Inconvenient facts won’t get in way
These days, in the populist era, politicians — if they are bold and shameless enough — will make statements they know will be contradicted.
Take US President Donald Trump’s denial to reporters that he made a US$1 million bet (for charity) that Senator Elizabeth Warren could not prove her native American heritage. Yet he was on tape offering the bet at a political rally on July 5 in Montana. Technology proved it. Case closed.
Trump, however, subsequently eased his way out of the situation with a “joke” about only agreeing to it if he could test her himself, which he said he wouldn’t enjoy, and went back to calling her Pocahontas. Everyone moved on.
The reason the facts didn’t matter to Trump in this case is that he is usually only speaking to the 38-45 per cent of Americans who back him in a fractured, polarised political system. Trump made the facts irrelevant by playing on the tribalism of the moment. He was jabbing at a key opponent and he knew his base would lap it up.
His methods — playing loose with basic facts — have become so common they lack any impact. If the intended target audience does not care, or believes Trump over facts, the power of facts to hurt the President is greatly diminished.
Trump’s control of his base is what keeps congressional Republicans in line. Republicans — at least until the Midterms next month — control the presidency and both houses of Congress. Three weeks ago, the New
published a lengthy investigation into Trump’s business dealings that has had no political impact on the president at all. Trump’s supporters — who have long considered themselves ignored by the urban power elites — appreciate his laser focus on them.
Trump was almost certainly channelling his base when he spoke bluntly about not wanting to put US arms sales to Saudi Arabia at risk over the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. He spelled out that the US would be harming itself. He added that Khashoggi was effectively not one of them: A resident, not a US citizen.
Trump repeated the shaky official Saudi denials to quarantine its rulers from blame. Khashoggi’s continued disappearance, news of an audio tape, flight logs of agents flying to Turkey, evidence said to be found at the Istanbul consulate, cleaners and new paint at the site and links between suspects and the prince pointed the other way.
Any responsibility will be kept away from royalty via an investigation run by the Saudis. They have called it a quarrel that got out of hand and arrested 18. Inconvenient facts won’t get in the way.
Crash nightmare
I was returning to Whanga¯rei from Warkworth on Saturday afternoon. Not long before 4pm I descended the hill coming on to the straight leading up to the Oakleigh Service Station, the traffic was running as per normal, and
Climate reality
Rachel Stewart, I enjoyed your missive as an amusing take-off on the latest IPCC call to support the payment of vast sums of our money to various corrupt dictators or similar. After all, IPCC was set up to show “man-made” warming. They are paid to do that, so they strive to show the desired results!
But it is obvious to any scientist or engineer worth their salt that there has been no significant warming this century. A basic knowledge of statistical variance and error bars tells us that.
It is also clear that no gas can cause heat storage via radiation in an atmospheric mixture because all gases have such wide spacings between molecules, that the gas laws forbid it. Planets and moons with carbon dioxide or methane atmospheres behave just the same as ours. According to Nasa, Russian and EU satellite readings too. Sunlight and air density govern ground temperature.
The entire AGW edifice, being unprovable as they have admitted, is all based on mathematical models, all averaged and using CO as a tuning knob. Now so far out as to be an embarrassment. Any qualified person also knows that “models are always wrong, but sometimes useful”. They can never provide data, that needs measurement of the real world. The thermometer is not co-operating, and Climategate tells us why they persist when they should have stopped taking our taxes.
What we are actually seeing is a normal cyclical (c.63 years) start to cooling as sea ice starts to grow and those famous passages become
blocked again. Except to the biggest icebreakers. Meanwhile Ross Shelf ice freezes from underneath.
So Rachel Stewart, enjoy the warmth while you may and thanks again for the delightfully bantering piece. An antidote to the real worry, which is that Western Civilisation is destroyed by hippy delusions.