Links - 4th January 2022 (2 - Climate Change)

Germany’s Energy Surrender - WSJ - "One might expect that a country suffering a generational energy crunch would be trying everything possible to expand supply. Yet Germany is proceeding with the closure of three nuclear power plants—around half of the country’s nuclear power generation—by the end of the year... The closures have been expected for years, but keeping the reactors open for their previously planned lifetimes could have helped alleviate some of the pain Germans are feeling now as rising global demand drives up the cost of energy. German one-year forward electricity prices have hit €300 per megawatt hour. For comparison, the 2010 to 2020 average was under €50 per megawatt hour. The antinuclear move has support from many of Germany’s climate-change obsessives, but abandoning carbon-free nuclear power has had predictable results on emissions. Coal was the country’s top energy source in the first half of 2021, generating more than a quarter of Germany’s electricity. Wind and solar produced 22% and 9%, respectively, as nuclear has fallen to around 12%. France, which relies heavily on nuclear power, puts out about half as much carbon dioxide per capita as Germany. The French also are coping with high energy prices as a result of nuclear outages and greater exposure to skyrocketing natural gas prices. But Paris is responding by building more nuclear reactors. Berlin—at the self-made mercy of the sun and wind—is now deepening its reliance on Russian gas to keep the lights on. This is the background explanation for its weak response to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. Germany’s staunch support for the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia, despite opposition from allies, undermines the West’s response to Vladimir Putin’s designs to dominate Eastern Europe. Germany is now pushing to keep nuclear power off the European Union’s list of “environmentally sustainable economic activities,” a designation that could lower the cost of financing nuclear projects. It’s bad enough that the Germans have undermined their own energy security, but they shouldn’t foist their self-destructive policy on the rest of the Continent."

XR founder Gail Bradbrook compared to Prince Harry for driving diesel car - "Gloucestershire eco warrior Dr Gail Bradbrook has come under fire for ferrying her children around in a diesel car while bringing London to a halt over climate change... many Extinction Rebellion supporters do not realise how privileged they are and their protest appears "puerile" and "utterly misplaced" when contrasted to what is going in Afghanistan."

500 organizations in Canada, U.S. urge feds to stop investing in carbon capture technology - "Investment in carbon capture technology will hinder Canada’s transition away from fossil fuels and exacerbate the effects of climate change, says a new letter co-signed by hundreds of organizations. Over 500 environmental groups and other organizations from Canada and the U.S. put the piece together, which ran as a full-page ad in the Washington Post and Ottawa’s Hill Times. It expresses their concern with government investment in carbon capture and the green guise associated with it."
Effective technologies hinder virtue signalling

What if the cash spent on flawed eco schemes went on new green tech that TRULY worked? - "Albert Einstein is reputed to have said that the definition of insanity is 'doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results'. To me, that perfectly sums up the spirit of Cop26, which kicks off in Glasgow tomorrow... I've been watching such grandiose declarations about transforming the global economy and our way of life for more than 20 years — yet emissions continue to increase... The Ugandan president put it bluntly: 'Africans have a right to use reliable, cheap energy.' The renewable energy sources favoured by the vast majority of environmental activists in wealthier nations have two big problems. First, they take up a vast amount of space, often displacing nature: for example, replacing 1 sq m of gas-fired power plant requires 73 sq m of solar panels, 239 sq m of on-shore wind turbines, or an astonishing 6,000 sq m of biomass (renewable organic material produced by plants and animals, including wood, energy crops such as short-rotation forestry and farm waste). Recent analysis found that to fulfil Biden's promise of a carbon-free economy by 2050, the U.S. could require a land mass equivalent to more than four times that of the UK to develop enough clean power. Second, and of even greater importance, the two most common renewable energy technologies are intermittent or unreliable. Solar energy isn't produced when it is overcast or at night-time. Wind energy requires a breeze. So it is deeply misleading to compare energy costs of wind or solar, only when it is windy or sunny, to fossil fuels. Modern society requires 24 hours of non-stop power, when there's no sun or wind, so fossil fuels are still needed... The International Energy Agency estimates that if the world achieves all of its ambitious stated electric vehicle targets, the saved CO2 emissions over this decade will be 235 million tons. According to the UN Climate Panel, this will reduce global temperatures by about one ten-thousandth of a degree celsius (that's 0.0001c) by the end of the century. Because tackling climate change with current technology is almost impossible, climate policy mostly tinkers at the margins, focusing more on bombastic promises and feel-good rhetoric and less on actions that cut emissions. Politicians have been doing this for decades — the same thing over and over without succeeding — and making ever-bigger promises... A new study in the journal Nature shows the cost of 95 per cent reduction by 2050, almost Biden's promise of net zero, would cost 11.9 per cent of GDP or more than $11,000 (£8,000) for each U.S. citizen, every year. No wonder, then, that politicians elsewhere show little interest in establishing the costs of their own extravagant promises. But pretending the technological answer exists and we just lack willpower to transform our economies is reckless. It stops us from pursuing the real solutions. If we care about fixing this challenge, we need to change course. Continuing to do what the EU has done, cutting carbon with a mixture of market and planning diktats, has avoided just 3 pence worth of global damage for each pound spent so far. That's partly because trying to effect change in the EU is expensive, and many EU climate policies are more inefficient than necessary (it favours using wind and solar to cut a ton of CO2 over the much cheaper option of switching from coal to gas)... Consider how the world in the 1960s and 70s worried about starvation. Applying today's approach would mean asking the rich to eat less and send leftovers to the poor. That could never have worked. What did work was the Green Revolution, innovating higher-yielding crops. It is likely this saved a billion people from starvation... The best example of game-changing climate innovation is the ten-year $10 billion U.S. public investment in shale gas set up under President George W. Bush. It led the way for a production surge of cheap gas, out-competing a significant part of coal in the U.S. energy mix. This was a major part of why the U.S. has the single biggest emission reduction of the past decade. Yet while everyone agrees we should spend much more on R&D, the fraction of rich countries' GDP going into R&D has halved since the 1980s. Why? Because putting up inefficient solar panels makes for good photo ops. It feels like we're doing something, whereas funding eggheads is harder to visualise. Leaders at Cop26 should focus much more on innovation... The geneticist who led the first draft sequence of the human genome argues for research into algae that produces oil, grown on the ocean surface. Because the algae converts sunlight and CO2 to oil, burning it will be CO2-free."

‘The developing world has much bigger problems than climate change’ - "They probably make the world a slightly better place. But the giveaway is in the number 26 – this is the 26th time that we have tried this. We have been trying since 1992, when we signed the Rio Convention... going to extremes is rarely the correct solution. Take another man-made problem – traffic deaths. There are more than one million traffic deaths around the world per year. We could stop them all by setting speed limits at five kilometres per hour. Nobody would die, except maybe from boredom. But we do not do that because there are other costs involved. Likewise, climate change is a problem, a real cost that we want to avoid, but climate policies also have real and substantial costs... a vast amount of emissions that we are going to see in the 21st century will come from the countries that are not so rich – China, India, countries in Africa, the rest of south-east Asia and Latin America. These countries are looking to pull their populations out of poverty. They are unlikely to decide that it is better to leave everyone in poverty in order to pursue Net Zero... [environmentalists] will always say that these countries should be allowed to get rich – and that they actually will get rich from utilising renewable energy. But if you really can become rich from that, it seems odd that we then have to twist everybody’s arms to make it happen. Besides, the developing world has far bigger problems than climate change. Tuberculosis kills roughly 1.5million people every year. Malnutrition still kills around three million children per year. Why do we have such little regard for these other issues, most of which are predicated on poverty? We need to move away from saying ‘this is the end of the world’. If global warming were a meteor hurtling towards Earth, it would make sense to throw the kitchen sink at the problem. But the reality is that global warming is a middling problem in a world of problems, many of which are arguably much bigger – like the lack of education, lack of good healthcare, lack of food, lack of security and lack of peace."

Michael Shellenberger on Twitter - "By 2020, the US had reduced its emissions 22% below 2005 levels. The reason nobody talks about this is because it was mostly thanks to replacing coal with fracked nat gas, which emits half the CO2 as coal, and which had nothing to do with UN climate agreements or climate policies
The same thing happened in Europe. EU had by 2020 reduced its emissions 26% below 1990 levels, mostly due to replacing coal with natural gas, and closing dirtier coal plants in Eastern Europe, neither of which had anything to do with UN climate agreements
And now, new data “actually shows slightly declining *global* emissions over the past decade,” something almost nobody is talking about...
Why does any of this matter? Because facts matter, for starters. But also because 70% of Americans, disproportionately young people, say news media coverage of climate change is making them anxious and depressed
The truth is that *most* environmental trends are going in the right direction
Climate scientists say “we’re hopeless unprepared” for climate change but that’s false. We’re more prepared than we’ve ever been. For politicians, activists, & journalists to spread falsehoods that cause anxiety & depression among schoolchildren is unconscionable
Ever since the above debate climate scientists have refused to debate me (see below). They falsely claim that I behaved inappropriately, talked too fast, and engaged in ad hominems. You can see for yourself that I didn’t. My real sin was pointing out truths they find inconvenient
Honestly, it shows the fragility of apocalyptic activists/scientists/journalists that they never mention
- declining disaster deaths
- no scientific scenario for more deaths
- no increase in disaster costs
- emissions declined 22% in US since 2005 & 26% in EU since ‘90
No issue since “over-population” has been more exaggerated than climate change… What’s really being expressed is Western elite anxiety over loss of control No wonder Xi & Putin both boycotted the wannabe imperialists at #COP26
Meanwhile, we are letting illicit drugs like fentanyl kill 100,000 of our family members every year. There’s no UN conference on it. No wall-to-wall media coverage. And no teenager urging us to panic"

North Face refused to make jackets for a gas company and now the oil industry is trolling them for all the petroleum used in making their apparel - "those expensive jackets – along with nearly every other product in North Face's lineup – is made with and from gas and oil products, and then shipped using fossil fuels."

Meme - "You can't figure out how to unload cargo ships but you know how to change global warming..."

B.C. emergency department head blames 'climate change' for patients health problems - "Like death by heat, doctors have traditionally struggled to clinically attribute mortality and severe illness to air pollution. For Merritt, this summer’s wildfire season changed all that. When a patient came in struggling to breathe, Merritt knew the smoke — that hadn’t lifted from the region for days on end — had made a case of asthma worse. For the first time in his 10 years as a physician, the ER doctor picked up his patient’s chart and penned in the words “climate change.”"
The universal diagnosis!

Rex Murphy: IPCC's ridiculous code red for humanity is a declaration of defeat - "The IPCC is the United Nation’s formidably denominated Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a moniker designed to have people leap out of their sleep at the very sounding of so august a title. It has the same summoning power today as the Roman papacy at the peak of its influence. Curiously like the papacy it also claims infallibility. Curiously too, in this, like all religions, it is fascinated by the end of the world. In fact the IPCC’s main or only function seems to be predicting it on a regular basis, as they have been doing for some time now... Even if this much-hyped scenario turns out to be true, which I seriously doubt: there is not a single person on the IPCC, or who owns a private jet that brings them to their conclaves, who will bear or taste any of the burdens he or she will attempt to impose on normal people as a consequence. For that crowd there will always be a party in the Hamptons."

Keeping a diesel is greener than buying a new electric car - "there are a large number of carbon emissions tied up in the manufacture of a car. According to a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists in 2015 the manufacture of a mid-range electric car with sufficient battery power to carry it 265 miles on a good day will require 68 per cent more emissions than the manufacture of a petrol equivalent. As a result – taking the mix of electricity generation in the US – you would have to drive 19,000 miles before you could begin to say you had saved a single puff of carbon emissions. In the case of Britain’s electricity mix, a study published in the journal Nature Sustainability last year claimed that over a typical lifespan an electric car would be responsible for 30 per cent fewer carbon emissions than a petrol equivalent. This somewhat depends, however, on whether you accept the Government’s argument that burning biomass like wood pellets in power stations – the single biggest source of ‘renewable’ energy – really accounts for zero carbon emissions. The Government’s methodology for counting emissions relies on the dubious and contradictory assumption that while planting a tree in Britain removes carbon from the atmosphere, chopping down a tree in North American and transporting it to Britain to burn in a power station does not generate emissions. But even if you accept the claim that zero carbon electricity really is zero carbon, that doesn’t mean you can cut your emissions by rushing out and buying an electric car. If you already own a serviceable petrol or diesel car, as Alok Sharma does, the equation is very different. The carbon emissions involved in the manufacture of the vehicle are already embedded – they can’t be negated by scrapping it years before its time. Buy a new electric vehicle, on the other hand, and you certainly will be responsible for extra emissions. If you want to cut your carbon emissions the very worst thing you can do is do what celebrities are apt to do – and as Grant Shapps, the Transport Secretary, has admitted to doing: buying an electric car to commute to London from his Hertfordshire constituency (a journey he could easily make by train) while holding on to a second petrol-guzzling car for journeys outside London. We hear endlessly how sales of electric cars have surged over the past couple of years but I have tried and failed to find a vital statistic: what percentage of these cars have been bought to replace old, life-expired vehicles – and what percentage have been bought as additional vehicles to allow their owners to show off their environmental credentials?"
Maybe electric cars are popular because they are effective means of conspicuous consumption

UN Won't Rule in Climate Case Brought by Greta Thunberg, Others - "Two years ago, a group of teens and pre-teens filed a petition with the United Nations saying five major emitters were violating their rights. On Monday, the UN committee tasked with reviewing their complaint basically handed them a participation trophy and then ruled largely in favor of the polluting countries."
Good. When people try to abuse the justice system they need to be ignored
Also headlined: "United Nations Tells Kids to Screw Off"
Top comment: "I remember protesting the golf war when I was in 5th grade and had no idea what it was about but that the adults were urging us to and we were just following other kids who were doing what the adults wanted to get the news channel to appear for publicity. ugggh..."

Bjorn Lomborg on Twitter - "Remember the big, global shut-down much of last year from Covid? It had 𝗻𝗼 impact on climate: "we could not detect any associated impact on temperature or rainfall" To actually have an impact on climate, you need Covid-reductions 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 year"

Bjorn Lomborg on Twitter - "It is quite remarkable, how climate-worried pundits feel free to badmouth any research that doesn't produce the 'correct' outcome Here @Noahpinion telling us that the world's only climate economist to get the Nobel prize is "obviously bananas""

Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, And Why It Matters - "On January 8, 2014, at New York University in Brooklyn, there occurred a unique event in the annals of global warming: nearly eight hours of structured debate between three climate scientists supporting the consensus on manmade global warming and three climate scientists who dispute it, moderated by a team of six leading physicists from the American Physical Society (APS) led by Dr. Steven Koonin, a theoretical physicist at New York University. The debate, hosted by the APS, revealed consensus-supporting climate scientists harboring doubts and uncertainties and admitting to holes in climate science – in marked contrast to the emphatic messaging of bodies such as Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)... Koonin was uncommonly well-suited to lead the APS climate workshop. He has a deep understanding of computer models, which have become the workhorses of climate science. As a young man, Koonin wrote a paper on computer modeling of nuclear reaction in stars and taught a course on computational physics at Caltech. In the early 1990s, he was involved in a program using satellites to measure the Earth’s albedo – that is, the reflection of incoming solar radiation back into space. As a student at Caltech in the late 1960s, he was taught by Nobel physicist Richard Feynman and absorbed what Koonin calls Feynman’s “absolute intellectual honesty.” On becoming BP’s chief scientist in 2004, Koonin became part of the wider climate change milieu. Assignments included explaining the physics of man-made global warming to Prince Philip at a dinner in Buckingham Palace. In 2009, Koonin was appointed an under-secretary at the Department of Energy in the Obama administration. The APS climate debate was the turning point in Koonin’s thinking about climate change and consensus climate science (“The Science”). “I began by believing that we were in a race to save the planet from climate catastrophe,” Koonin writes in his new book, “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, And Why It Matters.” “I came away from the APS workshop not only surprised, but shaken by the realization that climate science was far less mature than I had supposed.” “Unsettled” is an authoritative primer on the science of climate change that lifts the lid on The Science and finds plenty that isn’t as it should be. “As a scientist,” writes Koonin, “I felt the scientific community was letting the public down by not telling the whole truth plainly.” Koonin’s aim is to right that wrong. Koonin’s indictment of The Science starts with its reliance on unreliable computer models. Usefully describing the earth’s climate, writes Koonin, is “one of the most challenging scientific simulation problems.” Models divide the atmosphere into pancake-shaped boxes of around 100km wide and one kilometer deep. But the upward flow of energy from tropical thunder clouds, which is more than thirty times larger than that from human influences, occurs over smaller scales than the programmed boxes. This forces climate modellers to make assumptions about what happens inside those boxes. As one modeller confesses, “it’s a real challenge to model what we don’t understand.” Inevitably, this leaves considerable scope for modelers’ subjective views and preferences. A key question climate models are meant to solve is estimating the equilibrium climate sensitivity of carbon dioxide (ECS), which aims to tell us by how much temperatures rise from a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Yet in 2020, climate modelers from Germany’s Max Planck Institute admitted to tuning their model by targeting an ECS of about 3° Centigrade. “Talk about cooking the books,” Koonin comments. The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating. Self-evidently, computer projections can’t be tested against a future that’s yet to happen, but they can be tested against climates present and past. Climate models can’t even agree on what the current global average temperature is. “One particularly jarring feature is that the simulated average global surface temperature,” Koonin notes, “varies among models by about 3°C, three times greater than the observed value of the twentieth century warming they’re purporting to describe and explain.” Another embarrassing feature of climate models concerns the earlier of the two twentieth-century warmings from 1910 to 1940, when human influences were much smaller. On average, models give a warming rate of about half of what was actually observed. The failure of the latest models to warm fast enough in those decades suggest that it’s possible, even likely, that internal climate variability is a significant contributor to the warming of recent decades... “That the models can’t reproduce the past is a big red flag – it erodes confidence in their projections of future climates.” Neither is it reassuring that for the years after 1960, the latest generation of climate models show a larger spread and greater uncertainty than earlier ones – implying that, far from advancing, The Science has been going backwards. That is not how science is meant to work. The second part of Koonin’s indictment concerns the distortion, misrepresentation, and mischaracterization of climate data to support a narrative of climate catastrophism based on increasing frequency of extreme weather events. As an example, Koonin takes a “shockingly misleading” claim and associated graph in the United States government’s 2017 Climate Science Special Report that the number of high-temperature records set in the past two decades far exceeds the number of low-temperature records across the 48 contiguous states. Koonin demonstrates that the sharp uptick in highs over the last two decades is an artifact of a methodology chosen to mislead. After re-running the data, record highs show a clear peak in the 1930s, but there is no significant trend over the 120 years of observations starting in 1895, or even since 1980, when human influences on the climate grew strongly. In contrast, the number of record cold temperatures has declined over more than a century, with the trend accelerating after 1985... “Over the past thirty years, the incidence of natural disasters has dramatically increased,” Treasury secretary Janet Yellen falsely asserted last month in a pitch supporting the Biden administration’s infrastructure package. “We are now in a situation where climate change is an existential risk to our future economy and way of life,” she claimed. The sacrifice of scientific truth in the form of objective empirical data for the sake of a catastrophist climate narrative is plain to see. As Koonin summarizes the case: “Even as human influences have increased fivefold since 1950 and the globe has warmed modestly, most severe weather phenomena remain within past variability. Projections of future climate and weather events rely on models demonstrably unfit for the purpose.” Koonin also has sharp words for the policy side of the climate change consensus, which asserts that although climate change is an existential threat, solving it by totally decarbonizing society is straightforward and relatively painless. “Two decades ago, when I was in the private sector,” Koonin writes, “I learned to say that the goal of stabilizing human influences on the climate was ‘a challenge,’ while in government it was talked about as ‘an opportunity.’ Now back in academia, I can forthrightly call it ‘a practical impossibility.’” Unlike many scientists and most politicians, Koonin displays a sure grasp of the split between developed and developing nations, for whom decarbonization is a luxury good that they can’t afford... “Who will pay the developing world not to emit? I have been posing that simple question to many people for more than fifteen years and have yet to hear a convincing answer.” The most unsettling part of “Unsettled” concerns science and the role of scientists. “Science is one of the very few human activities – perhaps the only one – in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected,” Karl Popper wrote nearly six decades ago. That condition does not pertain in climate science, where errors are embedded in a political narrative and criticism is suppressed. In a recent essay, the philosopher Matthew B. Crawford observes that the pride of science as a way of generating knowledge – unlike religion – is to be falsifiable. That changes when science is pressed into duty as authority in order to absolve politicians of responsibility for justifying their policy choices (“the science says,” we’re repeatedly told). “Yet what sort of authority would it be that insists its own grasp of reality is merely provisional?” asks Crawford. “For authority to be really authoritative, it must claim an epistemic monopoly of some kind, whether of priestly or scientific knowledge.”... [There is] the emergence of a climate science knowledge monopoly. Its function is, as Crawford puts it, the manufacture of a product – political legitimacy – which, in turn, requires that competing views be delegitimized and driven out of public discourse through enforcement of a “moratorium on the asking of questions.” This sees climate scientist gatekeepers deciding who can and cannot opine on climate science... “I agree with pretty much everything you wrote,” a chair of a university earth sciences department tells Koonin, “but I don’t dare say that in public.” Another scientist criticizes Koonin for giving ammunition to “the deniers,” and a third writes an op-ed urging New York University to reconsider Koonin’s position there. It goes wider than scientists. Facebook has suppressed a “Wall Street Journal” review of “Unsettled.” Likewise, “Unsettled” remains unreviewed by the “New York Times,” the “Washington Post” (though it carried an op-ed by Marc Thiessen based on an interview with Koonin) and other dailies, which would prefer to treat Koonin’s reasoned climate dissent as though it doesn’t exist. The moratorium on the asking of questions represents the death of science as understood and described by Popper, a victim of the conflicting requirements of political utility and scientific integrity. Many scientists take this lying down."
Another "climate change denier" who must be deplatformed!

Pressing Pause In Climate Alarmism In Favor Of Smarter Solutions - "At his recent World Leaders Climate Summit, President Biden repeated his claim that climate change presents an "existential threat." This pervasive climate alarmism is the culmination of persistent eco-anxiety over the past decades. Already in 1982, the United Nations was predicting that climate change along with other environmental concerns could cause a worldwide “devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust” by the year 2000. Needless to say, that didn’t happen. Today, almost every catastrophe is blamed on global warming, and we are being told that we must radically change the entire world until 2030 to avoid the apocalypse... The U.N. Climate Panel estimates that the average person in half a century will be 363 percent as rich as today. When they include all the impacts of climate change, the increase in well-being will instead be equivalent to 356 percent of today’s incomes. That is a problem, not the end of the world... The Paris Agreement which President Biden just rejoined has been marketed as the solution to climate yet, by the United Nation’s own reckoning, it will accomplish almost nothing. In a best-case scenario, it will achieve just 1 percent of what political leaders have promised. And no major nation is on-track to actually deliver on their promises. The Paris agreement is phenomenally expensive, costing $1-2 trillion every year by 2030. Yet, even if all nations actually kept their promises, including Obama’s for the US, and also stuck to them through the rest of the century, the impact would be an almost immeasurable 0.3°F reduction in temperatures by the end of the century. The cost would vastly outweigh the benefit to the extent that each dollar spent will avoid just 11¢ of global climate damage. But there is another cost to excessively focusing on the climate problem in a world full of problems. COVID-19 showed us how worrying mostly about climate leaves us poorly prepared for all the other global challenges. The World Health Organization itself had repeatedly emphasized throughout the last decade how climate is one of the world’s leading health challenges, which is perhaps one of the reasons the group seemed to be blindsided by corona... The world’s poor battle with much greater challenges like starvation, poverty, dying from easily curable diseases and lack of education. And these challenges have solutions where each dollar can help much more. Spending just a thousandths of the cost of the Paris agreement could save more than a million people from dying of tuberculosis today. Each dollar would do more than a thousand times more good than spent poorly on climate. Similarly, we could do phenomenally much better at much lower cost helping children out of malnutrition or improving learning in schools. We could address most of the world’s top issues with a fraction of what we’re spending on climate."
Bjorn Lomborg keeps talking about innovation and green energy, but never gives the slightest detail and never mentions nuclear

Bjorn Lomborg on Twitter - "Scientific American: the term climate change should henceforth be called "climate emergency" Scientific American has decided to embrace climate alarmism rather than scientific reporting... Their article uses this fire picture and claims climate cause “increasingly dangerous wildfires” A science magazine would have shown (and known) that global burned area has declined for 119 years... They allege climate is the reaso “a hurricane blasts Florida” (really!) A science magazine would have shown (and known) that fewer hurricanes hit the US today... They insist climate is the reason “a California dam bursts because floods” (really!) A science magazine would have shown (and known) US relative flood cost decreasing... They allege climate is causing “a sudden, record-setting cold snap” in Texas” (what?!) A science magazine would have shown (and known) that climate means fewer cold days and nights... They say climate causing world's "biggest environmental emergency" A science magazine would have shown (and known) that deaths from climate emergencies have *declined* for a century... "

DOMINIC LAWSON: Free speech, fake science - and why we must take the fight to the climate zealots - "As I write this column, I do so without knowing if all those who regularly purchase the Daily Mail from their newsagents will be allowed to buy the edition in which it appears.That infringement of their — your — liberty is the purpose of Extinction Rebellion, a small-ish but increasingly influential group of middle-class climate change protesters who want to silence anyone or any organisation that doesn't share their hysterical view that the planet and its inhabitants will fry to fossil-fuelled extinction within a decade or two unless we return immediately to a form of pre-industrial subsistence.That, ostensibly, is why they had been blockading the print sites of most of our national newspapers.Their belief is not based on science but is quasi-religious: they regard any provider of information which does not conform to their strictures as wicked and to be silenced (if they refuse to be converted), rather in the same way that the Spanish Inquisition treated heretics. One of its founders and still an active member, Roger Hallam, went even further, declaring that 'maybe we should put a bullet in the head' as 'punishment' for those he deems responsible for this alleged impending planetary extinction... the Press is now defending itself robustly against XR's physical attempts to silence it, yet there has been a peculiar reluctance to challenge the protest group's claims forensically. Peculiar, because it is not just that their methods are objectionable: so are their arguments.Perhaps the only time this happened (at least on the BBC) was when Andrew Neil, during XR's tedious onslaught last year on those attempting to get to work in London, interviewed the movement's then spokeswoman, Zion Lights.Neil asked her to give the scientific basis for her claims that 'our children are going to die in the next ten to 20 years'. After some confused waffle, she responded: 'The overall issue is that the deaths are going to happen' — which did not get us much further.She seemed even more at a loss when Neil responded to her insistence that 'billions of people will die [as a result of climate change] over the next few decades': 'I looked through the report of the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] and there is no reference to anything of the sort.'Alas, the BBC have since parted company with Mr Neil, whose critical approach to this matter is not their house style... As the late chief scientific adviser to the Government, Professor Sir David MacKay, said a week before he died in 2016: 'Because my time is thinner and thinner, I should call a spade a spade…'There is this appalling delusion people have that we can take this thing [renewables] and we can just scale it up, and if there is a slight issue of it not adding up, then we can just do energy efficiency. Humanity really does need to pay attention to arithmetic and the laws of physics.'Yet the XR lot regard nuclear power as satanic, not just because of its former connection with weapons production, but also because they shun anything which doesn't seem to them 'natural'. It seems they would rather mankind died of hunger naturally, than prospered through technological and industrial processes. Or, rather, they take prosperity for granted, without understanding how it was created (perhaps because the great majority of them seem to come from homes which have never known poverty).Yet our politicians seem cut from the same cloth. When Greta Thunberg came to the UK in April last year, they queued up to praise her and her arguments, which are indistinguishable from those of XR... the Government legislated to make the UK 'net zero carbon by 2050' — admittedly 25 years later than XR's impossible demand. But it had no idea how much this would cost, or how it would be done. The New Zealand government did carry out such an exercise, and concluded that to achieve 'net zero' by 2050 would cost 16 per cent of GDP annually. This would equate to £560 billion a year if applied to the UK — equivalent to almost three-quarters of all public expenditure.Yet this legislation was passed without even a debate, let alone a vote in the House of Commons: it was enacted through a statutory instrument. This could only happen because the overwhelming majority of MPs are too scared to be seen as so-called 'climate change deniers'.And they absolutely refuse to engage with such rigorous thinkers as Bjorn Lomborg, the president of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre think-tank, or Michael Shellenberger (named as a 'hero of the environment' by Time Magazine in 2008), both of whom argue that grotesquely excessive resources are being ineffectually dedicated to 'preventing' climate change. So Bjorn Lomborg's latest book, False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts The Poor, And Fails To Fix The Planet, has been almost entirely ignored in the British media (forget about any BBC interviews with Lomborg).And I believe the Daily Mail is the only British newspaper which has given much space to Shellenberger's new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All — perhaps the most pertinent of his points being that to move to 100 per cent renewables 'would require increasing the proportion of land used for energy from today's 0.5 per cent to 50 per cent'."

Former Extinction Rebellion activist goes full nuclear - "Zion Lights is now director of Environmental Progress UK, but was formerly a leading spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion UK and the founder of its newspaper, The Hourglass.Her decision to campaign for nuclear energy will have surprised and angered many of her fellow environmentalists, but she argues that “Covid-19 has led us to a crossroads and we now have a unique opportunity to build a green future that involves clean energy”... When I went on the Andrew Neil Show last autumn, he asked me what solutions Extinction Rebellion had to offer to tackle climate change. Speaking for the organisation, I was careful not to say anything that was not backed by the movement’s declared policies, which are to leave it to Citizens’ Assembles to decide.However, the question has bothered me ever since — because there exist scientifically assessed solutions for addressing climate change, and in the energy arena one of those solutions is nuclear power.She argues that the UK must reduce reliance on fossil fuels, which she described as highly polluting and dangerous, and that nuclear energy is a “low-carbon energy source that we can invest in now”. “For many years I was skeptical of nuclear power. Surrounded by anti-nuclear activists, I had allowed fear of radiation, nuclear waste and weapons of mass destruction to creep into my subconscious. When a friend sent me a scientific paper on the actual impacts, including the (very small number of) total deaths from radiation at Chernobyl and Fukushima, I realised I had been duped into anti-science sentiment all this time”... “I also discovered that nuclear waste is minimal, well-stored and well-managed, and has never actually killed anyone,” she wrote, adding “the mindset that you cannot be pro-environment and pro-nuclear at the same time needs challenging. The more research I read, the more I learned about how nuclear power is an essential tool in the battle to address climate change”."

Ridiculous Zuccs: weirdo canadians

"You weirdo canadians with your foreign snack cakes. *emoji* *emoji*" is considered "hate speech".

Note that this was confirmed with manual review.

It is safest on Facebook to never name a nationality, even if you're clearly joking.

Links - 4th January 2022 (1 - Covid-19)

Wait what? FDA wants 55 years to process FOIA request over vaccine data - "Justice Department lawyers representing the FDA note in court papers that the plaintiffs are seeking a huge amount of vaccine-related material – about 329,000 pages.  The plaintiffs, a group of more than 30 professors and scientists from universities including Yale, Harvard, UCLA and Brown, filed suit in September in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, seeking expedited access to the records. They say that releasing the information could help reassure vaccine skeptics that the shot is indeed “safe and effective and, thus, increase confidence in the Pfizer vaccine.”  But the FDA can’t simply turn the documents over wholesale. The records must be reviewed to redact “confidential business and trade secret information of Pfizer or BioNTech and personal privacy information of patients who participated in clinical trials,” wrote DOJ lawyers in a joint status report filed Monday.  The FDA proposes releasing 500 pages per month on a rolling basis, noting that the branch that would handle the review has only 10 employees and is currently processing about 400 other FOIA requests... Plaintiffs' lawyers argue that their request should be top priority, and that the FDA should release all the material no later than March 3, 2022.  “This 108-day period is the same amount of time it took the FDA to review the responsive documents for the far more intricate task of licensing Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine,” wrote Aaron Siri of Siri & Glimstad in New York and John Howie of Howie Law in Dallas in court papers. “The entire purpose of the FOIA is to assure government transparency,” they continued. “It is difficult to imagine a greater need for transparency than immediate disclosure of the documents relied upon by the FDA to license a product that is now being mandated to over 100 million Americans under penalty of losing their careers, their income, their military service status, and far worse.”  They also argue that Title 21, subchapter F of the FDA’s own regulations stipulates that the agency “is to make ‘immediately available’ all documents underlying licensure of a vaccine."  Given the intense public interest in the vaccine, the plaintiffs' lawyers say that the FDA “should have been preparing to release (the data) simultaneously with the licensure. Instead, it has done the opposite.”... To be sure, most people -- including many who sanctimoniously proclaim “I do my own research” -- lack the expertise to evaluate the information.  But the plaintiffs, who also include overseas professors from the UK, Germany, Denmark, Australia and Canada, appear to be well-positioned to do so."
Only "anti-vaxxers" will see a problem with this!

FDA Says It Now Needs 75 Years to Fully Release Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Data - "The Food and Drug Administration is asking a judge to give it 75 years to produce data concerning the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine, up 20 years from a previous request."

FDA report finds all-cause mortality higher among vaccinated - "The clinical trials of Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine found that the all-cause mortality rate of the vaccinated group was higher than that of the control group, months after the trials were launched, according to a recently released FDA report... The report emphasized that "None of the deaths were considered related to vaccination.""

Pfizer-funded talks falsely suggested rival vaccines might cause cancer, experts say - "at least one prominent scientist has said the presentations spread the kind of misinformation that fuels vaccine hesitancy."

Omicron: Pfizer CEO says we may need fourth Covid vaccine doses sooner than expected - "the two-dose series likely still offers protection against getting severely sick from omicron, the companies said... Pfizer and BioNTech can develop a vaccine that specifically targets omicron by March 2022 should that prove necessary, Bourla said. He said he anticipates new variants to emerge in the future, and the company is monitoring to see if vaccine adjustments are needed."
Soon, you will lose your job if you don't get the booster, since being protected from severe sickness from 2 jabs still won't mean you're fully vaccinated against covid

Pfizer boss: Annual Covid jabs for years to come - "Pfizer has also developed an antiviral pill, Paxlovid, which in trials cut hospital admissions and deaths by nearly 90%... Dr Bourla had a strong message for those who did not want to have vaccines.  "For those that are just afraid, the only emotion of human beings stronger than fear is love," he said.  "So I am using always this argument that the decision to get another vaccine is not going to influence only your health, it is going to affect the health of others and particularly the health of the people you love the most, because they are the ones that you will interact with.  "So take the courage to overcome your fears and do the right thing.""
Annual revenue stream for years to come assured! It is more profitable to jab the whole population every year than to treat high risk populations who do actually have serious covid symptoms
They are still preventing the vaccine is great for reducing transmission (when, sotto voce, the supposed justification for vaccine apartheid is to prevent the healthcare system from being overwhelmed). Ironically, even before Delta,  Public Health England data suggested that Pfizer/AstraZeneca only reduced transmission by 40-60%, and 50% is the WHO's vaccine effectiveness threshold

Pfizer Claims Vaccine Will Reduce Average Daily Child COVID Deaths From Almost Zero To Almost Zero | The Babylon Bee - "In a moment celebrated by all hard-working lobbyists, Pfizer announced that the COVID-19 vaccine will reduce average daily child COVID deaths from almost zero all the way down to almost zero."

Pfizer is brutalized after posting what many call an extremely "disturbing" meme in "Science" - "Gee, nothing says “science” quite like posting a meme of a genderless humanoid blob being hugged and comforted by a giant, shapeless, pink pharmaceutical lab blob, right? Well, apparently that’s how Pfizer sees the world because it’s the meme they posted to comfort everyone about “misinformation” and it scared a lot of people. Pfizer thought they would be smart and dismiss what they call “wild conspiracy theories” about their COVID vaccine with this bizarre blobby meme, which looks like something straight out of a dystopian comic. And really, if you want to talk about disinformation, look no further than the humanoid blob that occupies the White House. This is the guy who went to a CNN town hall and told the world that if they got any of the COVID vaccines they wouldn’t get COVID. As we know now, that was wildly erroneous misinformation that was actually very dangerous. Note that Pfizer has disabled comments, so people cannot comment directly under the meme. What are they afraid of?"

Did Biden Say You Won't Get COVID if You're Vaccinated? - "During a July 2021 CNN town hall, U.S. President Joe Biden falsely stated that "You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations," and "If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in the ICU unit, and you’re not going to die."

Covid vaccines: Pfizer CEO says people who spread misinformation on shots are 'criminals'
Especially considering that last year's misinformation is this year's fact (or plausibility)...

PolitiFact | Sun exposure does not kill the coronavirus - "There is no evidence that sun exposure kills the coronavirus, known officially as COVID-19. UNICEF has debunked the claim. (UNICEF is a humanitarian organization, not a public health institution.)"
Sunlight linked with lower COVID-19 deaths, study shows

Hong Kong’s covid rules and extreme quarantine drive exodus of foreign talent - The Washington Post - "With China exercising ever-tighter control over Hong Kong, the city is hewing to the country’s strict “zero covid” policy extolled by Beijing as evidence of a superior political system. Yet the approach has largely cut off Hong Kong from both China and the world — a severe blow for a place that built its success on global connections. Even more than recent political changes, the authorities’ refusal to adapt to living with the virus is eroding Hong Kong’s viability as an international city, according to almost two dozen diplomats, chambers of commerce, recruiters, pilots and other expatriates. The resultant brain drain is altering the face of the financial hub, which some Western companies now consider a hardship post, as fewer people are willing to take the places of those leaving. The number of overseas professionals and investors admitted to Hong Kong under its general employment program dropped from about 41,000 in 2019 to 15,000 last year and 10,000 through the third quarter of 2021, immigration data shows. With quarantine rules unlikely to be lifted within the next year, departures of foreign businesspeople and other expatriates are set to accelerate.  “The long-term damage has already been done to Hong Kong’s viability,” said one senior Western diplomat. “There is an absolute lack of predictability that businesses don’t like.” Authorities have defended the approach, insisting on the need to keep the virus out — a goal health experts say is unsustainable — as they prioritize reopening to mainland China. The strict measures already included collecting stool samples from young children in hotel quarantine. This month, the omicron variant’s spread led Hong Kong to further tighten rules, lengthening quarantines for most arrivals and threatening holiday travel plans with sudden flight bans for airlines that unwittingly bring in even a few infected passengers. In a survey released this month, the British Chamber of Commerce found that 70 percent of respondents hoping to add staff in Hong Kong had encountered difficulties, with many citing quarantine restrictions.  “As the rest of the world opens up to international travel, there is a risk that Hong Kong will become increasingly isolated as an international business center,” an overview of the results said, adding that senior executives were relocating to Singapore or Dubai, where borders are more open. Jan Willem Moller, chairman of the Dutch Chamber of Commerce, said that about a quarter of Dutch businesspeople have left this year, and that the departures would “increase significantly” if the quarantine rules stay in place. “Inflow has pretty much dried up, as well,” he said, adding that colleagues at other chambers reported similar patterns. On the front line of quarantine restrictions are pilots, especially at Hong Kong carrier Cathay Pacific. Some have been on “closed loop” rotations, alternating between working and isolating for extended periods before they can reenter the community. On layovers, pilots and aircrews are forbidden to leave their hotel rooms, keeping them in a hermetically sealed bubble.  Cathay has occasionally tried to force hotels overseas to provide its pilots and aircrews with single-use card keys to stop them from leaving their rooms... “A lot of colleagues are at breaking point,” said one pilot who resigned recently after more than 15 years flying for Cathay. “I’m tired, and I can’t see the future.”  At least 240 Cathay pilots have quit since May, according to employees who reviewed internal numbers. The carrier is reeling, with staff morale at “rock bottom” after hefty pay cuts last year and more departures imminent... the Oneworld Cockpit Crew Coalition, a federation of pilot unions from the Oneworld network, which includes Cathay, said the airline’s pilots faced “untenable” working conditions. One pilot who has flown with Cathay for more than 20 years said the exodus “is only just beginning.”  “Another year, two years, three years or more of quarantine in Hong Kong and there will be almost nobody left. Some pilots haven’t seen their wife and children for two years”... Tightened quarantine measures have led other carriers, including British Airways and Swiss International Air Lines, to suspend Hong Kong flights. Cargo operator FedEx said last month that it would shut its crew base in the city and relocate pilots over the next 16 months... “With pretty much every expert agreeing that unfortunately covid-19 is here to stay, what exactly is China or Hong Kong’s end game?” On top of the quarantine rules, Hong Kong temporarily bans flights by airlines found to be carrying at least four passengers who test positive for the virus on arrival. Qatar Airways, Nepal Airlines, Air India, Korean Air and Cathay Pacific routes from some cities are currently subject to bans, which are often announced with little warning, throwing travel plans into disarray. Three of these routes, including Cathay Pacific flights from London to Hong Kong, were banned just before Christmas. Flight changes have prevented people from seeing dying relatives and complicated travelers’ efforts to return to Hong Kong. A shortage of rooms at quarantine hotels has added to the frustration. Meanwhile, businesses including banks, media and restaurant groups have begun to pay staff thousands of dollars to offset the costs of quarantine, adding to the burden of operating in one of the world’s most expensive cities... Officials have tried to offer sweeteners in the interim. In an interview with local media, Eddie Yue, chief executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the de facto central bank, said that it had put together a team to deliver “wine and gourmet food” to quarantined finance workers in hopes of making them “less angry with Hong Kong.”"

Scott Adams on Twitter - "Here's the Fake News telling you in 2020 that using UV Light as a disinfectant inside the body is a bad idea and (so Trump could be wrong).
Here are the trial results for using light as a disinfectant inside the body. It worked. Conclusion: Trump asked a well-informed question on a topic his own "experts" did not yet know about.
Here's the full transcript of Trump's comments about "injecting a disinfectant" inside the body. Note his references to light at the start and the end are typically edited out for the Fake News clips you have seen. Removing them changes the meaning...
So why haven't more people heard this debunk of the #DrinkingBleachHoax? One reason might be that Google removed the company's video on it. I assume it is being suppressed on search as well.
If you are a Democrat, you probably never heard the full debunk of the #DrinkingBleachHoax. Look into it and you will find it is like a Rosetta Stone that lets you see the other hoaxes, such as the #FinePeopleHoax the #RussianCollusionHoax and more."

Evidence mounts that Omicron COVID variant is more infectious, less severe than Delta - "the South African Medical Research Council published a report about an Omicron-driven outbreak in the Tshwane district in South Africa’s northern Gauteng province, one of the first areas in the world where Omicron has overtaken Delta as the dominant strain. The researchers wrote that in the past two weeks there has been an “exponential" rise in caseloads, but the surge has not corresponded to a significant uptick in hospitalizations and deaths.  “The relatively low number of COVID-19 pneumonia hospitalizations in the general, high care, and ICU wards constitutes a very different picture compared to the beginning of previous waves,” the report said, examining data from the Steve Biko and Tshwane District Hospital complex...   Scientists elsewhere have posited a theory that may explain why Omicron appears to be less severe than previous variants. At Nference, a U.S.-based biomedical data platform, researchers sequenced Omicron and found that part of its genetic code, which is not in other variants, is also present in the common cold. That strand could be a sign that Omicron is evolving to become less severe and more transmissible similar to the evolution of other viruses... a group of researchers led by Carl Pearson, a research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, published a non-peer-reviewed study finding that Omicron may be spreading twice as fast as the Delta variant. But the researchers said they were uncertain whether Omicron was more infectious than Delta or if the variant is simply better than previous strains at evading immune defenses established by previous infections or vaccines... Researchers in Hong Kong say that a case of Omicron transmission in one of the city's quarantine hotels is fueling worries about the variant's potentially high degree of transmissibility. Hong Kong University researchers reported that Omicron likely spread between two fully vaccinated people across the hall from one another even though the patients never left their respective rooms...   Researchers are concerned that Omicron's numerous mutations on the spike protein will make it more resistant to vaccines and natural immunity acquired from previous COVID infections. In the coming days and weeks, scientists will likely release neutralization studies projecting how much Omicron may evade existing COVID-19 vaccines.  For natural immunity, emerging evidence suggests that Omicron is bypassing the immune defenses built up from earlier infections. Last week, a group of researchers in South Africa posted a preprint study finding that the risk of reinfection was 2.4 times higher with Omicron compared to Beta and Delta."
Obsessing about case counts but ignoring hospitalisations and deaths while still pretending that it is an "epidemic of the unvaccinated" is a great way to sustain moral panic

South Africa Hospitalization Rate Falls 91% in Omicron Wave - "Infections in Gauteng, where South Africa first identified the omicron variant, may have peaked, he said. Infections in North West province may also be peaking, data presented at the press conference showed."

Chise 🧬🧫🦠💉 on Twitter - "HKUMed shows Omicron infects and multiplies 70X faster than Delta in the human bronchus, which may explain why it transmits faster, BUT also shows Omicron infection in the lung is significantly LOWER than the original virus, which may be an indicator of lower disease severity... In contrast, Omicron variant replicated LESS efficiently (MORE than 10X lower) in the human lung tissue than the original SARS-CoV-2 virus, which may suggest lower severity of disease."

Dr ANGELIQUE COETZEE, who discovered Omicron says we are over-reacting to the threat - "As chair of the South African Medical Association and a GP of 33 years’ standing, I have seen a lot over my medical career.  But nothing has prepared me for the extraordinary global reaction that met my announcement this week that I had seen a young man in my surgery who had a case of Covid that turned out to be the Omicron variant... nothing I have seen about this new variant warrants the extreme action the UK government has taken in response to it.  No one here in South Africa is known to have been hospitalised with the Omicron variant, nor is anyone here believed to have fallen seriously ill with it. Yet Britain and other European nations have reacted with heavy travel restrictions on flights from across southern Africa, as well as imposing tighter rules at home on mask-wearing, fines and extended quarantines.  The simple truth is: we don’t know yet anywhere near enough about Omicron to make such judgments or to impose such policies. In South Africa, we’ve retained a sense of perspective. We’ve had no new regulations or talk of lockdowns because we’re waiting to see what the variant actually means.  We’ve also become accustomed here to new Covid variants emerging. So when our scientists confirmed the discovery of yet another, nobody made a huge thing of it. Many people didn’t even notice... If, as some evidence suggests, Omicron turns out to be a fast-spreading virus with mostly mild symptoms for the majority of the people who catch it, that would be a useful step on the road to herd immunity... the reality is that Covid is something we have to learn to live with. Look after yourself and get your vaccines. Above all, don’t panic – and that goes for governments as well."co
This is good evidence that the whole response to covid is essentially political

Study: Omicron risk of hospitalization, death is 54% lower than Delta - "A new study from Public Health Ontario suggests the Omicron COVID-19 variant causes less severe illness."

South Africa study suggests Omicron could displace Delta - "Research by South African scientists suggests that Omicron could displace the Delta variant of the coronavirus because infection with the new variant boosts immunity to the older one."

Omicron is ‘not the same disease’ as earlier Covid waves, says UK scientist - "Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at Oxford University and the government’s life sciences adviser, said that although hospital admissions had increased in recent weeks as Omicron spreads through the population, the disease “appears to be less severe and many people spend a relatively short time in hospital”. Fewer patients were needing high-flow oxygen and the average length of stay was down to three days... Paul Hunter, a professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia, said people with Covid should eventually be allowed to “go about their normal lives” as they would with a common cold."

Recent COVID-19 Trends Suggest That Initial Fears of Omicron Were Overwrought - "The U.K. likewise has seen a dramatic increase in daily new cases but only a modest increase in hospitalizations, which in turn seem to involve fewer severe cases than they did during the last surge. "[The] number of patients with covid-19 in English hospitals is definitely rising, but not precipitately so," Chris Hopson, CEO of NHS Providers, which represents British health care workers, reported in a Twitter thread yesterday. Here is how he summarized his conversations with the heads of the trusts that oversee British hospitals: "What's very interesting is how many are talking about [the] number of asymptomatic patients being admitted to hospital for other reasons and then testing positive for Covid. Some are describing this as 'incidental Covid.'" Hopson said hospitals are "not, at moment, reporting large numbers of patients with severe Covid type respiratory problems needing critical care.""
This won't stop the mischievous conflation of protection from serious disease and protection from infection used to push boosters

Three doses of China’s Sinovac do pretty much nothing against omicron: Study - "While much is still unknown about how Sinovac’s shot holds up to omicron — including how T cells, the immune system’s weapon against virus-infected cells, will respond — the initial results are a blow to those who have received CoronaVac. There have been more than 2.3 billion doses of the shot produced and shipped out, mostly in China and the developing world."

Commentary: Omicron and travel restrictions – uncertain environment is destroying passenger confidence - "  The uncertain environment is destroying passenger confidence, leading many Singapore travellers to delay their first trips since the start of the pandemic. They fear restrictions will tighten further, adding hassle to an already stressful travel experience and possible quarantine requirements by the time they return.  Singapore has also become an even less attractive destination for potential tourists due to the uncertainty and a new daily testing requirement for the vaccinated travel lane (VTL) scheme.   Singapore was already struggling to recover international tourism compared to other destinations. Local restrictions were unappealing. People were also unable to pursue multi-country itineraries using Singapore as a stopover or jumping off point.   The VTLs have so far mainly attracted Singapore residents and overseas travellers visiting friends and relatives in Singapore rather than those visiting purely for leisure purposes.   The outlook for Singapore’s tourism sector was already rather dismal and is now even bleaker.  Hotels have lost most of their quarantine business, which has been a lifeline since March 2020 but is now limited to a relatively small group of countries due to the introduction of VTLs and home quarantine becoming the default option for travellers from nearly 100 countries.   Most hotels will again have to rely mainly on overseas visitors as staycations is a limited market. However, visitor numbers will be a tiny fraction of what they were prior to the pandemic for at least several months. Omicron has already prompted two of Singapore’s largest source markets for tourism, Australia (New South Wales and Victoria) and India, to reintroduce quarantine requirements, essentially killing what was already relatively subdued leisure demand.   Singapore’s largest source market, China, had not yet reopened and was already not expected to permit quarantine free travel for at least several months. Singapore’s second largest source market, Indonesia, also still had quarantine requirements before Omicron. These were expected to lift soon but Indonesia has instead now tightened quarantine rules, making it unlikely two-way quarantine free travel with Singapore will be established for at least a few months. China accounted for 17 per cent of all visitors landing at Changi in 2019 followed by Indonesia with 13 per cent, India with 8 per cent and Australia with 7 per cent...   Singapore has kept the door open, electing not to follow some countries that have shut the borders to all visitors, but the requirements are so cumbersome and the risk of travelling is so high, most travellers will be scared away...   Earlier VTLs focused primarily on long-haul markets in Europe and North America, which account for a relatively small share of Singapore’s pre-pandemic passenger traffic, despite being economically important...   The onerous requirements and the stress of international air travel were already impacting demand, to the point the VTL cap for most countries was not yet an issue although seats on VTL flights were close to being sold out from some countries during peak days...   A smoother recovery is only possible once there is more consensus and uniformity in the governmental response to new variants.  There has been huge variation. Many responses do not make sense and seem arbitrary rather than based on data or science. Politics and a lack of consensus over border policies and travel protocols are the major impediment in resuming international travel.   In the Asia Pacific, where international passenger traffic was still down by about 95 per cent in October (including in Singapore), this has particularly been an issue. The situation was only starting to improve in November as several countries began reopening.  Many have now slammed on the brakes, making it hard to confidently plan any overseas trips.   Omicron shows how precarious the situation still is and how difficult it will be to transition to an endemic state where borders stay open and confidence in international air travel can be restored."

Omicron’s rapid spread shreds budding recovery in air travel - "Requirements vary and can change rapidly, making air travel a befuddling proposition for those in a position to consider it. Over the weekend, the UK added a pre-flight test requirement for all incoming travellers, while the US said it’s reviewing policies on a daily basis. Japan backtracked on a plan to stop inbound flight reservations... “Pent-up demand will come back, it’s just that there needs to be clarity on what those travel rules and restrictions are,” said Goh, adding that the confused response to omicron “does not necessarily bode well for the next variant.”"

liv 🐝 on Twitter - ""once covid is over" is starting to sound like "once I finish this shroud for Laertes""

Cody Gamble on Twitter - "Imagine the outrage if the state enforced weight loss mandates for "the obese to relieve the health care system"

ZUBY: on Twitter - "Do you know the darkest realisation I've had over the past year? It's not about the governmental overreach... It's not the bastardisation of science... It's the realisation that a significant % of my fellow citizens would turn on me if instructed to by an 'authority'."

Anti-Vaxxers Are Terrified the Government Will ‘Enforce’ a Vaccine for Coronavirus - "Anti-vax groups on social media are claiming that the spread of the disease will lead to mandatory vaccinations and 'unlimited surveillance.'... This is a common theme in the anti-vax world, and conspiracy theorist communities more broadly: that every disease outbreak is a pretext to enforce a secret, frequently sinister agenda. (Conspiracy theorists of all stripes have already seized on that idea; almost as soon as the disease started to spread, they were busily peddling paranoia alongside xenophobia and bullshit treatments.) In this case, they have a real-world data point to draw on: the way the Chinese government is furiously cracking down on dissenting voices who criticize its response to the outbreak... The consensus now seems to be that while there’s no coronavirus vaccine yet, it’ll soon be impressed on an unwilling population, along with other vaccines.  “Of course, they will enforce another vaccination,” wrote Mark Elkin, who holds himself out on Facebook as an author and “Earth change analyst,” and who has 16,000 followers. “It’s a double sided agenda. Cull the nations and form more control. However, the ‘order out of chaos’ card will be in full effect due to this virus. The infrastructure of the world is in serious trouble and with that comes medical martial law.” (Facebook has pledged to curtail coronavirus misinformation and "harmful content," instead prioritizing what it calls "accurate information and helpful resources" in their search results.)  Elkin’s message speedily made its way through Facebook’s still ultra-effective anti-vax grapevine -- despite Facebook's stated goal, beginning in March 2019, of stemming the tide of anti-vaccine misinformation... Elkin's post was shared by a woman named Mary Elizabeth... Elizabeth’s post, in turn, was shared by Larry Cook, the founder of the massive anti-vaccine Facebook page Stop Mandatory Vaccination. Cook is one of the biggest single sources of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media, and the coronavirus has made him busy... Cook is also resharing old rumor-mongering posts from Stop Mandatory Vaccination, lightly updated for the coronavirus crisis—for instance, claiming that the CDC will impose “indefinite detainment, forced vaccination and unlimited surveillance.” “Make no mistake, the purpose of the Coronavirus is to help usher in vaccine mandates,” Cook wrote in yet another post. “Be Woke. Know the Plan. Prepare. Resist.”  A Facebook spokesperson tells us, “We are connecting people with authoritative information from regional and global health organizations, as well as from our third-party fact-checking partners." Referring to Stop Mandatory Vaccination and Chem Free Kids, they add, "Both of these Pages have educational pop-ups that direct people to credible information from the CDC and posts rated false by fact-checkers.”... Bigtree is one of the filmmakers behind the anti-vaccine movie Vaxxed, on which he worked with Andrew Wakefield, the now discredited former gastroenterologist who first suggested a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Bigtree, on his radio show The Highwire, also promoted claims that coronavirus was made in lab. This idea was so exciting that The Highwire sent out a press release, which is currently being hosted on the Associated Press site for press releases, lending it a thin but shiny veneer of respectability... The state of rising global panic is good for social media engagement, and good for peddling bogus cures. But vaccine opponents in the U.S. are also clearly hoping it’ll do something else: enlist future warriors in their fight against vaccines at the legislative level.  “Right now there are laws trying to be passed in New Jersey that are going to take away your right to opt out of a future coronavirus vaccine,” Bigtree proclaimed on Press For Truth, apparently referring to a recent bill that would have ended religious exemptions for vaccines, but which died in January. “Laws are being dropped in states all across this country. That’s what you have to get involved with. That’s what you have to worry about.”"
From Feb 28, 2020
So much for mandatory vaccines and the lab leak hypothesis being paranoid far right conspiracy theories

Meme - "IT'S NOT COERCION! YOU HAVE A CHOICE. *Woman held up at gunpoint*"

Omicron study concludes variant more resistant to coronavirus vaccines, causes less severe covid - The Washington Post - "He said the disease may be less severe in South Africa because more than 70 percent of the population had already been exposed to the coronavirus."
Ironically, this is a good advertisement for natural immunity, but it won't stop natural immunity being ignored in the quest to get everyone jabbed multiple times, possibly for the rest of all time

Chris Selley: The experts making apocalyptic Omicron predictions lost our trust long ago - "“This will reach every single person,” another U of T professor and science table member, Peter Juni, told both CTV News and the Star. (In his CTV interview Juni described as a “myth” the idea that Omicron might cause milder symptoms than other variants, but also, confusingly, said that ”we simply don’t know” what Omicron really has in store for us.)... it’s an odd thing: Even amid the uncertainty and apocalyptic predictions, calls for lockdown measures such as we have seen in the past aren’t nearly as strident this time around. There’s little evidence Canadians wouldn’t put up with closing restaurants, bars, gyms and swimming pools: Léger’s latest poll for the Association for Canadian Studies, released last week, found 68 per cent of Canadians (and 71 per cent of Ontarians) would support “reintroducing … lockdown restrictions in Canada” in the face of the Omicron variant. But most expert calls for action, even from those predicting massive rates of infection, have thus far focused on improving ventilation in schools and other indoor spaces, on quickening the pace and expanding the availability of vaccine booster shots, and on rapid testing...   It could not really have been more obvious that these leading medical minds had a bred-in-the-bone antipathy to rapid testing — goodness knows where it came from — and were crafting their arguments to fit it. “PCR tests are more accurate than rapid antigen tests, therefore we shouldn’t allow rapid antigen tests” is the sort of perfect-defeating-the-good logic that one often hears in activist circles. It has no business coming out of a doctor’s mouth.   We’ve heard a lot about how much politicians let Canadians down since March 2020, and quite rightly. But Canadians can vote those politicians out. When this is over, the medical and public-health communities have just as many existential questions to ask themselves about what they said, why they said it, and what damage they have done to the “trust the experts” mentality that generally serves us very well."

Are we overhyping the threat of Omicron? - "The Omicron known unknowns can be overcome with more evidence and data. Acquiring such evidence can help attain an accurate perception of the threat. But this takes time and effort, and it doesn’t make for exciting headlines. As a society, we are more accustomed to receiving snippets of information from a few sources. And, as a result, we have become impatient and lazy. This evidence vacuum leads to disagreements, unchecked opinions, and the outsourcing of decisions to third parties about how we go about our daily lives. In consequence, as a society, we are becoming accustomed to being told what to do. Individuals can readily project their anxieties on to others – as many experts have done. In a state of ignorance and fear, the threat is distorted and bad decisions can follow. When evidence is de-emphasised and the role of experts is overemphasised, this fosters paternalistic and authoritarian policies.   Medicine itself has long dispensed with such paternalistic attitudes. Instead, clinicians seek to inform patients about what they may want or need to know. They share information, recognising a patient’s autonomy, values and his or her need to be informed about the risks and benefits of any given intervention. Dealing with uncertainty is a vital part of medical training due to its importance for informing decisions. Clinicians who can’t tolerate uncertainty are more likely to over-test, over-interpret results and over-refer patients. Such intolerance further increases stress and burnout, and can lead to poor prescribing and have other detrimental effects on patients... Answers to very complex questions become black and white. Uncertainty is suppressed as it instills a sense of dread about what’s next. What follows are political attempts to provide plausible protection from known unknowns. The threat has to be ramped up – and so, in this case, the increased transmissibility of Omicron is discussed as though it is incontrovertible.   The failure to reduce uncertainties is the single most abject failure of the response to the pandemic. Nearly two years in, we have still not researched the impact of those interventions that affect the whole of society – those interventions regularly rolled out when the threat is heightened, which lead to profound societal disruption and divisions... politicians and other experts who are intolerant of uncertainty will only seek to increase the sense of threat and instigate control measures based on little or no evidence.  In the face of uncertainty, the wise learn to watch and wait."

Covid antibody rates more than 50 per cent higher than roadmap predictions - "Antibody rates are now more than 50 per cent higher than epidemiologists predicted they would be when they published models which informed the Covid roadmap.  In February, Imperial College warned that only 44.6 per cent of the population would be protected by the original lockdown release day of June 21.   But the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that eight in 10 people over the age of 16 now have antibodies to Covid."
Of course we are still told that covid modelling is very accurate

Links - 3rd January 2022 (3)

California governor candidate under investigation over 1,000lb bear sidekick - "Turns out campaigning across California with a 1,000lb bear is not a foolproof political plan.  John Cox, a candidate vying to replace Gavin Newsom in the state’s gubernatorial recall vote, is under investigation for violating a San Diego city law that bans anyone, except zoos, from bringing wild animals – including lions and tigers and bears – into the area."

Facebook - "Restaurants are reopening soon for dine in service. The owners and employees are stressed. Please do not go and complain about minor things. Please do not go if you are going to hassle them about new rules. Please do not go if you are not going to tip. They are excited to serve you and are trying their best. These are unprecedented times and your understanding is appreciated."
Apparently they'll be happy to have no customers

Woman on vacation reportedly finds dead tortoise in her vagina - "A British woman has been questioned by police in Spain after doctors found a dead tortoise inside her vagina... She apparently had no idea how the reptile ended up where it did."

Gynecologist Jennifer Gunter Warns Women Not To Put Garlic In Their Vagina - "Women has been placing bizarre items in their vagina from Jade eggs recommended by Gwyneth Paltrow’s website Goop to wasp nests supposedly to rejuvenate and tighten women's private parts...   In a 2014 interview with Scientific American, obstetrician–gynecologist Paul Nyirjesy of Drexel Vaginitis Center at Drexel University College of Medicine said that as many as 10 percent of his patients had tried to use garlic to cure yeast infection... using garlic to treat infection could make things worse since the root vegetable may contain bacteria from soil that can worsen pre-existing infection. She also said that garlic may trigger the vagina to grow microorganism-filled biofilm."

Putting PARSLEY in your vagina to bring on your period is dangerous docs warn after women died - "WELLNESS warriors seem to be obsessed with telling women to stick random things into their vaginas.  And the latest piece of bizarre advice suggests sticking parsley up there can help induce your period."

Doctors warn women not to use toothpaste to ‘tighten their vaginas’ - "Some kinds of toothpaste contain small particles that could also cause painful microabrasions to the vaginal walls... The potentially dangerous trend comes after reports that men were rubbing toothpaste on their penises to last longer in bed...   In the summer, women were warned of the dangers of putting popsicles in their vaginas to cool down."

Princeton - PWB 030397 - Nobel laureate in literature teaches about intellectual life of his native Japan - "Kenzaburo Oe, the 1994 Nobel Laureate in Literature cited by the Swedish Academy for the "poetic force" of his writing, is on campus this year as a visiting lecturer in East Asian Studies and fellow of the Humanities Council... While he has been scholar in residence at the University of California, Berkeley (where he spoke English with his colleagues), and at the Collegio de Mexico in Mexico City (where he spoke French), last semester was his first stint as professor. He taught "The Writer as Artist in Modern Japan," and this semester he is teaching "The Representation of Japanese Intellectuals," both in Japanese. He also conducts some class discussion in English, "doing anything," he says, "that will encourage communication.  "I am enjoying teaching greatly," he continues. "The students express their point of view concretely and clearly. In Japan, when young people speak about literature or philosophy, the discussion is often vague, without accurate definitions of words or concepts. Here, when they speak, they define their terms."... "as a child, I wanted to be a physicist. I begged my mother to let me go to Tokyo to study physics. I promised I would win the Nobel Prize for Physics.  "So, 50 years later, I returned to my village and said to my mother, 'See, I have kept my promise. I won the Nobel Prize.' 'No,' said my mother, who has a very fine sense of humor, 'You promised it would be in physics!'" Oe's village is Ose, in Ehime Prefecture, on the island of Shikoku. "My father was keeper of the forest on our island," he says. "My family had been foresters for 200 years. As a child I enjoyed reading an English encyclopedia of trees. I had an English dictionary but no Latin dictionary to help with the names of trees. My school did not offer Latin classes, but my teacher said, 'You can study French, in which many of the words are very close to Latin.'"  By the time Oe realized that French and Latin, "while related, are completely different," he was immersed in French language and literature. He went on to major in French literatureat Tokyo University, from which he graduated in 1959."

Triboulet: The Jester Who Was Condemned — and Saved — By His Wits - "Nicolas Ferrial, also known as Le Févrial or Triboulet (1479–1536), was one of the most celebrated jesters in history. He served two French kings: Louis XII and Francis I. He had all of the qualities necessary in a good court jester, most importantly, the gift of quick wit. This wit not only made him successful but it also nearly resulted in his doom. Fortunately, that very same wit ultimately saved his life...  Triboulet’s sense of frivolity got out of control, and he slapped the king on the royal bum. The monarch lost his temper and threatened to execute Triboulet. A bit later, the monarch calmed down a little and promised to forgive Triboulet if he could think of an apology more insulting than the offending deed. A few seconds later, Triboulet responded: “I’m so sorry, your majesty, that I didn’t recognize you! I mistook you for the Queen!”  Ultimately, Triboulet’s joking went too far. He offended Francis I to the degree that the king ordered the execution of the jester. Out of recognition of the jester’s years of faithful service, however, the king granted Triboulet the right to choose the way he would die.  Triboulet lost no time in responding. “Good sire, for Saint Nitouche’s and Saint Pansard’s sake, patrons of insanity, I choose to die from old age.” Francis I found his response so hilarious that he commuted the death sentence and, instead, banished the jester from the realm."

Beyond WEIRD Psychology: Measuring and Mapping Scales of Cultural and Psychological Distance
"Singapore is culturally more American than New Zealand and Great Britain... In fact, we are culturally more American than Hong Kong and Taiwan are culturally PRC-Chinese! According to the paper, that is." - comment
For those who claim that Singapore is Asian and so will not fall prey to the US culture wars

EU companies can ban employees wearing headscarves, court rules - "Private employers in the EU can ban people from wearing religious symbols, including headscarves, in order to present an image of neutrality, the bloc’s highest court has ruled.  Companies can ban headscarves provided such a prohibition is part of a policy against all religious and political symbols... The ban on religious and political symbols can be justified by the “employer’s desire to pursue a policy of political, philosophical and religious neutrality with regard to its customers or users, in order to take account of their legitimate wishes”... The cases were brought by two German Muslim women, a special needs childcare worker and a sales assistant in a chemist. Both were told to remove their headscarves after deciding to wear the garments on their return to work after parental leave.  The childcare centre banned staff from wearing any religious symbols, including the Christian cross and the Jewish kippah. It suspended the woman twice and issued a written warning, which she challenged in the German courts.  The drugstore informed its employee not to wear conspicuous political, philosophical or religious signs. She refused and went to court, stating that she regarded the head covering as mandatory under her religion."
The Independent framed it differently (as an anti-Muslim measure) and left out important information even in the article, so its followers were predictably raging on Facebook. What happens when you depend on farming rage clicks...
All the Remainers are silent about this

Christian teacher in Berlin banned from wearing crucifix necklace
Naturally, lots of ignorant and prejudiced people claimed that only Muslims are affected by neutrality laws

German police to investigate Jewish officer who wore kippa while in uniform - "A senior Jewish police officer in Berlin is facing disciplinary proceedings for wearing a skullcap in public while on duty. Chief inspector Tuvia Schlesinger was said to have violated police neutrality rules when he donned a white kippa during a demonstration in solidarity with recent victims of anti-Semitic attacks in the city."
Someone was claiming that the EU's ruling wouldn't stand if any competent lawyer challenged it, ignoring that it was already a case on appeal, and claimed that the moment someone in Germany tried to enforce the rule against a Jew, the ruling would go the other way and the law would be overturned

Meme - "Common Sense Extremists @crushmarxismnow To the leftist, a cuckservative who consistently caves to their demands and norms looks the same as a right winger who actually fights back. So you may as well fight back."

Alison Stevenson on Twitter - "Made more money off of one photo of my butthole today than I did writing a Vice article"

Meme - "Straight males of reddit, what's the gayest thing you've ever done?"
"One of my best friends is gay. He refers to this as a "no homo bro cuddle": I went to his house and stayed the night and we slept in the same bed. Completely non sexual but did spoon (I was big spoon) for comfort and just to cuddle. Reason being - his dad had recently died and he had been sleeping poorly since (lives alone). Said he just needed someone to cuddle with for comfort so he could get a good nights sleep. His love life is in shambles so he didn't want another gay man because he knew they would just try to fuck him as part of the deal. So I obliged and he slept well for the first time since the funeral. It was pretty gay to spoon with a gay man in his bed overnight. But I don't regret it."
Is it homophobic to say gay men always try to fuck the men they cuddle?

Sally Albright on Twitter - "Repeat after me: I am not smarter than Joe Biden. I am not smarter than Kamala Harris. I am not smarter than Nancy Pelosi. I am not smarter than James Carville. But if I l stand back and watch and learn, I will be smarter than I am."
And they say Trump supporters are cultists

Meme - "When Democrats in 2016 were debating whether 75 was too old to run for President. But now a 78 year old is President *Grumpy Bernie*"

The Hygienic Efficacy of Different Hand-Drying Methods: A Review of the Evidence - "most studies suggest that paper towels can dry hands efficiently, remove bacteria effectively, and cause less contamination of the washroom environment. From a hygiene viewpoint, paper towels are superior to electric air dryers... paper towels reduced the numbers of all types of bacteria on the hands. However, the hot air dryer increased all types of bacteria on the hands."
For greenies, trees are more important than people, so

Facebook - "I’ll admit the Bernie memes are funny BUT his openly grumpy disposition during a very historic moment for women and particularly women of color speaks volumes to me." (3 accounts)
"It appears Democratic Party bots are real"

'Mackenzie Health lost my uterus': Richmond Hill hospital apologized, but Vaughan woman facing unwanted surgery - "Anna’s physician had diagnosed her with complex hyperplasia with atypia — abnormal precancerous cells on the endometrial lining.  The standard of care, she was told, was to remove her uterus, Fallopian tubes and ovaries. But Anna, 48, is big on research. What she found made her question the need for a full hysterectomy. She learned ovaries serve an important function in reducing risk of heart attack and removal could expose her to a host of other problems.  She opted to have the uterus removed, biopsied and, if there were signs of cancer, would return for an oophorectomy (ovaries removal).  The surgery went well, she was discharged two days later and waited for biopsy results.  And waited.  Finally, Anna’s doctor made the unusual request to meet in the hospital July 9 with the manager of the OR and director of surgery.  The hospital representatives told her they were sorry; they could not find her “specimen.”... There was nothing left to test to see if she had cancer... body parts meant for testing at Mackenzie Health were routinely placed on the same cart as surgical waste and a PSW was responsible for delivering both. And most importantly, she learned there were no checklists keeping track of what went where."

jeb the llama on Twitter - "Guy who invented the clock: there will be 12 numbers on it
Friend: so the day will be divided into 12 segments?
Inventor: no, 24
Friend: so will the day start at 1
Inventor: the day will start at the 12, which is at night
Friend:
Inventor: the 6 means 30"

Dhevarajan Devadas on Twitter - "Emerging Stronger Taskforce: Set up industry-led partnerships that are not afraid to "fail fast and fail forward""
"When ST repeats meaningless buzzwords without analysis & then wonders why readers have abandoned it."

Meet the 'Elon Musk of Africa' whose emotional story will greatly inspire you and find out his country - "Meet the hidden Elon Musk of Africa who made a car from the scratch. His name is Kelvin usually called Elon Musk of Ghana. He grew up in Ghana, he came from an impoverished family and apparently he is still poor but this did not just stop his ambition to become an engineer!"
Given that Musk was born in Africa...

Facebook - "The KTV cluster showed many people about the KTV night life here. Men paying for female hostesses, to drink, to sing, to entertain...  But do you know there are KTVs who does the same, but with gender roles flip around? Yes. Men entertain ladies, ladies throw money on men hostesses, to drink, to entertain."

Meme - "OPRAH WINFREY -WORTH $3.2 BILLION, YET LECTURES US ON INCOME EQUALITY. GIVES WEIGHT LOSS, ADVICE, YET APPEARS IN WEIGHT WATCHERS COMMERCIALS FROM THE NECK UP BECAUSE SHE CAN'T LOSE WEIGHT HERSELF. GIVES MARRIAGE ADVICE, YET ISN'T MARRIED. GIVES PARENTAL ADVICE, YET HAS NO CHILDREN. HAS NO EXPERIENCE IN POLITICS, YET TELLS YOU WHO YOU SHOULD VOTE FOR. STOP LISTENING TO THIS YOU KNOW MORE THAN SHE DOES!"

Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle - "Do clashes between ideologies reflect policy differences or something more fundamental? The present research suggests they reflect core psychological differences such that liberals express compassion toward less structured and more encompassing entities (i.e., universalism), whereas conservatives express compassion toward more well-defined and less encompassing entities (i.e., parochialism). Here we report seven studies illustrating universalist versus parochial differences in compassion. Studies 1a-1c show that liberals, relative to conservatives, express greater moral concern toward friends relative to family, and the world relative to the nation. Studies 2a-2b demonstrate these universalist versus parochial preferences extend toward simple shapes depicted as proxies for loose versus tight social circles. Using stimuli devoid of political relevance demonstrates that the universalist-parochialist distinction does not simply reflect differing policy preferences. Studies 3a-3b indicate these universalist versus parochial tendencies extend to humans versus nonhumans more generally, demonstrating the breadth of these psychological differences.
We'll still be told that liberals don't have their countries. Presumably we'll also be told that they don't want to destroy the family (even though they keep writing about how it sucks)
Comment: "This is fascinating. It basically says that Leftism is a philosophy of self-hatred. The farther away a thing is from you, the more you like it, and the closer it is to you the less positively you feel about it. It's very consistent with the idea that Leftists tout caring about people and things in the abstract (which is easy to do), while in practice mistreating actual real physical instances of those people and things."