Potpourri

Bully!

One of the great challenges of the  Late Modern Age is how to define a disparagement so that it does not include oneself. For example, 'sexual predator' must apply to teen-aged boys who are said to go horizontal on the sofa and the girl later has an attack of the vapors, but does not apply to Ted Kennedy or Bill Clinton, at least while they are still in office. To wit:

bully (v.): "to overbear with bluster or menaces," 1710, from bully (n.).

Brett Kavanaugh shared the DC Court of Appeals with Merrick Garland, who was its chief judge. Republicans so opposed Garland's appointment to succeed Scalia that they would not even allow a vote. (TOF thought the power play was churlish and did not object to Garland.) But they did not try to smear him.  There was no asisault on the very basics of the law. Anyone who remembers the Massachussetts day care center hysteria -- or the Salem witch hysteria, or the numerous lynchings once common the south and midwest, often in consequence of miscegenation hysteria -- should be wary of swallowing any accusation simply because it is fraught. The latter in particular was often accompanied by chanting, intimidating mobs. Recall also Tawana Brawley, the Duke lacrosse players, and others. No one of the usual suspects "believed the victims" of Bill Clinton.

FDR would never get loyal Democrat and devoted New Dealer, Hugo Black, onto the court today. His youthful indiscretion was his membership in the Ku Klux Klan. He resigned from the KKK in 1925, at age 39. 

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Thank Goodness for Global Warming

The greening of the world as measured by Leaf Area Index (LAI)

Speaking of CO2

Fallen Angels redux.

Die Twinnies

Be afraid. Be very afraid. They got accordians and they know how to use them.

It's Natural!

Think twice before justifying a behavior on the basis that "animals do it, too!" After all, dolphins engage in murder and rape.

“Demand me nothing: … I never will speake word.” -- Iago, Othello

The Stanford Prison Experiment

Psychology cannot suit up in the game played by Physics and Chemistry. It is almost impossible to construct an objective science when the very objects of study are themselves created and defined by the researchers, and when things that cannot be measured are replaced by surrogates solely because they can be. The most famous psychology study of all time was a sham.

The Manhattan Contrarian Remembers the First Earth Day:

"Forty-eight years after the first Earth Day in 1970, the scares that got the thing going look, frankly, ridiculous in retrospect."
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2018-4-23-why-i-have-a-problem-with-earth-day

At the time of the first Earth Day, super-doom-monger Paul Ehrlich was riding high on the success of his big book, The Population Bomb, which had been published in 1968. 

• "In ten years (1980) all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish."
• "by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions."

"The second most important environmental crisis as predicted in 1970.  You guessed it -- climate change!  Oh, except for one thing:  It was global cooling, rather than global warming!" 

• "The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years.  If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age."

Then, there's air pollution.

• "In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution." 
• "At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it's only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable."

And Resource Depletion. Limits to Growth would appear in a couple years.

• Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.

Writing just five years after the first Earth Day, Paul Ehrlich and his biologist wife, Anne Ehrlich, predicted that "since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 yeas or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it."

Quote of the Day

"Striving gets you upwardly mobile suburbs and gentrifying urban neighborhoods.  Handouts get you Baltimore."
-- The Manhattan Contrarian