grifting through the ages

the covid grift was just the climate gift on high speed replay

stop me if you’ve heard this one before:

1. terrify everyone with dire predictions of imminent doom

2. justify your predictions with “models” that have never evidenced any forward predictive ability

3. demand that everyone upend their lives and choices to stop this “crisis”

4. frame the threats in absolutist, religious, and moral terms

5. never, ever allow the idea of cost/benefit to be discussed

6. use government mandates to create a massive gravy train to alleviate the crisis

7. make sure your cronies and just your cronies get their snouts in the trough

8. constantly move goalposts and claims so that by the time your models are revealed to be garbage, you’re well on to the next grift

9. repeat

i’m guessing many of you have, at this point, a more than passing familiarity with this strategy around covid, but the branch covidians did not invent this. this has been the greenie alarmist playbook for 60 years and arguably for 200 if we go back to malthus. covid was just a highly sped up version which made the grift easy to see. it turned a long-con into a hustle.

epidemiology models make predictions weeks and months into the future. this means that when the future comes, lots of people still remember them. it also means that there is not a lot of time to pivot to the new grift. therefore, doing so gets jarring and visible, especially the 5th time you do it in rapid succession. there were 100’s of claims like this:

epidemiology is like watching seagulls eat your picnic. climate is like watching termites slowly eat the load bearing beams or your house.

climate activism and mandates do not inflict the kind of sudden, egregious damage that covid did but this trade off in speed comes with a pernicious side: the slowness means the con is hard to spot, easy to shift, and the damage just builds and builds in 100 subtle ways until one day your house falls over.

frogs dropped in hot covidian water knew to jump right out (well, some did) but the anthropogenic global warming folks are looking to slowly boil you alive. (and believe me, if you think the data is low quality, adulterated, and mismodeled in covid, wait until you get a load of climate science. it’s an order of magnitude worse, completely captured by agenda and grants, and has long since devolved into full blown crony capitalist advocacy. these are the people who invented the phrase “the science is settled.”)

the WEF and their “build back better” along with the opportunistic virtue grifters like john “carbon footprint of a mid sized town” kerry from this new administration love climate. if you couple it to health and to social justice, you can touch everything on earth and engage in massive social control over lives and livelihoods.

the climate goody room is a massive gravy train that also helps perpetuate a politically based aristocracy. everyone else should drive a prius to save the world so that the folks who mandated it can fly a private jet to brazil to accept a climate award.

the rewards to green pals and the allocations of capital driven by ESG and mandates for everything from windows to HVAC to EV’s to blackout inducing windmills and “flush three times” low flow toilets. now we all have to pick the plastic regulator out of out new showerheads to take a real shower because some donor made a killing on mandated upgrades. almost none of this has any real effect. worse, it was not designed to. it’s just hairshirts and public virtue signaling/pain infliction to draw attention by being a nuisance, not to solve a problem.

if you want to reduce waste, focus on something that matters like packaging. every product you buy is shrink wrapped, bubble wrapped, boxed and reboxed. the waste is stunning. but changing it is not visible for public signaling. it’s not annoying and henpecky. so you ban plastic straws instead knowing full well this makes ZERO difference and that paper straws are likely worse for the environment anyhow. but it makes everyone notice. you’re getting attention.

this was always the california line in budget debates. first things cut and closed: state parks, libraries, and fire protection. this is like 0.0% of budget. it makes zero difference. it saves no money. it’s meant to annoy and punish. and it works.

the climate gang is now at it again looking to force EV’s and windmills and solar and all the other stuff that will make life far more expensive, less reliable, and substitute truly nasty forms of pollution for benign (take a look at the by and waste products from mining, processing, and disposing of cobalt, neodymium, nickel, and and 30 other inputs to this some time.) by the time you build a tesla and power it with windmills to run it for 7-10 years until the battery is shot you’d have been doing the earth a massive favor buying a gasoline powered honda.

but this is not enough. to really get buy in they need to annoy you because gaining compliance with annoying practice is actually what builds belief. this is our old friend cognitive dissonance again.

this is why asking for a favor makes people more prone to like you than doing them a favor. (this is really true BTW)

you need to set up a crisis like “the world will die in 30 years if we do not act now to save climate” and then find silly, picayune, and public ways to signal being on board with “team savior.” no one really believes that eating beef and raising cows causes global warming. the methane they produce is not a that big a deal and they are producing it by eating grass which is, of course, a carbon sink that sucks up CO2 while it grows and replenishes. it’s just a big circle. culling moo-cows is not going to reduce greenhouse gasses or temperatures.

BUT, it’s the kind of thing karen loves to strike a pose about in public and you just cannot buy that kind of marketing. “oh, yeah, like sorry, i’m just, you know, totally like better than you and trying to like, you know, save the world by eating rice grown in a dessert because “food miles” you know?”

once you realize this the rest of these silly impositions and bizarre flexes all start to make sense. it’s not supposed to make a difference, it’s supposed to generate vectors for public posing and in-group signaling. this is a gorgeous example:

no remotely reasonable person who believs that CO2 poses a threat to earth’s climate could possibly look at this ecosystem and say “pets! there’s the problem! let’s fix it.” it’s clearly absurd. but it’s a great public flex precisely because it’s so inflammatory and so nonsensical. it foregrounds the issue and generates attention. it makes you glad to give up straws because you feel guilty about keeping mr fluffers.

but then the adherents wade in and (oh so tellingly) say “well, this is just part of a bigger point” which not only is, itself, a meaningless statement as one could just as easily say that making children sleep in helmets is just a part of the larger issue of “child safety” but then riffs back into that grand old malthusian bassline to which all these claims always seem to return: we’re running out of stuff and the climate will kill us. unlike epidemiology, this has a 30 year timeframe. you can do an awful lot of damage in just 10.

fortunately for us, the club of rome and its progeny have been using these false malthusian and climate claims to predict end after end of the world going back 60+ years. here’s a fun look at what they were claiming 30 years ago:

amusingly, the media savvy folks from tuvalu, who famously signed their climate accord underwater using scuba tanks to highlight their existential threat from rising sea levels turned out to be completely wrong. their islands have been getting BIGGER.

polar bears are THRIVING. agricultural output is up and food insecurity has plummeted over the last 50 years while this same gang has been predicting “food wars” over and over. they were wrong then. they are wrong now.

if we go back a little further to before the great climate shift in 1976 (likely driven by a major shift in the pacific decadal oscillation from cool to warm) we see something VERY interesting that not a lot of people remember. all these same scientists and agencies were warning of dangerous global COOLING and just like now, the only way to stop it and save humanity was to stop burning fossil fuels and stop having children. sound familiar?

many have tried to gaslight this issue and claim it was never “consensus” but this is flatly false. claims that this was not representative are invented from whole cloth to cover for this embarrassing pivot. it absolutely was and all the old hands in the field remember it.

the always excellent mark perry documented dozens of such predictions HERE.

the “experts” are 0 for 50.

there is a name for people who see the same thing in every single inkblot and repeatedly demand the same response to every crisis regardless of what that crisis might happen to be.

it is not “scientist.”

the people making religious levels claims about the end of the world being nigh have been doing this since the 60’s. they have yet to be right about any of it and they seek to alarm and push false “cure” that’s neither needed nor efficacious. they seek to prevent the weighing of cost benefit and to subvert and vilify markets because markets and the price mechanism are such an effective means of establishing aggregate preferences and weighing the worth or products and strategies. markets are the proof of what bad policy this is. therefore, they must be removed from the discussion.

incessantly yammering “externality! externality!” is a red herring. if people want eco products because they value eco outcomes, they will pay for them. better still, markets will rapidly get to REAL answers about what’s more efficient and sustainable instead of making up nonsense like “windmills” that provide such poor baseline power as to require full backup capacity, whose maintenance costs are ruinous, and whose manufacturing generates literal lakes of RADIOACTIVE SLURRY.

if there is any silver lining to 2020, perhaps it lies in so many people have now seen firsthand how models, scare tactics, and hyper-aggressive public policy can be used to harm society while professing to save it. you have seen the lie, seen the grift, seen the false sanctimony and religious fervor. you have seen the vast trough of crony capitalism and the extent of regulatory capture.

as someone who did a serious, deep dive into climate over a decade ago and spoke to many of the top researchers in the world while so doing, i can only say that i was utterly shocked. i too thought “sure, this is probably true. there looks like a sound scientific consensus and good data.” there isn’t.

the censorship makes covid-twitter look like pikers. they will ruin you if you speak against it. the models have no predictive skill. the measurements are a joke and the data has been adulterated so many times it’s hard to even find valid series. those running the key organizations like the UN’s IPCC and the NOAA and GISS are all failed, third-rate back benchers elevated to rank not for their skill as scientists but for their ideological purity. imagine a whole agency where everyone on top is eric ding. welcome to the IPCC. imagine a group run by a fauci clone with twice the zealotry who overtly alters data all the time. welcome the the GISS.

don’t take my word for it. go have a rummage around and see for yourselves. (i recommend not using google as a search engine when you do. they slant their search results around climate so badly that you flat out cannot get a look at the data if you use them. google is not a search engine, it’s a stealth curation modality)

take what you saw and what you learned from covid and see if you see the same patterns. you may be surprised at how closely they map. this is why real life james bond villain klaus “you’ll have nothing and like it” schwab and the WEF love this stuff. it’s the same playbook on multiple fronts.

these agencies and policies are not about science or about merit. they are about politics and they are about power. they are about taking those with the “correct” views and putting them in positions of credentialed authority and funding because it makes for good propaganda.

letting them substitute appeal to authority for debate and data is giving up the game entirely, especially as they are the ones choosing who shall have “authority.” be cautious of credentials. surely you’ve gotten a bellyful of how that goes over the last 15 months. democracies and republics die when their citizens blindly accept technocratic diktat.

once upon a time, education was not about learning what to think, but how to think.

citizenship was about asking the hard questions and developing views.

it is not unpatriotic to question. it’s anti-social not to.

think for yourself or someone else will do it for you.