RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/leftist-naked-bike-rides-and-the-pornographic-imagination/

Years ago, when I was assigned to cover a nudist summer camp in Maryland for a leftist magazine, I braced myself for the unexpected.

In that bright Maryland summer sunlight, I saw unwieldy operation scars, bruises the size of Bulgaria, kneecaps shaped like hard volcanic ash, butts the size of South America, and excess arm skin that recalled the bloated iguanas of Puerto Rico. Stripped humanity up close is often not very pretty, and that’s why clothing (and some modesty) is needed to make it pretty.

As Mae West once observed, “My advice to those who think they have to take off their clothes to be a star is, ‘once you’re boned, what’s left to create the illusion?’ Let ‘em wonder. I never believed in giving them too much of me.”

The motley crew of blue-haired females and often heavily-tattooed cyclists in Philadelphia’s annual Naked Bike Ride makes it plainly obvious that many of the participants can’t quite live up to the ‘naked’ claims of the event. This fact becomes obvious when one notices how many riders opt for some kind of modest body covering, as if driven by a repressed morality that’s at serious odds with the leftist street theater narrative.

Body coverings take many forms — a vest, cape, loin cloth, etc. — but it can also be done by painting your body.  Many of the riders in Philadelphia’s Naked Bike Ride paint their bodies as a way to cover their nakedness; in many ways the body paint acts as a woke version of the Adam and Eve fig leaf.

Paint your naked body all over in colorful configurations and the result, really, is a suit of clothes, the opposite of naked.

The world’s first naked bike ride took place in 2004 in Canada. The philosophy behind riding naked was, and continues to be, to draw attention to anti-fossil fuel causes and as a protest against body-shaming.

Body-shaming  is a leftist concept meaning that one must be blind to the dangers of being overweight and to agree to pretend that massively overweight bodies are just as beautiful as those depicted in Renaissance paintings. To say otherwise is risking being called a heretic.

Naked bike rides are most popular in Left-oriented cities like Chicago, Seattle, Austin, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston and Philadelphia.

https://www.thefp.com/p/climate-activism-has-a-cult-problem?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Maybe you saw Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” smeared with two cans of tomato soup. Or the 20-year-old man who set fire to his arm at a tennis tournament, wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the words “End UK Private Jets.” Or the traffic on London’s M25 highway blocked by protesters for days. One 24-year-old girl, Louise, climbed atop a crane on the highway. “I’m here because I don’t have a future,” she exclaimed between sobs.

All these stories feature young members of a movement that claims to fight climate change by demanding their governments stop using and producing fossil fuels immediately.  

Their methods seem unorthodox, and you’re probably wondering how defacing artwork or gluing your hand to the floor of a Volkswagen showroom reduces carbon emissions. I don’t blame you. 

The difference between me and you is I used to be one of them.  

For the past 16 years, I was part of one environmental organization or another as an activist or paid employee. First it was Camp for Climate Action, where we protested a different corporation every year. Once, in a demonstration outside a bank in Edinburgh, we wore garbage bags and painted ourselves in molasses—a nod to the tar sands that the bank was investing in—and stormed the Royal Bank of Scotland headquarters, where I was arrested.

I became a mother in 2011, and swore off putting myself in danger, but I doubled down on my commitment to the movement. I wrote a book on ecologically minded parenting. I was the co-editor of a magazine, Juno, on the same subject. I gave talks, made television appearances, and wrote articles about the threat posed by unlivable temperatures that come from our reliance on fossil fuels.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/let_them_eat_bugs.html

Give up cheeseburgers, and eat bugs instead.  That’s what the Davos elite want you to do, while they dine on $50 burritos and slabs of steak.  They would even have you feel good about being a meat- and diary-free insectivore.  To this end, they have carefully manufactured the cult of environmental alarmism, whose virtue-signaling adherents have been duped into thinking an ecological disaster is at hand.

The cult’s latest scapegoat is agriculture.  The wise global leaders of the World Economic Forum (WEF) have decreed that farming must be restricted to “save the planet.”  By 2030, they dictate, plebs must adopt the ecologically sound practice of entomophagy, or insect-eating.

In sardonic response to this vision — as Orwellian as it’s quixotic — Michael Shellenberger, the author of Apocalypse Never and a relentless campaigner against environmental hysterics, says pollution from farming is negligible compared to that from jet-setting around the world promoting bug cuisine.  He calls out the “woke” elite’s “festival of narcissism,” in which brazen hypocrisy is a flaunting of power.  He describes the WEF as a “cult wrapped in a grift wrapped in an enigma” that seeks world domination through business.

The strategy is to create a need (in this case, to protect the environment), through fear-mongering if necessary; make people feel virtuous about having that need; and only then launch products that will upend millennia-old paradigms, and hence earn massive profits.  Not surprisingly, millions of dollars have already been invested in bug farms.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/20/the-world-economic-forum-making-the-world-safe-for-autocracy/

Churning out carbon emissions to fly in on their corporate jets to Davos, Switzerland, for their annual fête to make the world safe for autocracy, the World Economic Forum’s hypocrisy is once again patent:

Greenpeace accused attendees of ‘ecological hypocrisy’ before asking just why the WEF claims it is committed to the global goal of keeping warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) when the emissions generated from all the private jets flying in and out of airports serving Davos last year were equivalent to those produced by about 350,000 average cars for a week.

Despite the calumnies by that nest of right-wing loons, Greenpeace, the WEF’s hypocrisy is only exceeded by its elitism. Consider the following from the U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate Change, billionaire John Kerry: “[It is] extraordinary that we select human beings . . . are able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet.”

What makes them “select” and gets them into that room is that they are rich and powerful. How they got that way varies from those who inherited it, married into it (like Kerry), or earned it by providing a good and/or service the masses purchased. Like thinking placing a book under your pillow as you sleep will help you cram for an exam, these elitists believe their ability to acquire money (one way or another) mystically translates into expertise in other fields of human endeavor, ones which must be fertilized by their presumed omnipotence—the climate change apocalypse, disinformation, immigration, etc.

So, too, there are invited attendees who are not necessarily wealthy, such as journalists and politicians (though nowadays many of them qualify for the “one percent”), and sundry courtiers. These invitees leap at the opportunity to attend, hoping to parlay the invite into career and monetary advancement; and relishing the sense of vicarious elitism accorded by their economic betters deigning to acknowledge their existence. It is deemed impolitic to note that the attendance of  these lesser lights is only suffered because they are deemed useful idiots.

What these elitists and their useful idiots are after, unadorned by nicety, is seen in this John Kerry quote: “money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money.” 

Money from whom, you might ask? You. Again, Kerry:

We don’t have time, folks, to be cobbling together bespoke deals here, there and everywhere. We have to do it on a massive basis and the key to that one is philanthropy. It’s not the only key, we need governments to put Federal public money into it.

You see, the rich are tired of footing the bill to peddle apocalyptic conspiracy theories that can scare the peons senseless enough to throw away their liberty and prosperity to make the world safe for autocracy.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/at_davos_the_rev_john_kerry_signals_his_place_among_the_elect.html

John Kerry at Davos

“When you start to think about it, it’s pretty extraordinary that we — select group of human beings because of whatever touched us at some point in our lives — are able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet,” said Kerry.

Before getting to the sillier part of his homily, allow me to explain what Neo-Puritanism is and why it has surfaced. The concept is implicit in the very word “progressive.” In the last decade or two, that word has replaced “liberal” as self-definition among the Left. On the Right, we shorthand the Left’s shifting semantics into the more useful “woke,” a word that on the Left originally meant someone who had awakened and seen the light.

At the risk of tautology, progressives, by definition, progress. Unlike old-school liberals who could content themselves with a status quo, progressives move forward. They refuse to rest, refuse to reflect. That much said, few among them have any clue as to what their ultimate destination might be. For instance, who ten years ago thought that “trans rights” would be a hill on which the woke would be willing, if not to die, at least to pout.

Like their seventeenth-century New England namesakes, the woke exist in a perpetual state of anxiety. For the original Puritans, the anxiety derived from a Calvinist theology that spared only the “elect” from eternal damnation. The problem was that no amount of good works could assure one’s “elect” status. Only faith could do that, but even the faithful could not be certain that their faith would suffice.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/al-gore-attempts-own-greta-moment-unhinged-davos-rant-equivalent-600000-hiroshima-bombs

Al Gore is testing out his performative Greta mode at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week. The former Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate who as early as the 1990’s was dubbed in the pages of The Washington Post as “very boring” and as having a “naturally stiff, wooden persona” momentarily (and very awkwardly) tried to go climate activist beast mode during a Q&A panel.

His attempt this week to pull off a “Greta moment” and shed his notorious stiffness resulted in an unhinged rant wherein he claimed that carbon emissions and greenhouses gases are trapping “as much extra heat as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima class atomic bombs exploding every single day on the earth.”

That’s right, you heard him correctly… six-hundred-thousand Hiroshima bombs every single day – according to his bizarre rant, which he further said is “boiling the oceans” and creating “rain bombs” and “atmospheric rivers” resulting in millions of “climate refugees”. 

“Climate refugees are expected to reach one billion in this century”… he said, before turning to the “xenophobia” somehow unleashed on the world in the process due to the “Hiroshima bombs”. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/01/20/insanity-on-display/

John Kerry, former senator, former secretary of state, and now chief climate alarmist for the Biden administration, said in so many words Tuesday during his World Economic Forum rant that it’s too late to save the planet from global warming. Yet he claimed climate programs still need more “money, money, money, money, money, money, money.” The only reason he’s not the worst person in the world is because he has so much competition at Davos.

What Kerry actually said was that he is “not convinced we’re going to get there in time to do what the scientists said, which is avoid the worst consequences of the crisis,” meaning that he doubts that the global temperature will stay under the cap of 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial temperature set by scientists (though it is actually a random figure with no scientific support).

Yet he continues to crusade for a cause that hopes to strip Westerners of both their wealth – yes, according to the United Press International, he said “money” seven times – and freedom to move about.

With absolutely zero self-awareness, the man who flies in private jets, has multiple homes (which most of us would consider mansions) and more cars than most families, and up until a few years ago owned a yacht, preached about “the way we live,” and thundered against “the incredible sort of destructive process of growth the way we interpret it.” He called it “robber-baron growth.”

But his luxurious lifestyle and those of the other wealthy men and women fighting global warming must be OK, because he assured members of his fawning audience that they are all special, “a select group of human beings” who “are able to sit in a room and come together and, uh, actually talk about saving the planet.”

https://pjmedia.com/columns/john-stossel/2023/01/18/the-recycling-religion-n1662662

For decades, we’ve been told: recycle!

“If we’re not using recycled paper, we’re cutting down more trees!” says Lynn Hoffman, co-president of Eureka Recycling.

Recycling paper (or cardboard) does save trees. Recycling aluminum does save energy. But that’s about it.

The ugly truth is that many “recyclables” sent to recycling plants are never recycled. The worst is plastic.

Even Greenpeace now says, “Plastic recycling is a dead-end street.”  

Hoffman often trucks it to a landfill.

Years ago, science writer John Tierney wrote a New York Times Magazine story, “Recycling Is Garbage.” It set a Times record for hate mail.

But what he wrote was true.

“It’s even more true today,” says Tierney in my new video. “Recycling is an industry that uses increasingly expensive labor to produce materials that are worth less and less.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/01/climate_change_talking_points.html

For the record, climate change is real — but that’s nothing new.  Just ask a wooly mammoth or a dinosaur.  Atmospheric heat-trapping is also real, or else everything around us would freeze solid every night — just as it does on our airless moon.  And sea level is the best way to tell if the Earth is warming or cooling because it is a truly global indicator, rather than a stew of various local measurements.

It is also important to understand the well known cycles that bring us seasons and weather patterns.  The seasons change from equinox to solstice over and over because the Earth’s rotational axis is tilted relative to its orbital plane.  During winter in the northern hemisphere, the sun appears in the sky farther in the south.  It moves north until it reaches the summer solstice — as the weather warms.  Due to the elliptical nature of our orbit around the sun, the northern summer finds the Earth farther away from its heat source than it is in the winter, which tends to moderate the seasonal temperature change. 

The opposite is true for the southern hemisphere.  Closer to the sun in the summer and farther in the winter would make for more severe weather down there, except for the much greater amount of the southern surface being covered by oceans, which also serve to moderate the weather.

Another axiom of climatology is that the west coasts of the continents have noticeably milder weather than the east coasts.  This is probably due to the rotational direction of the Earth, which is counterclockwise when looking down at the north pole.

Back to sea level and climate change.  Previously at this site, Viv Forbes posted a link to NASA’s website showing a graph of annual sea level measurements going back to 1993.  The overall accumulated increase is 102.5 millimeters.  This site is also sprinkled, nonetheless, with all kinds of dire climate change warnings.  But if you do the math, it comes out to a little under 3.7 millimeters per year.  At this rate, it would take about 82 years for the sea level to be raised by one foot.  Also, the graph forms what is mostly a straight line even if you scroll down to see the same plot going back all the way to 1900.  No “hockey sticks” here…just a steady increase.  This is because we are in an interstitial warm period known as the Holocene — which began about ten to twelve thousand years ago when the last ice age, the Pleistocene, ended.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/is-davos-over/

The social club for the very powerful is still drawing plenty of power brokers, but some big names are staying away.

While there are 52 heads of state of government heading to Davos this year, top-tier leaders are missing. U.S. President Joe Biden and his Chinese and Russian counterparts Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are all giving it a miss.

French President Emmanuel Macron, who promised to Make the Planet Great Again, is also skipping the talkfest, along with new British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and re-elected Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Instead, it’s a European-heavy guest list: German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is the only leader from a G7 country, sharing top billing with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, another German.

Davos always drew more Germans than anyone else. These days it has to settle for….

The U.S. delegation includes cabinet members such as climate envoy John Kerry, who will camp out in Davos for most of the week, but others such as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen are skipping.

John Kerry. That’s like sending an invitation to the family next door and having them send their idiot cousin who doesn’t even live there.