisis and increasingly empty shelves to look great by comparison with what’s to come. For producers to track their emissions would add to their costs, and those added costs would certainly be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices, just as the higher energy costs we are currently experiencing primarily because of biden’s climate policies are responsible for a large portion of our high inflation rate and rising consumer prices.
These policies will harm consumers in addition to investors, pension funds, and retirees—the very groups the SEC is supposed to be protecting. The factors likely to affect materially the success or failure of publicly traded companies are best known to the officers and managers of the firms and funds themselves, not the SEC, other regulatory agencies, politicians, or self-appointed stakeholders, including climate activists, not actively involved in the relevant business.
The effects of climate change 20, 30, 50, or 100 years from now are unknown and unknowable. Man-made climate change is based on climate-simulating computer models of future conditions, which cannot be trusted. They have consistently been wrong about past and present temperatures, the most basic projections they have to make. The models have also consistently misidentified various climate conditions and weather events.
If activists want a company or fund to consider climate change risks, effects, and opportunities in its business and investment decisions, they can purchase stock or bonds issued by the company, as every other investor does. Then, at annual board meetings or other periodic company events they can express their desires as co-owners. They can try to convince company or fund managers to consider potential climate change risks and rewards and monitor and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Failing at that, they can introduce climate-related resolutions, offer like-minded candidates for the board of directors, and try to convince a majority of stock owners to support their resolutions, directives, and slates of candidates. Those concerned about climate matters can form their own companies and funds, complete with public stock offerings, to compete with the businesses they believe are not taking climate change concerns seriously enough. This, not probably illegal SEC mandates, is the appropriate way for companies and funds to take climate concerns seriously.
The SEC’s role in these matters should be limited to ensuring "truth in advertising"—a policing function. The SEC should not attempt to develop or enforce uniform standards defining what it means for a company to take climate seriously. Instead, the SEC should simply require transparency from those companies and funds that profess to be "green." In publicly available documents and disclosures, the companies and funds should be required to state specifically what practices they are undertaking to respond to climate change and how and on what timeline their efforts to reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions should be judged.
In addition to ensuring the transparent disclosure the SEC should routinely monitor and police businesses claiming to embrace "green" policies, as they do with other promises businesses make to investors. The SEC should also respond to complaints from investors about companies failing to carry out their mission as stated. There is no nonpolitical justification for the SEC to require businesses to account for their climate risks, much less those of their business associates.
“What prudent merchant will hazard his fortunes in any branch of commerce when he knows not but that his plans may be rendered unlawful before they can be executed...and will render him a victim to an inconsistent government.”— James Madison, Federalist Papers #62.
1. michael mann’s 1998 “hockey stick” argued that the Earth’s climate held steady for all of human history until suddenly, in the 1900s, the temperatures increased, representing the upturned blade of the hockey stick. mann’s study intentionally ignored several thousand scientific publications showing other periods of climate change throughout human history. This ridiculous theory is the basis of CO2-focused “global warming” movement, which morphed into the “climate change” movement. mann’s theory informs the positions taken by the un's intergovernmental panel on climate change (ipcc), the agency dictating policy to your local, state, and federal governments. This is the REAL climate change denial; sacrificing of truth for a desired political agenda. Tthe acceptance of prior warming periods undermines the argument that a modern warming is an existential threat, and prior warming periods undermine the idea that anthropogenic (man-made) CO2 is the primary cause of climate change.
To acknowledge that anthropogenic CO2 could not possibly cause climate change throughout human history, the climate extremists would be forced to question their religion. When guided by truth instead of ideology, the following questions become more interesting:
-How is it that the last six great ice ages started with far more CO2 in the atmosphere than we have now?
-Is it true, as many experts note, that temperatures drive CO2 levels, and not the other way around?
-How does anthropogenic CO2 drive climate when it makes up less than 5% of total CO2, with most coming from the oceans, volcanoes, decaying vegetation, and forest fires?
-Isn’t the sun the most important cause of climate, and what effects follow from sun spots and solar flares?
-If greenhouse gases (GHGs) are the most significant drivers of climate change, then why do we focus on CO2, when water vapor (i.e., clouds) is a far more impactful GHG? In fact, there have been a flurry of recent published studies on the effects of clouds.
For the left-wing, addiction to liberal ideology and their status among the woke remain subordinate to truth and courage. Many have sacrificed research funding and reputation to honestly criticize mann’s flawed theories. In fact, numerous climate experts upended their professional lives by pointing out that mann’s theory is more activism than fact, including Professors Tim Ball, Ian Clark, Ian Plimer, Nir Shaviv, Piers Corbyn, Steven Koonin, Judith Curry, and William Happer — to name a few. Experts Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick presented a detailed analysis of the flaws of mann’s 1998 theory in a series of studies in 2003 and 2005, detailing the numerous technical flaws with mann’s analysis, invalid “due to collation errors, unjustifiable truncation or extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculation of principal components and other quality control defects.” McKitrick summarized the theory’s most significant problem as an issue of unreliable proxy data. mann relied on a small and controversial subset of tree ring records of bristlecone pine cores from high and arid mountains in the U.S. Southwest. The scientists who published the tree ring data on which mann relied (published by Graybill and Idso in 1993) specifically warned that the data should not be used for temperature reconstruction and that the 20th-century data had regional anomalies.
2. The words of klaus schwab, founder and executive chairman of the world economic forum.
Additional Info:
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/04/the_religiofication_of_climate_change.html
Biden invents 'Securities and Environment Commission' out of thin air to force climate agenda on US businesses
https://apple.news/AR6GPg1NPS0CJbCVRCgQBJw
Source; Sent from an on line friend...........
Harvard University used the database consisting of the entire American population from 1989 to 2015 and found racial disparities in adult income, even when childhood households are of equal income and wealth, contradicted the assumption that racial disparities in wealth explain all racial differences in social outcomes, and found equal childhood household wealth did little to equalize rates of criminality. Powerful evidence of cultural and behavioral differences between white and black men were shown to operate independently of wealth or income. And Brandis University, studying wealth changes from 1984 to 2009 on a nationally represented set of families, concluded that inherited wealth accounted for only 5% of the racial disparity in wealth gains over the time period.
These findings are consistent with other research that find racial differences in crime rates even among those with similar economic backgrounds. For example, Darrell Steffensmier found that even after adjusting for poverty and unemployment, black neighborhoods had substantially higher violent crime rates than similar white neighborhoods. Robert Cherry found that even after taking into account employment, education, and poverty, states with a greater share of black men have higher violent crime rates. The point being that race cannot be excluded as a factor.
The behavior of human beings, individually and collectively, is complex. Individuals differ as do many groups, on behavioral measures vital to social economic success. Causes and their effects may take long stretches of time to play out. Stratification explicitly excludes from its analysis of group disparities anything to do with the interests and abilities of the individuals involved - which would only be legitimate if those factors have been proven to be irrelevant to demographic variables. For example, economic disparities cannot be understood if endogenous differences, (average differences in the interests and ability of disparate groups) are a priori excluded.
Arbitrarily claiming laws and norms were explicitly engineered to disadvantage a certain race is a very strong charge that is almost impossible to prove or disprove. It departs from scientific practice since it explicitly excludes from its analysis of group disparities anything to do with the interests and abilities of the individuals involved. Unfortunately, unproven allegations attributing malign motives to whole classes have become common to the bogus left-wing philosophy of critical theory. Certainly, no laws since the mid-1960s have expressed any such intention.
The proper behavioral science approach would be to begin by looking at both endogenous and exogenous causes: at all the germane, cogent interests and abilities of the individuals and the conditions acting on them. Often what's ignored is endogenous causes, the idea that group-based inequalities are due to defective cultural habits and practices on the part of the subaltern or subordinated community. This tends to remove sound science and sound logic entirely from determining the causes.
There appears to be an inverse correlation between wealth and criminality and positive correlations between wealth and cognitive ability. High rates of criminality can reduce wealth and high academic achievement can increase wealth. So, the precise direction of cause and effect is uncertain. Wealth instead of being a dependent becomes an independent variable. Instead of wealth acting on various behaviors, behaviors can and do act on wealth. Wealth is often an outcome of the individual's interests and abilities in the opportunities available to one.
What is holding people of color down are cultural factors other than race that black scholars Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele have compellingly argued with abundant empirical evidence. Promoting that it isn’t true are only making matters worse
"Ironically, the stronger and less victimized a previously victimized group becomes, the more it will insist on its own victimization."-Benedict Beckled
“A sullen spirit of equality can proceed from envy in the baser sort of democracy.”---Paul Elmer More
Wealth is anything that people value. Wealth can be health, love, beauty, happiness, money, and many other things. Money, however, allows us to store wealth, index it and to transmit it. Money comes from some form of earning. Work provides earnings in the form of income. People's incomes go up because people become more productive. That's true of people over time and across nations.
What matters to a person is not whether who he has performed in comparison to any random domain but how he has performed in a domain that is important to him. This suggest that income inequality is not as much of a problem as it is sometimes assumed. The University of Nevada found that in advance nations income inequality on average neither helps nor harms.
The general view among liberals is that economic inequality is socially undesirable because it makes people miserable. Therefore, since liberals are the self-anointed benefactors and self-appointed rulers of all of humanity, they feel compelled to rob the fruits of the successful and give it them to the less successful, primarily through higher taxes.
Under that welfare ethos the individual comes in conflict with his alter ego—his equal in rights. The welfare state, with it’s never-ending poverty, derelicts on the street, unattended illness, and complaints of not enough by every group, cannot avoid becoming the judiciary state, when were the masses are ruled by a handful of elites in black robes. This is the point where alleged good intentions exceed the power to fulfill them and mark for the culture the onset of decadence.
Putting aside for now the issue of envy (which provides ample fuel for the type of equality fire that burns and destroys) and immorality of taking what isn’t yours, the facts show that economic inequality isn’t what frustrates people, lack of an opportunity to try and become richer is what does. In the real world, were liberal minds seldom dwell, one’s own income potential matters a great deal more than what others are earning. In fact, rising incomes of others often serves as positive evidence of what one can achieve.
Focusing on income inequality rather than absolute improvement in the standards of living can be psychologically destructive, for there will always be people who have more money, more things, better health, higher intelligence, better looks, greater height and strength, and more charisma among other things. Do not fall into the trap of instead of being grateful for all the good things in your life be resentful because of the things you lack but others have.
Preoccupation with income inequality risks normalizing envy, a happiness destroying emotion. There is nothing wrong with income inequality, provided that it was fairly arrived at, by creating value others want. In fact, income inequality is in many ways the midwife of progress. Progress would be impossible if society prevented people from trying out and benefiting from new things(1).
Liberal policies that try to take from Peter to give to Paul (technically called redistribution policies) tend to reduce wealth in total for all. That means fewer jobs, less prosperity, less charity, less improving lifestyles and turns beneficiaries into demoralized long-term even permanent dependents, among other things(2).
“Diversity is celebrated and individuality praised, yet so many are looking to equality as a prescription for human flourishing. All of people’s varied talents, interests, backgrounds, make up, etc, all that diversity renders egalitarian utopianism unworkable…it seems that one of the most important things all humans are equal in is that we are all unique.”—Rev Robert Sirico
- Nobel prize winner William d. Nordhouse who concluded only a minuscule fraction of the social returns from technological advances was captured by producers, indicating that most of the benefits of technological change are passed on to consumers rather than captured by producers. He estimated that innovators are able to capture only 2.2% of the total surplus from innovation. Steve Jobs is but one example. He was able to create trillions of dollars in value for all of humanity, while receiving just a tiny fraction of that, because he enjoyed a culture that awarded risk, creativity, and discipline.
2. The dogma of equal opportunity, an ideal when demanded to be fully realized, can only happen when the institution of the family (with self-sacrifice, advantages, ambition, cooperation, etc) is no longer respected, and when parental control and responsibility passes to the State.
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“Every human has four endowments—self awareness, conscience, independent will, and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom ... The power to choose, to respond, to change.” --Stephen Covey
The wide range of differences in individual capacities and potentials is one of the most distinctive facts about the human species. Not all human impulses are laudable. To think otherwise would be to commit the naturalistic fallacy. Not all types of inequality are detrimental to human well-being. But one example are the geniuses who have invented things you can neither explain nor understand but yet you benefit immensely from. Such people are but one small demonstration that inequality of ability can benefit all of us. If the differences are not very important, then freedom is not very important and the idea of individual worth is not very important.
Honest achievement that cost those in the lead much to achieve enables those who follow to reach the same level at a much smaller cost. A truly egalitarian society, which can exist only through force, would progress by essentially being parasitical, taking from those who have paid the cost. In a non-egalitarian society those forces which at first make inequality self-accentuating later diminish it. Even those who find themselves at the short-end of inequality have more to gain from faster growth that inevitably comes in a free market than from any conceivable forced redistribution.
Freedom, which equality when before the law creates, is progressively destroyed by demands for another kind of equality, economic or outcome. We can achieve either equality before the law or a material equality (which will diminish), but not both at the same time. Equality before the law which freedom requires leads to material inequality. The desire of making people more alike in their material condition cannot be accepted in a free society as a justification for further and discriminatory coercion. To preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion Those who demand an extension of equality do not really demand equality but the distribution of it as they desire regardless of individual merit, which is irreconcilable with freedom. Like Plato said: “Equal treatment of the unequal ends in inequality, when not qualified by due portion.”
Even if the impossible could be achieved, that we all have equal chances, this will produce unequal results, proportioned to the “successful efforts” of the individual, on the value of the achievement. To be successful the individual must be free to use the capacities and knowledge they have which often others do not have. Life in society necessarily means that we are dependent for the satisfaction of most of our needs on the services of some of our fellow members. In a free society these mutual services are voluntary, and each should be able, within reason, to determine to whom he wants to render services and on what terms. The benefits and opportunities which others offer to us will be available only if we satisfy their conditions, to be otherwise is mandatory servitude. This is as true of social as of economic relations.
If in the pursuit of uncertain goals people are to use their own knowledge and capacities, they must be guided, not by what other people think they are to do, but by the value others attached to the result in which they aim. If renumeration did not correspond to the value that the product of a man’s effort has for others, he would have no basis for deciding whether the pursuit of a given object is worth the effort and risk. It is only by the value of the result that we can judge with any degree of confidence. Otherwise we presume that we are able to judge in every individual instance how well people use different opportunities and talents given to them and how meritorious their efforts are in light of all the circumstances which have made them possible. We would also have to presume that some human beings are in a position to determine conclusively what a person is worth, or entitled to determine what he may achieve. That presumes then that others can and do know all that guides a person’s actions.
To decide not on achievement but on the intent means we must judge whether people have made such use of their opportunities as they ought to have made and how much effort of will or self-denial this has caused them. This presupposes also that we can distinguish between that part of their achievement which is due to circumstances within their control and the part which is not.
All human differences therefore create different advantages. Since acquisition by any member of the community of additional capacities to do things which may be valuable is to be regarded as a gain for the community. This implies that the desirability of increasing the abilities and opportunities of any individual does not depend on whether the same can also be done for others.
The discontent that the success of some people often produces in those that are less successful rests on envy. It is the modern tendency to ignore traditional definitions of morality, to gratify that vice and to disguise it in the garment of social justice (which John Stuart Mill called “that most antisocial and odious of all passions” ) which has become a serious threat to freedom. History testifies that freedom empty of such morality and the dictates of moral law ends in violence and despair.
Each of us is inherently different from one another in our potential, talents, and merit. Therefore equality and liberty are incompatible. Our government, however, is tending to reward those who have less and punish those who have more. External factors such as work ethic and lifestyle choices are ignored. History shows that nations fail whenever this approach has been tried. With great cost and far too much human suffering(1).
In 1965 Mao Satan plunged China into the cultural revolution, arguing that expertise and merit was a source of privilege that undermined socialist equality. The result was millions of people murdered, a whole nation of almost a billion people suffered in a more intense gulag and in the end it was reversed.
“The secret passion of citizens in a DEMOCRACY is envy, expressed in demands for equity.”—Alexander de Tocqueville
“I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to be merely idealizing envy.”—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Junior.
Further info:
Poll: Voters Prefer System Where All Have Equal Opportunity
https://apple.news/AL32w-LEjPrulZyapkW1T_Q
Source; GLOBAL CLIMATE INTELLIGENCE GROUP WWW.CLINTEL.ORG
There is no climate emergency
Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures.
Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming
The geological archive reveals that Earth’s climate has varied as long as the planet has existed, with natural cold and warm phases. The Little Ice Age ended as recently as 1850. Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming.
Warming is far slower than predicted
The world has warmed significantly less than predicted by IPCC on the basis of modeled anthropogenic forcing. The gap between the real world and the modeled world tells us that we are far from understanding climate change.
Climate policy relies on inadequate models
Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as policy tools. They do not only exaggerate the effect of greenhouse gases, they also ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial.
CO2 is plant food, the basis of all life on Earth
CO2 is not a pollutant. It is essential to all life on Earth. More CO2 is favorable for nature, greening our planet. Additional CO2 in the air has promoted growth in global plant biomass. It is also profitable for agriculture, increasing the yields of crops worldwide.
Global warming has not increased natural disasters
There is no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts and suchlike natural disasters, or making them more frequent. However, there is ample evidence that CO2mitigation measures are as damaging as they are costly.
Climate policy must respect scientific and economic realities
There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050. Go for adaptation instead of mitigation; adaptation works whatever the causes are.
OUR ADVICE TO OUR LEADERS IS THAT SCIENCE SHOULD STRIVE FOR A SIGNIFICANTLY BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF THE CLIMATE SYSTEM, WHILE POLITICS SHOULD FOCUS ON MINIMIZING POTENTIAL CLIMATE DAMAGE BY PRIORITIZING ADAPTATION STRATEGIES BASED ON PROVEN AND AFFORDABLE TECHNOLOGIES.
Meanwhile, research published in the journal Atmosphere concludes that CO2 is only 1 possible forcing factor driving recent climate changes, and probably not the dominant one. Stuart Harris, Ph.D., the University of Calgary, finds multiple other explanations have been offered in various studies at various times for recent climate changes, beyond today’s current bete noire, CO2.
Harris notes that historical warming and cooling preceded changes in CO2 concentrations. In addition, he points out that the recent modest increase in global average temperature began in the later part of the 19th century and early 20th century, before significant human greenhouse gas emissions, and that temperatures since then have risen and plateaued a couple of times even as carbon dioxide concentrations steadily increased. As a result climate changes are now, and historically have been, driven by external factors like solar activity, and internal factors, and how the Earth’s rotation moves fluids, and the way the Earth responds to: “uneven solar heating of the surface of the Earth and the movements of the excess heat in the tropics towards the cooler polar regions, primarily by the movements of ocean currents, modified by the movements of air masses.”
Whether or not the factors Harris identifies are driving present climate change, 2 things we can say with some certainty about them: they impact the climate; and they are inadequately accounted for, or completely ignored, in climate model representations of the Earth’s climate and model outputs.
"Atmospheric carbon dioxide is only suggested as a cause in 1 theory, which, despite its wide acceptance by politicians, the left-wing media, and the public, ignores the findings in other studies...Increased CO2 also does not explain the well-known NASA map of the changes between the global 1951–1978 and the 2010–2019 mean annual temperatures. The other theories by oceanographers, earth scientists, and geographers fit together to indicate that the variations in climate are the result of differential solar heating of the Earth, resulting in a series of processes redistributing the heat to produce a more uniform range of climates around the surface of the Earth. Key factors are the shape of the Earth and the Milankovitch Cycles, the distribution of land and water bodies, the differences between heating land and water, ocean currents and gateways, air masses, and hurricanes."--Stuart Harris
Meanwhile, research published in the journal Entropy examines attempts to suppress scientific research skeptical of claims humans are causing a climate crisis. It responds to the unscientific claim that consensus has established that human greenhouse gas emissions are causing dangerous climate change, so research questioning the consensus position should be rejected out of hand, without even giving the scientific courtesy of peer review or being considered for publication.
The authors, Igor Khmelinskii and Leslie V. Woodcock, climate researchers with nearly 500 peer-reviewed articles published between them, argue(1) that authoritarian censorship makes factually incorrect assertions, and suggestions that threatens to undermine scientific progress by subverting the scientific method.
The theory that CO2 emissions are causing present warming is just that, a theory, not established fact! Its “consensus” is political, not a scientific process—not through testing and confirmation as demanded by the scientific method. Whether correct or not, their point about CO2 driving climate change not being an established fact is certainly correct. Even more important, however, is their analysis of how scientific progress is threatened by scientific truths established by “consensus,” accompanied by the dismissal of the scientific method, and attempts to prevent skeptical climate analyses from being published, out of fear that it would give alternative views of why the climate is changing legitimacy.
That paper presented research indicating the residence time of any molecule of CO2 entering the atmosphere is between 5 and 10 years, far shorter than the hundreds of years commonly asserted by those pushing the narrative human CO2 emissions are causing catastrophic climate change. Based on this analysis the author concluded the atmospheric concentration of CO2 was likely not stable at 280 ppm in pre-industrial times and that approximately 90% of all anthropogenic CO2 emitted by humans has already been removed from the atmosphere, and thus can’t be driving dramatic climate change. This paper passed peer review, but because it presented a view that contradicts the “consensus” position on the residence time and impact of CO2 affirmed by the u.n. intergovernmental panel on climate change, the climate-crisis extremists claim the research is wrong on its face and its analysis didn’t even merit scientific consideration. In other words, demonize and ignore anything that proves them wrong.
Quashing alternative theories without even review and testing is not what the scientific method prescribes or how science progresses. Such treatment of research is rejecting science.
Meanwhile, what’s coming out of the european union is a foul multilayered onion. On the outside is its laughable, juvenile, impossible utopian idealism. Thus the european green deal, approved in 2020, to show member states the way to climate neutrality by 2050. A key component of this deal – one layer deeper – is a legislative package called Fit for 55, which aims to reduce EU emissions by 55% by 2030. When we go deeper still to this thing called the Buildings Directive, which regulates building energy efficiency in the EU. In 2021, the European Commission proposed extensive revisions to bring this Directive into alignment with its Fit for 55 aspirations. The climate-neutral utopia of 2050 is supposed to be an all-electric world. All this promised abundant electricity will be generated by fields upon fields of wind turbines and photovoltaic panels. How building energy efficiency will matter for emissions at all in this promised electrical utopia is a hard thing to understand.
Sweden has finally walked back its 2045 goal of climate neutrality, the UK has delayed by 5 years its ban on internal combustion engines, the revised German GEG pushed back the new heating requirements while larding the rules with a wide range of exceptions, and now the EU have ditched their concrete demands for building renovations. As our lofty aspirations run up against our self-imposed deadlines, they are steadily modified downwards. The apocalypse never quite happens, but we’re never quite relieved of impending doom either. It goes without saying, of course, that none of these unilateral regulations have any hope of saving the climate, even on their own terms. While EU emissions have declined substantially since the mid-2000s, fossil fuel production and global emissions remain on an undeterred upward trend.
1) "… statements inconsistent with, and illustrate ignorance of, the laws of classical thermodynamics, of the limitations of the Earth’s global energy budget multivariate computer models, and of the known absorption and emission spectroscopy of CO2...The scientific method of establishing truth requires hypotheses to be tested against experimental results by circumspective scientific scrutiny. Scientific knowledge cannot be established by consensus politics. We question the wisdom of a policy of rejecting articles that may disparage the greenhouse-gas hypothesis. By this criterion of science by consensus, … Nicholas Copernicus’s research … disputing the prevailing consensus of the Ptolemaic hypothesis of a static Earth system, would have been rejected by Copernicus Publications. A policy of only publishing consensus science enhances an ascendancy of politically motivated subjective pseudoscience, causing a stagnation of our scientific understanding and description of Earth systems."
Additional Info:
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/10/another_day_another_climate_tipping_point.html
Source; Sent from an Internet friend.............
“Financial blacklisting doesn’t just rob you of a chance to spread your message: it robs you of your ability to do business, your livelihood, your very means of functioning in a capitalist society and it has now become a reality.”— Allum Bokhari
esg is a kind of social credit scoring system, similar to the ones now being used by the Chinese Communist party to tightly control its population and economy. esg is a system by which nameless, faceless, unaccountable, unelected bureaucrats can impose arbitrary rules on corporations and dictate how they do business based on nothing but cultural and political whims, regardless of your political philosophy or causes you support or oppose. esg is possible to dramatically alter almost any part of life by changing corporate behavior.
esg ratings are offered by moody's investor service, morningstar, msci, and s&p global. According to a report by kpmg, thousands of companies, located in more than 50 countries, have esg systems in place. Governments around the world are now putting policies into place that are designed to coerce or, in some cases, even outright Force most large businesses to adapt the social credit scoring system esg. The world economic forum and the international business council collaborated to create a set of universal, material esg metrics. Moody’s has created the esg score predictor analytics to provide 56 esg scores on more than 140 million public and private companies globally.
The more authoritarian it gets, the more likely it is that businesses will opt out. This is why so many businesses and government want to make esg, or something similar to it, mandatory, incentivized. As a business owner, if you do anything at all that would normally be favored by esg, you're incentivized to develop and distribute your own comprehensive esg report. Otherwise you're going to end up with whatever esg score Moody's algorithm gives to you. For the left-wing elites who want a the great narrative, this is a win-win scenario. Join or die.
esg dedicated investment funds, including black rock, state street global advisors, morgan stanley, allianz, goldman sachs, fidelity, ubs group,and vanguard, control more than $100 trillion. larry fink of black rock said” "access to Capital is not a right it's a privilege." That in essence is threatening companies who refuse to go along with the esg agenda, while the esg asset managers become significantly richer from weaponizing esg, choosing to go all in on left wing causes. Why fight a political opponent if you could just buy him off?
Under Trump, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency published the fair access rule that would have mandated that large Banks conduct risk assessment of individual customers, rather than make broad-based decisions affecting whole categories or classes of customers when provisioning access to services, capital, and credit. This was designed to stop Banks from using esg scores and other subjective measures to discriminate against particular industries or customers, which is a foundational part of the great reset. Almost immediately upon entering office biden rescinded that.
Humanity can thrive in the 4th Industrial Revolution while embracing both the benefits of emerging technologies and a passionate commitment to inalienable, unchangeable, eternal human rights. But that cannot happen if we submit ourselves to the world economic forum’s great narrative.
What's to be done:
1. Dismantle corporate and government ESG scores
2. Think and act local.
3 . Large corporations which have effectively become government partners, should be required to adhere to the Bill of Rights.
4. Protection of data should be enhanced. Data is power.
5. The Federal Reserve needs to be dramatically reformed. The left-wing/democrats have killed any attempts to do such. The government issued digital currency should never be allowed.
Additional info:
https://www.foxnews.com/media/experts-break-americans-getting-tired-woke-capitalism
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/bonds/bond-market-crash-jpmorgan-bank-of-america-unrealized-losses-explainer-2023-11
https://www.axios.com/2023/11/08/us-national-debt-stabilize-cost
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/bonds/bond-king-jeff-gundlach-us-debt-levels-exploding-recession-economy-2023-11
20yrs
https://reason.com/?p=8253951
https://nypost.com/2023/11/07/real-estate/housing-costs-have-just-hit-a-new-record-heres-what-that-adds-up-to/
https://mustreadalaska.com/poll-americans-want-cuts-in-government-but-the-cuts-they-want-would-not-make-dent-in-national-debt/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-democrats-should-care-about-debt-policy-taxes-inflation-deficit-debt-labor-economy-e193bea2
https://www.axios.com/2023/11/08/us-national-debt-stabilize-cost
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/bonds/bond-king-jeff-gundlach-us-debt-levels-exploding-recession-economy-2023-11
20yrs
https://reason.com/?p=8253951
https://nypost.com/2023/11/07/real-estate/housing-costs-have-just-hit-a-new-record-heres-what-that-adds-up-to/
https://mustreadalaska.com/poll-americans-want-cuts-in-government-but-the-cuts-they-want-would-not-make-dent-in-national-debt/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-democrats-should-care-about-debt-policy-taxes-inflation-deficit-debt-labor-economy-e193bea2
Source; Sent from an Internet friend........
Not Racist, just facts.
Formerly titled; certain people and the burden they create for you
At the county level, the homicide rate has been higher in left-wing/democratic-leaning “blue” counties than in Republican-voting “red” counties since 2002. Violent crime is overwhelmingly associated with urban centers under left-wing/democrat control regardless of who that state supported in 2020.
Victims of hate crime incidents? Out of about 345 Million people in the US, there were 11,288 single-bias incidents involved 13,278 victims (or 0.0038%of the population), 469 relating to an alleged victim’s gender identity (or 0.000135%), vs. 353 the year before. “hate crime” includes physical altercations, verbal threats or property damage targeting “an individual, a business/financial institution, a government entity, a religious organization, or society/public as a whole.” 21.0% of offenders were black, 50% higher than the black(1) population. The number of white offenders was 20% lower than the white population.
In the real world all murders are hate crimes In 2019, there were 8,438 black victims of homicide, black on black murders accounted for 90% of all homicides within the black community. In 2022, there were 11,565 black victims of homicide, 54.7% of the total. You can do the math and see the trend.
Young black males between the ages of 15 and 34 are most at risk of being involved in a black on black murder. Black on black murders are more prevalent in urban areas. Gang-related activity is a major contributing factor to black on black murders. Only 40% of black on black murders are ever solved. Black on black murders have a devastating impact on the black community, causing fear and mistrust.
The black lives matter movement, an overtly marxian undertaking, not only divides Us by race but also divides the black race by instigating a climate of lawlessness, which has fueled a dangerous increase in gang activity and murder in African-American neighborhoods.
In 2022, property crime was 6.51 million offenses, 1.23 million violent crime, of which there were 21,156 cases of homicide including murder and nonnegligent manslaughter.
The left-wing blames it all on “social justice,” predicated on the assumption that institutional discrimination is the primary reason for differences among groups of people. It assumes that were it not for such discrimination, all would be equally represented in all human endeavors. In other words, human beings are equal not only in their nature and capacities but in their ability to develop those capacities.
However, this marxist assumption is rarely tested empirically. In fact, both the historical record and everyday experience regularly contradict it. For example, not only have homogenous societies had unequal representation among groups of people in various endeavors, but even twin siblings who are raised under the same roof and by the same set of parents show vast differences in aptitude, performance, and cognitive ability. This is because factors beyond both our knowledge and our control — including factors that begin long before birth — heavily influence the development of human capabilities, including intelligence.
Some cultural traditions go back centuries or even millennia and thus continue to orient the developmental capacities of the people living in these cultures today. It is disastrous folly to believe that government decree could circumvent these longstanding cultural traditions without major catastrophe. Moreover, these reciprocal inequalities rarely amount to one group dominating all fields of human achievement. As Thomas Sowell has stated: “Even highly successful groups have seldom been highly successful in all endeavors.” This does not mean that life is fair for all groups of people, much less to all individuals, or that there is nothing that can be done about injustices in the world. It does mean, however, that we ought to be humble about the limits of both our knowledge and our power to improve things rather than make them worse.
Negative consequences have followed from decades of government policymakers, ignoring the limits of their knowledge, resulting from the unintended consequences of minimum wage policies, tax legislation, rent control laws, and policies related to race and sex as well as to welfare, housing, and education.
One example--affirmative action in education. These policies have harmed first and foremost to the recipients themselves. Minority students who gain acceptance to schools for which they are not academically prepared usually struggle to keep up with the rigorous pace and demanding workload. As a result, they end up either failing or dropping out, winding up worse than if they pursued a path where they could succeed. Another example--the positive results that followed from the abolition of affirmative-action policies in California (as decided by voters). The number of black and Hispanic students graduating from the University of California system as a whole rose dramatically over a 4-yr span, and an increase of 63% graduating in 4 yrs. with a grade point average of 3.5 or higher." Another example--following the growth of the welfare state in the 1960's both crime rates and out-of-wedlock birth rates exploded in minority communities. The 2 decades prior, however, saw declining crimes. Out-of-wedlock birth rates were lower among minority groups than among the majority white population. Nevertheless, “liberal elites, politicians, activists and so-called "leaders" who took credit for the black progress that supposedly all began in the early 1960s took no responsibility for the painful retrogressions that demonstrably did begin in the 1960s.
The lesson, one that F.A. Hayek tried to inform us of almost 100 yrs. ago, is how little we know about the lives of others. We must, therefore, be careful when making policy decisions that have the potential to affect many people — and possibly even whole societies.
““We agree that ‘equal chances for all’ would be desirable. But that in no way guarantees that we have either the knowledge or the power required to make that goal attainable, without ruinous sacrifices of other desirable goals, ranging from freedom to survival...Stupid people can create problems, but it often takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe. They have already done that enough times — and in enough different ways — for us to reconsider, before joining their latest stampedes, led by self-congratulatory elites, deaf to argument and immune to evidence.”--Thomas Sowell
1. Blacks are approx. 14.2% of the US population.
Additional Info:
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/101894-the-crime-wave-in-america-is-crippling-our-nation-2023-11-06
Source; Sent from an on line friend......
"Researchers have created the largest atlas of human brain cells so far, revealing more than 3,000 cell types — many of which are new to science."--Science Advances and Science Translational Medicine
“It’s highly significant, this is the first atlas of the whole human brain at the single-cell level, showing its intricate molecular interactions...These types of atlases really are laying the groundwork for a much better understanding of the human brain.” ---Anthony Hannan, neuroscientist at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health in Australia.
There's a growing effort among left wing elites to use emerging technological innovations to reshape and redesign how people think, feel, and make decisions. About which values they desire and how they can ensure those values are imposed on as many people as possible.
Moises Velasquez-Manoff, in a new york times article entitled The Brain Implants that could Change Humanity, explained that some neuroscientists are already using rudimentary brain implants to alter human behavior and that brain reading and possibly brainwriting technologies are fast approaching, and society isn't prepared for them.
One example of brain implant technology(1) is a company called neuralink. It's mission is to create the future of brain computer interfaces. The human brain is connected to an implant called the link, which is a sealed, implanted device that processes, stimulates, and transmits neural signals to the user's brain.
Aside from the potential health risks, there are an incalculable number of ethical issues and dangers that inevitably come with such a technology. In a world where man and machine are united, how could we stop people from being heavily influenced, manipulated, or controlled, about how people think about societies, cultures, religions, economics, and morality, where a specific emotional response could be guaranteed to the point where people lose their free will, even their humanity.
1. The world economic forum is taking a strong interest in the topic of brain implants. klaus schwab suggested that as early as 2027, brain implants could be relatively commonplace.
Additional Info:
Gene editing is the ability to make highly specific changes in the DNA sequence of a living organism, essentially customizing its genetic makeup. It is made possible by a powerful tool called crispr. Quoting the wef’s klaus schwab on this matter: “The science is progressing so fast that the limitations are now less technical than they are legal, regulatory and ethical... We may see designer babies in the near future, along with a whole series of other edits to our humanity..."
It is completely conceivable that forms of radical human change will be available within a generation, innovations that risk creating entirely new forms of inequality and class conflict.
It's definitely not a good idea for our government, that can't figure out a way to maintain peace and order in many of our major cities, balance its budget, or even run Amtrak, to be in the business of genetic engineering technologies and techniques. That is far too much power for a government in a free society, to play God by rewriting the basic rules of biology. That is a dangerous game, and the last time a major government power played it, Europe ended up with the holocaust.
Yet, in 2022 biden signed an Executive Order entitled Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation for a Sustainable, Safe, Secure American Bioeconomy, which states: "...to help us achieve our societal goals... To be able to write circuitry for cells and predictably programmed biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers; unlock the power of biological data..."
Source; Another on from my unknown Internet friend.........
Trump is a symptom, not a cause. Trump’s endorsements aren’t pulling his candidates over the finish line, the story goes, and he alienates centrists, moderates and independents. Trump is fracturing the Republican Party, they say. The fractures are there, alright, but Trump didn’t create them. After years — nay, decades — of mouthing conservative platitudes only to capitulate to the Left when elected, the “grassroots” no longer believes anyone from the Republican “establishment,” and words like “bipartisanship” are signals for we’ll back down at the first sign of pressure. If you really want Trump out and someone else in, find a candidate who is unafraid to oppose the hardcore left, infuriate democrats, thumb his (or her) nose at the left-wing media and stand up for ordinary Americans against the weaponized apparatus of the Deep State. The GOP needs to unite behind a candidate. Spend some time on social media and you’ll see.
As weak, incompetent, corrupt and destructive as biden is, if Republicans are divided, libs/dems win.
Also, election integrity matters more than ever. If Republicans want a message to drive home in 2024 and thereafter, this is a big one. In addition to the ease with which electronic voting can be manipulated, as we saw the other day, we have the very real prospect of non-citizens voting. 8 to 10 million people are believed to have entered the U.S. illegally since biden took office. 15 states and the District of Columbia require no photo identification to vote. Add to that mail-in voting and ballot harvesting, and you have the very real prospect of people who have no right to vote casting ballots in U.S. elections. What we need is mandatory voter identification, a return to paper ballots, in-person voting, and to make Election Day an annual national holiday.
ADDITIONAL INFO:
https://amac.us/newsline/elections/not-so-fast-virginia-election-results-should-worry-democrats/
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/saraharnold/2023/11/08/republicans-win-big-in-blue-state-n2630959
https://www.foxnews.com/media/liberal-new-york-times-columnist-warns-ridiculous-ignore-erosion-bidens-support
He's lying--AGAIN!
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6340639371112
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/saraharnold/2023/11/10/bidens-chaotic-speech-screams-he-should-be-banned-from-running-in-2024-n2631061
https://spectator.org/elites-confounded-by-populist-sentiment/
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/dem-voter-loses-it-gop-poll-worker-curse-rant-unhinged
https://freebeacon.com/democrats/this-democratic-megadonor-warned-about-wage-theft-he-also-stole-his-employees-wages/
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/11/10/report-blue-states-automatically-registering-welfare-recipients-to-vote
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/11/maga_is_the_new_sons_and_daughters_of_liberty.html
https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/join-the-grand-old-party/
