Culture

WMBriggs.com Podcast, 30 Mar 16 — No Deal In Georgia, New Criterion Climate Conference

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Live! 10 AM Eastern every Wednesday. Listen to the archived show above.

Update YouTube is telling me the video is “blocked in some countries” because the snippet from the 70-year-old song belongs to some copyright holder. (I purchased the CD years ago.) I can’t see which countries might be blocked. I’ll search for new opening music.

No Deal.

Read “Christians: Boycott Disney, Marvel, The NFL” for background.

Georgia Governor Deal, like the Legislature before him, surrender to Mammon, all the while swearing they weren’t backing down. Deal did this, not only to “protect” Georgian money flow, but to avoid “discrimination.”

What’s needed is more, not less, discrimination.

Religions—including Islam, which Governor Deal swatted away—are by definition discriminatory. To ask them not to be is to ask them to adopt the State’s official religion, a move which is—surprise—discriminatory.

It isn’t just Georgia, but North Carolina, too. And the NCAA.

Big businesses, the kinds of which we can all do well without, are engaging in holiness signalling. They don’t really give a damn whether the pastor of some small church turns away same-sex couples.

New Criterion Climate Conference

I’ll have a Stream piece up tomorrow with all the details. Today, some name dropping and scene setting.

I can’t find a way to permanently link to the event, but it’s still here on Page one of their listings.

Who came? Roger Kimball, who publishes the New Criterion (the reincarnation of TS Eliot’s Criterion) and is chief at Encounter Books (which puts out tons of must-read stuff). NC had material on the culture wars in science before, but this is their largest public foray into the dismal field of global warming.

Speakers: Will Happer, Princeton physicist, who co-founded the new CO2 Coalition, the group which co-sponsored the conference; plant scientist Craig Idso, who proved CO2 is good; the well-bearded (and therefore most distinguished looking) Ross McKitrick, who proved models don’t match reality (and who had the best line of the morning about the politicization of science, quipping, after being asked about an article which appeared is a supposedly renowned journal, “Just because it’s in Science doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong”); Dick Lindzen, who needs no introduction, and who proved most haven’t a clue about physics, and that, sadly, most don’t care.

Patrick Moore, co-founder of GreenPeace (yes), who proved how robust animals really are to changes in environmental conditions; economist Bruce Everett, who showed that Germany is all talk and no show when it comes to using “alternative” fuels.

Finally, after a lunch which included wine (very civilized), Mark Steyn, who had the audience rolling.

The gathering was intimate and concentrated and focused on the one solid scientific fact oft forgotten: that CO2 is good, not evil.

Again, more details tomorrow.

Categories: Culture, Podcast, Statistics

19 replies »

  1. Mr Briggs,
    Podcasts rock!
    What a sensible and civilised medium.
    I missed the start, or I think I did but it’s a wonder my computer worked at all.
    I didn’t know about the New Criterion Conference but they should have televised it.
    That would be entertainment.
    Thank you for this podcast and I hope there will be many more.

  2. Joy,

    Thank you. The whole thing is now archived above.

    There were cameras there at the NC conference. Whether it’ll turn up somewhere I don’t know. If I learn, I’ll post it.

  3. I expect more of the same we see out of Georgia, NC and Arizona. It’s what happens when spineless whiners are elected and those electing them are willing to pay to be discriminated against and damaged by said paid elected officials. It’s just the radicals that protest, so why is anyone surprised the radicals are winning????

  4. The audio quality is good thanks to that new microphone. I believe the music copyright pertains to each playing of the piece, not whether you once bought a copy. There are organizations that license usage for a fee, a part of which eventually goes back to the artists as royalties. There may be a fair use time limit on clips that you don’t have to pay for.

  5. “The gathering was intimate and concentrated and focused on the one solid scientific fact oft forgotten: that CO2 is good, not evil.”

    There is nothing solid, scientific or factual about “CO2 is good, not evil.”

    Silliness.

    But it is telling – that you guys really are just pro-pollution.

    JMJ

  6. Gary,

    Yes, of course. My objection is the silliness of the copyright law extending that long.

    JMJ,

    CO2 is not pollution, therefore to be “for” it is not to be for pollution. If you’d like some lessons in physics, I’m available as a tutor (for a fee).

  7. I Googled carbon dioxide essential for life and got several hits, one of which was this one. The first paragraph:

    Far from being a pollutant, rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations will never directly harm human health, but will indirectly benefit humans in a number of ways. Chief among these benefits is global food security. People must have sufficient food, simply to sustain themselves; and the rise in the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration that has occurred since the inception of the Industrial Revolution (an increase of approximately 100 ppm) has done wonders for humanity in this regard. And, it will continue to work wonders in helping us meet the rising food consumption needs of a larger, future population.

  8. JMJ, on the contrary this focus on CO2 as a pollutant is taking resources and attention away from real pollution problems. Instead of pestering the developing world about CO2 emissions we should be insisting that these countries deploy scrubbing technologies in their factories and power plants.

    The National Park Service provides a nice summary of the nature, source, and effect of Air Pollution here. Note they do not list CO2 anywhere in this piece.

  9. My objection is the silliness of the copyright law extending that long.
    Hardly silly considering the $$$. The publishing powerhouses knew how to bribe Congress into extending the time. The artists got their crumbs to keep them quite.

  10. JMJ: Pollution is at this point mostly a human governmental construct, as is the zero safe level nonsense used by the EPA and others. Some definitions are accurate, many merely ways to exert more control over people. One must keep adding pollutants as others are eliminated or one loses their job. So we have pollutants that exist merely to justify the EPA—you remember them, the caring government agency that dumped toxic chemicals into the Colorado river. It’s interesting the progressive are pro-pollution when it comes to the polluting effect of massive government regulations made only for the purpose of making certain corporations rich while driving others out of business. And here I would have thought from reading your comments you actually didn’t like rich corporations. My mistake. You like certain rich corporations, that’s all.
    Steve E makes an excellent point also—all the money thrown at supposed CO2 “pollution” could have been used to clear the skies over China and India using real pollution control methods instead of the insane waste of fighting something that is not the enemy.

  11. Briggs, I was 15 when I first took physics. At 15, I was also immune to Hegel’s Fallacy. You are, in fact, pro-pollution. It cuts right to what you seem to want.

    JMJ

  12. JMJ: You are anti-conservative so calling CO2 pollution seems to fit what you want. That makes you guilty of the same fallacy, does it not?

  13. You are, in fact, pro-pollution.

    As Slick Willie might say: “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘pollution‘ is.”

    If you beg a question often enough, does a bald assertion become an established fact?

  14. JMJ,
    So what your saying is… your physics instruction happened WAAAAY WAAAY back in the past, many years before, “the current year,” and therefore it is not important or valid to any argument.

    How about we do an experiment?
    Let’s take some fruit and vegetable seeds and put them in a sealed area, then let’s pump in CO2 to levels around 80%.
    You’re presumption you champion on that big ole bandwagon is the plants would die. After all, pollution is pollution because it has a negative effect.
    What would you do if the plants instead, grew; and grew fast, big, and healthy?

    Ah, who am I kidding, you wouldn’t do anything if that happened. You’d just ignore the evidence because it doesn’t fit with your biased dogma.

  15. So Hollywood is threatening to blacklist people and places if they don’t surrender to and agree with their beliefs?

    What does that remind me of?

    Oh, that’s right! It sounds exactly like the leftist and Hollywood depiction of McCarthy and what they call McCarthyism.

    Pot, meet kettle.

  16. John, shouldn’t that be, “…doesn’t fit with you’re biased dogma”?

    You’re teasing his bad grammar, aren’t you? I thought I was the grammar cop around here.

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