Wolf Notes for 11 Oct. 2018

The IPCC’s latest just in time for Halloween

Everything about the global warming movement is a scam designed to transfer the wealth and political power of the West generally and the U.S. in particular into the hands of socialist apparatchiks at the U.N.  It has always been so.  The most recent effort to accomplish that was with the Paris Accords, from which, thankfully — and in perhaps the most consequential act of his Presidency — Trump withdrew.  But these watermelons in the U.S. and at the UN (green outside, red inside) are not going to give up.

The IPCC issued a new climate report several days ago, complete with dire projections and hands out for money. CNN was on top of it: Planet has only until 2030 to stem catastrophic climate change, experts warn

Governments around the world must take “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” to avoid disastrous levels of global warming, says a stark new report from the global scientific authority on climate change.

The report issued Monday by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), says the planet will reach the crucial threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels by as early as 2030, precipitating the risk of extreme drought, wildfires, floods and food shortages for hundreds of millions of people.
The date, which falls well within the lifetime of many people alive today, is based on current levels of greenhouse gas emissions.
The planet is already two-thirds of the way there, with global temperatures having warmed about 1 degree C. . . .

Oh my.  So what do we need to do (besides simply doing nothing for the next twelve years but ignoring these people) to stave off dystopia?  The UN answer to that one is easy.  Transfer wealth.  How much?  Well, the price tag on the Paris Accords was a paltry few trillion from the West.  The UN is shooting for the whole enchilada this time around — a few trillion of our wealth per year:

A new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report projects between $1.6 trillion and $3.8 trillion in “energy system supply-side investments” is needed every year through 2050 to have any chance of keeping future global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

That’s a price tag of between $51.2 trillion and $122 trillion by 2050 just for energy investments. Environmental economist Richard Tol said, given the high cost, the IPCC’s report is totally unrealistic.

That high end number is almost two times the entire world GDP.  The 2017 U.S. GDP was $19.3 trillion.  In order to achieve their goal, the UN envisions completely reworking the world’s financial and tax system so that they can extract the wealth of the West (China probably gets a pass if they follow the Paris Accords logic).  At least one person has opined that this means “dismantling capitalism.”  I do not read the IPCC report as suggesting that.  They seem to be aiming for fascist Italy, where privately owned businesses can still remain, so long as they exist in service to the UN state.  No word yet on whether the IPCC suggests renaming the post of Secretary General as Il Duce.

One would think that by this point, after the utter travesty of over three decades of failed climate predictions, these bottom dwelling watermelons and their media enablers would be ashamed to repeat their performance art.  And yet . . . if we have learned anything from recent history, it is that socialists will not give up and they are immune to empirical evidence.  All it will take is the next Obama in office to start us down the road to no return on all of this.  Unfortunately, my hope for Trump and Congress to address the IPCC, the bastardization of science, the ability of a President to transfer our tax dollars to a foreign entity without Congressional authorization, and the scandal that is our historic temperature records looks to go unfulfilled.  This is one to watch.

Alan Dershowitz Discovers The ACLU Is A Radical Progressive Organization

Slowly but surely, the liberal Alan Dershowitz is getting mugged by reality.  The ACLU was a communist front organization at its inception, and indeed, perfected the art of using the Courts to bypass Congress.  Prof. Dershowitz bought into the ACLU as an organization solely aimed at vindicating our rights enshrined in the Constitution.  That bit of liberal blindness was possible thirty years ago when the ACLU occasionally took high profile cases on the side of non-progressives.  But it is possible no more.  And for Prof. Dershowitz, the catharsis was the ACLU’s opposition to the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court:

Now that Brett Kavanaugh has been confirmed, it is appropriate to look at the damage caused by the highly partisan confirmation process. Among the casualties has been an organization I have long admired.

After Politico reported that the American Civil Liberties Union was spending more than $1 million to oppose Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, I checked the ACLU website to see if its core mission had changed – if the ACLU had now officially abandoned its nonpartisan nature and become yet another Democratic super PAC. . . .

Well, it always was, Prof. Dershowitz, at least at its core.  The “nonpartisan” facade was simply to claim to uphold the freedoms of this country even as they did their best to replace them with socialist progressive ideology.  Those who bought into the facade were useful idiots.

The Constitution as Unconstitutional

John Hinderaker at Powerline writes:

A major theme on the Left these days is that any institution with elements other than pure, one-man-one-vote democracy is illegitimate. That would include, among others, the Electoral College and the Senate.

Leave it to proggies to ignore our history.  The proggies are confusing democratic elections with our Republican form of government.  We are most decidedly not a democracy.  Indeed, perhaps the form of government most clearly rejected by our Founders, in no uncertain terms, was a democracy.  For but one example, this from John Adams:

Democracy… while it lasts is more bloody than either aristocracy or monarchy. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide.

As to equal voting weight between states in the Senate, that is a form that predated our Constitution.  Our Founders governed through equal voting by state in the First Continental Congress, the Second Continental Congress, and under the Articles of Confederation.  The small states demanded that as the price of joining, and then as a price of union.

As to the electoral college, there again we see a balancing between the “one man, one vote” system that has so enamored the left, and the voting by states, so that each state has electoral votes equal to the number of its Representatives and two Senators.  As Hinderaker writes:

It seems to have just dawned on liberals that our constitutional system is not a pure democracy. It is, rather, a system of checks and balances that is intended to require a degree of consensus, expressed in multiple ways, in order to implement major changes. Ocasio-Cortez and other liberals are indicting the Constitution. Their ultimate indictment, of course, is that the Constitution condoned slavery, which pre-existed it, until it didn’t. See the 13th Amendment. So what’s the point?

Like much the Left is doing these days, it is hard to see a coherent strategy or a plausible end game . . .

Well, the end game is the will to power.  Anything and everything standing in the way of that goal is, to the proggies, illegitimate.

Why Is This Not Big News?

Washington D.C.’s local government, facing a backlash from workers, is in the process of rescinding its $15 minimum wage law.

Though it was served up as a progressive plan to hike wages, Initiative 77 would have actually cost many workers money. The proposal abolished the so-called “tipped minimum wage” of $3.50 cents per hour, replacing it with a $15 minimum wage for all food service workers in the city. But workers that I (and other reporters) talked to before the vote told me that they often make far more than $15 a hour, thanks to tips. Even if they don’t, D.C. law required restaurant workers to make at least $12.50 an hour, with employers mandated to top-up employees’ pay if they earn less than that much in tips.

Given the choice, many workers said they’d rather not earn $15 per hour at the cost of losing their tips. More than 8,000 of them sent comments to the city council urging them to repeal the measure. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser, a Democrat, has indicated she would sign the repeal.

The Devolution of Social Science

An interesting article at Quillete on the social sciences, particularly in light of the recent revelation that three academics submitted hoax articles to grievance study journals and had them published.

Things are different now. I first got an inkling of this more than three decades ago. Sorting through some old papers, I found this quote from an unnamed British sociologist speaking at a talk in 1986: “Theories in science are not constrained in any way by empirical facts.” I noted that most of those listening agreed with him.

The quote is absurd and in the years that followed I noted how widespread this assault on the scientific method has become. A whole field devoted to discrediting science has sprung up under the banner of “Science Studies” which, needless to say, is now a recognized academic discipline with its own association and cluster of peer-reviewed journals. One such is Social Text, which published a brilliantly nonsensical piece ‘Transgressing the boundaries: Towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity‘ by physicist Alan Sokal. Sokal succeeded by using the right words, like “transgressive” and “hegemony,” and promoting the correct political views, like “science as gendered domination” and putting “objective” in quotes.

Bottom line, as practiced today, the grievance studies majors are long on ideology, absent on science.  They are exhibit one for the argument to reform higher education and funding of the same.