RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/10/floods_and_droughts_are_nothing_new.html

There is nothing unusual about today’s floods, fires, droughts, homelessness, and hunger — they have always been part of the human story.  But satellite technology allows us to track them better, and our worldwide media revel in disaster reporting, bringing tearfully tragic scenes into every living room, every night.

Population growth means that more people are affected by weather extremes, but there is no evidence that floods and droughts are getting worse.

Written flood records go back to biblical times, and geological records go back for epochs.  Every floodplain today is a testament to previous floods.  The width of today’s floodplains and the depth of their alluvial soils show that there have been really huge floods in times past — and almost every society has stories of great floods.

Droughts (and the starvation they often cause) are also written into our history of famines, wars, and migrations.  They are also recorded in massive deposits of barren, wind-blown sandstone and loess.  Much of Earth’s surface was smothered by desert sands or vast ice sheets in times past.

El Niño droughts have been recognized as far back as 1525, but the famines of 1877–78 changed history in China and India, where people starved; granaries were looted; dynasties fell; cannibalism became common; and people ate roots, bark and carrion.

The first Europeans to explore Australia recorded smoke from hundreds of small bushfires and noted the beautiful grasslands and open forests created by earlier fires.  Observant ones also noted with awe the nests of flood rubbish caught high up in big gum trees.

The 1812–1820 El Niño droughts caused wars and migrations in Africa, and the 1844/46 El Niño drought changed the history of Australia.  Gregory Blaxland found a way across the Blue Mountains to discover the vast inland grasslands, while Charles Sturt suffered incredible hardships looking for “the Inland Sea” in central Australia during a drought.

Australia was later scarred by the Federation drought and the Millennium drought.

The 1852 flood in the Murrumbidgee River swept away the town of Gundagai, and the 1893 Bremer River Flood destroyed the Victoria Bridge and the Indooroopilly Bridge.  At least 60 people were killed when a flash flood destroyed the township of Clermont in 1916.  That whole town was relocated.

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/3688593-proposed-climate-rule-is-bigger-badder-deal-than-manchin-schumer-climate-bill%ef%bf%bc/

In his Florida v. Davos speech at last month’s National Conservatism conference, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) made important observations about the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investing movement. He called it out as an attempt to use corporate and economic power to impose on society an ideological agenda that could not win at the ballot box. 

“Corporatism is not the same as free enterprise,” DeSantis argued. 

He warned of the danger from the growth of the administrative state, which he called the logical outcome of Congress abdicating its responsibility to hold the bureaucracy to account and letting it do much of the heavy legislating. 

In an opinion piece five days earlier, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg lambasted such Republican critics of ESG. “Critics call it ‘woke capitalism,’” he wrote. “There’s just one problem. They don’t seem to understand capitalism. And flogging ESG is not only a terrible economic mistake. It will be a political loser too.” 

Bloomberg’s forecast will be tested when Florida voters decide whether to reelect DeSantis on Nov. 8. 

The battle has been joined and that is good news, because it signals a much-needed debate on ESG and its climate-policy component. 

Although Democrats hail passage of the Schumer-Manchin Inflation Reduction Act, far more consequential is the Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposed climate-risk disclosure rule, currently being finalized. It will operate at the nexus of the administrative state, Wall Street and politically motivated institutional investors. The Net Zero Asset Managers initiative, part of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), has 273 signatories with $61.3 trillion in assets under management.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/14/were-in-the-climate-army-now/

During the Global War on Terror, when the United States was engaged battling terrorists and insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Left routinely lied to young voters that President George W. Bush in particular, and Republicans in general, were going to reinstitute the draft and send them to these active military theaters. The Left’s message was less than subtle: vote for Democrats or else the GOP will make sure you’re drafted and/or dead.

I was reminded of this in the heat of the 2020 election, when one of the Democrats’ smears was that an unstable President Trump was going to involve us in a war—likely a nuclear one. As during the Bush Administration, the scurrilous charge targeted young voters. What was different was that Trump was far less interventionist, and utilized American military power with significantly less frequency than did his predecessors. If one understands the Left’s tactics, Trump’s disinclination to use military power was not only insufficient to stop their “he’ll get us in a war” lie; it was, in fact, their reason for spreading it. (To those who contest this assessment of the Left’s tactics, does “Russiagate” ring a bell?)

Heading into the 2022 midterm elections, the Democrats and their media cohorts are now using the prospect of nuclear war to try and prop up Joe Biden’s sagging poll numbers, which threaten to drag his party’s federal and state candidates down to defeat. To wit, Biden opined to a gaggle of fat cat Democrats:

[For the] first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, we have a direct threat of the use [of a] nuclear weapon if, in fact, things continue down the path they are going. We’ve got a guy [Putin] I know fairly well. He’s not joking when he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons because his military is, you might say, significantly underperforming.

Yes, if the Democrats’ stoking of “civil war” rhetoric isn’t enough to get their voters to the polls for the 2022 midterm elections, why not toss in the prospect of nuclear annihilation—along a path they and their minions have helped cement—even as they taunt the enemy to try to look like a tough guy? 

What could possibly go wrong?