Oh boy. Remember when a study came out that said that conservative political beliefs are associated with psychotic traits, such as authoritarianism and tough-mindedness? While liberalism is associated with “social desirability?” The American Journal of Political Science recently had to print a somewhat embarrassing correction. It turns out somebody made an Excel error. And the study’s results aren’t a little off. They aren’t a lot off. They are exactly backwards. In other words, at least according to this study, it’s liberals who are psychotic and conservatives who are awesome. Well, obviously, as a conservative, I first had to stop laughing for 10 minutes before I could catch my breath. –Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, The Week, 10 June 2016
The reason the study was made, and the reason it was published, and the reason it was cited so often despite its shoddy methodology, was simply to smear conservatives, and to use “science” as a weapon in our soul-deadening cultural-political war. Isn’t it time we see that this is killing science and its credibility? Isn’t it time to do something about it? –Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, The Week, 10 June 2016
We have become familiar with the cold blob, which has developed at the ocean surface in the northern part of the North Atlantic during the last couple of years, but it is evident that it has been getting much colder below the surface as well, down at least to 700 m. Temperatures are now back down to where they were in the early 1990s. –Paul Homewood, Not A Lot Of People Know That, 13 June 2016
But the biggest takeaway from this year’s BP Statistical Review may be that the world’s fossil fuel consumption has also never been higher. While global coal consumption did decline by 1% in 2015, the world set new consumption records for petroleum and natural gas. The net impact was a total increase in the world’s fossil fuel consumption of about 0.6%. That may not seem like much, but the net increase in fossil fuel consumption — the equivalent of 127 million metric tons of petroleum — was 2.6 times the overall increase in the consumption of renewables (48 million metric tons of oil equivalent). As a result, despite the record increase in renewable consumption, global carbon dioxide emissions once again set a new all-time record high. –Robert Rapier, Forbes, 8 June 2016
Today, in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, MEPs voted “overwhelmingly” by 577 MEPs, with only 24 against and 69 abstentions to accept the Green Party’s Heubuch Report and demand that the European Union stop funding the G8’s New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. In 2015, after 30 years of residence in the Brussels area, I became a Belgian citizen. Today, for the first time since officially becoming a European, I was ashamed of what ill-guided people in the European Parliament had done in the name of Europe. We need to let Africa have the chance to develop, not on our terms or demands, but on theirs. Shame on Maria Heubuch and her band of eco-religious missionary zealots. — David Zaruk, The Risk-Monger, 8 June 2016
