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Reality is so cruel to climate wish fairies. | Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
Left climate mob admits they might need to be more friendly
We know a movement is on the way down when they start to analyze what is going wrong.
Faced with the Worst Possible Outcome (Trump is still the President), one corner of the climate zealot world is starting to wonder if bundling The Climate Cause in with the Femo-Gay-Lezbian-Gaza-Project as an all or nothing package might be counterproductive. There is even awareness that they are supposed to be the compassionate ones.
Wait til they find out they manipulate, coerce and bully teenage girls and scare toddlers…
To motivate their team, they stoke their worst possible fear, and what’s worse than the climate apocalypse — well, it’s when voters choose a right wing government.
Without pluralism within the climate movement, we risk handing the future to the far right
…the two of us share a growing concern about the direction of the climate movement. A project that ought to be broad, open and compassionate has come to be dominated by a narrow set of ideological demands which […]
By Jo Nova
They must have been disappointed
Psychologists have finally run a massive test of climate communication strategies, — and they all fail.
A new megastudy of more than 13,000 Americans tested the ten most cited climate-messaging strategies drawn from 157 previous papers. Twenty-four co-authors from five countries were involved. They wanted to find the paragraph — the killer framing — that would change beliefs, shift behaviour, or, ideally, persuade people to part with some cash. They didn’t find it.
Probably the most newsworthy finding is that there is a vast pool of grant money available to study rehashed minutiae of how to sell weather-changing sorcery to the jaded public. It’s a full time Blob Psy-Op machine to “nudge” the voters. If only they spent some of this money checking the science before they fine tuned the fear campaign?
This is a Psy-Op machine in search of a slogan
They call this research “science” but it’s more like corporate message-testing in advertising. And it’s done for free at universities to help the industry. The goal here is not to understand the human condition, it’s to sell a carbon tax or a solar panel.
The study […]
Image by gugacurado from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
We now know that when AI is trained on AI generated content, its output degrades. The more artificial the training material is, the more it hallucinates and becomes delusional. But humans are a sort of large-language-model and we are running that same experiment on us. We are gradually raising children on more and more artificial content and less real experience. There are adult children who have never grown and harvested a single piece of food, who live online, watch anime, and know that electricity comes from wall sockets, and food comes from Coles. We thought they were just detached from reality, but what it it’s something much deeper? What if AI shows us a universal truth of a neurological network?
This is the thesis of The Copernican: Urban Bugmen and AI Model Collapse: A Unified Theory
Model collapse is a serious limit to AI systems; a failure mode that occurs when AI is trained on AI-generated data…
In reviewing model collapse, the symptoms bear a striking resemblance to certain non-digital cultural failings. Neural networks collapse, hallucinate, and become delusional when trained only on data produced by […]
By Jo Nova
And so we arrive, a nation of people looking at TikTok as they cruise down the freeway
This week, our national energy policy is an Agony-Aunt letter — poor Alexa, 21, has been suffering from ‘climate anxiety’ since she was 15. Instead of asking her grandparents (who don’t rate a mention) she dreams of telling her grandkids that she did “everything she could”. Everything, that is, except for talking to her own grandparents, listening to climate skeptics, or seeking alternative views.
Instead of doing her homework, she gate-crashed the PMs promo event so she could be used as emotional bait in a battle between the deep-state-banker-blob and the workers. She probably thinks she’s on the side of the workers (though she’s also probably never met one).
Channel Nine reports on her mental health disorder in the middle of an election campaign, not to help her heal, but to exploit her to push for the climate policies, and political winners that Nine shareholders probably want. See their first line. It’s not “news”, it’s political advertising.
Alexa, 21, has been suffering from ‘climate anxiety’ since she was a teenager. She’s not alone
Young voters are forming […]
The Guardian
By Jo Nova
The Blob are afraid they will lose even more followers to social media…
Academics and the old dying media have produced a study that “shows” people who believe social media posts are bad people. The message here for believers is that only horrible people get their news from sites like X or TikTok. Those selfish people score badly on civic values.
The trick in this “peer reviewed” propaganda is how they define civic values. You might think it means checking on elderly neighbors, donating to charity, or volunteering at the Scouts, but actually “Civic values were defined as an individual’s belief in democratic institutions “. So if you question parliament or universities you are not a good citizen. The institutions are sacred!
This transparent paper is just a get-out-of-jail free card for sloppy, self serving academics. Mike Benz warned us that the Blob redefined “democracy” as “democratic institutions” in 2016, which meant people could be tarred with the “anti-democratic” brush if they criticized the “essential institutions” of democracy, like elections, insurrections, vaccines, or senile Presidents.
The left destroy the meaning of words to deceive their flock. The right let them get away with […]
The Guardian
By Jo Nova
It could be the most rigged survey I’ve ever seen
The Lancet “Planetary Health” poll of young Americans looks as contrived as anything in our fake academic and media world.
The survey, funded by AVAAZ (a $20 million dollar political activist “NGO“) is clearly an industrial scale psychological mining operation to find Politically Useful Statistics. It is amazing the survey passed ethical approval, because some 15,793 people aged 16 to 24 were allegedly subjected to a relentless series of unhinged and unbalanced suggestions. The sheer repetition of doom mongering is a form of abuse. It’s works like hypnosis — imagine being asked, “How much, if at all, does climate change make you feel the following? Then being offered 10 shades of pain: Anxious, Powerless, Afraid, Sad, Angry, Despair, Ashamed, Grief, Depressed, Guilty, and finally Indifferent, or Optimistic.
Not only was there no chance to say climate change made you feel Bored, Lectured, Cajoled, Hen-pecked, Conned, and Scammed, but the response list itself was like a hypnotic suggestion, do you beat your wife, how often do you beat your wife, and how do you feel when you beat your wife?
The hapless victims of […]
By Jo Nova
A group of arty psychologists has accidentally shown how much skeptics can achieve if they just speak up.
The small, poorly worded study, done by people who have little understanding of the climate debate, or even of the scientific method, doesn’t prove much at all. But if you start with 170 people who have been fed propaganda for years and then ask some random questions, whatever you repeat seems more believable. We could have learnt so much more if these psychologists did not start so confused themselves.
Their big “discovery” was that hearing something skeptical a second time gave it a significant boost in believability, even when the audience were 90% believers. Their big conclusion was the advice to essentially never utter a skeptical word, just repeat the propaganda:
“Do not repeat false information. Instead, repeat what is true and enhance its familiarity.”
They appear to be oblivious that their advice essentially kills the idea of open public debate. They don’t mention public debate or free speech. Possibly, since they are at an Australian university, they’ve never come across it.
But the core message comes through at The Guardian — they are scared skeptics […]
By Jo Nova
The “Misinformation Industry” has been caught with its pants down — accidentally finding, then burying, the information that nearly everyone in their own industry “leans left”.
This is a field that generated headlines about how conservatives are more susceptible to believing misinformation, and conservatives consume more Facebook disinformation. It would be awkward then if the whole field turned out to be leftist academics, and they tried to hide that, which is exactly what just happened.
The leading “journal” on misinformation surveyed 150 of its own academic experts, then forgot to mention that one of the most striking and significant results from their own survey was that being a “Misinformation Expert” was a left wing phenomena.
Bjorn Lomborg noticed the statistics on their self-admitted political leanings buried in an appendix, and graphed it himself. He writes: “Misinformation experts are perhaps not quite unbiased”.
There was barely a conservative among them:
@BjornLomborg
Speaking of misinformation, it’s a little misleading, don’t you think, to pretend this doesn’t matter in a field “devoted” to researching political misinformation?
It seems The Misinformation Review has been misinforming its readers.
The Misinformation Industry looks, acts and smells like a leftist invention […]
By Jo Nova
A team of psychologists were so sure “climate deniers” deceive themselves for selfish reasons that they ran three experiments with four thousand people, only to find they were completely wrong.
The researchers figured that those who do not accept that coal makes storms and floods must be motivated by their desire to keep on polluting, or flying, or feeling warm, and so they lie to themselves about the science in order to feel OK about it. (A bit like academics must do when it turns out they get paid well, but don’t know their research topic at all, maybe?)
It must have been quite the shock when Zimmermann and Stötzer were proved wrong on every single experiment. They even tried to bribe skeptics with $20 cash rewards and it still wasn’t enough.
Why are people climate change deniers? Study reveals unexpected results
Do climate change deniers bend the facts to avoid having to modify their environmentally harmful behavior? Researchers from the University of Bonn and the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) ran an online experiment involving 4,000 US adults, and found no evidence to support this idea. The authors of the study were themselves […]
By Jo Nova
Written just in time for the UN Climate junket, Anna Lee, 21, declares she’s too worried about climate change to have children.
In the past these declarations have been a part of a Doomer fashion show where people who probably wouldn’t have had children anyway brag about how saintly they are for not having them. They wear their childlessness as a badge of glory. But Anna Lee’s declaration sounds more like a cry for help from someone raised on a climate fantasy. She doesn’t feel she can offer her children a future, perhaps because she doesn’t have one herself. She has, after all, been raised by the village on a dead-end religion. The world will only be saved if impossible things happen. Storms, fires and floods can be stopped with whirly-gigs and magical silicon carpets, don’t you know? The solution is so obvious, and it’s cheap and free too, but people in our tribe are too stupid and greedy to do it. Imagine what a depressing message that would be — born into a craven mob of colonizing lemmings who didn’t do anything good like ending slavery, inventing antibiotics or walking on the moon. Losers…
Some subset […]
By Jo Nova
For most of our lives, scientists have been among the most trusted community leaders. But not any more.
For nearly fifty years, more than four out of ten Americans said they had a “great deal of confidence” in the people running our institutions of science. This was the strongest possible answer people could give. But all that has changed in the last few years with public opinion on science now splitting along political lines. Faith in the institutions of science has collapsed among conservative voters.
The goodwill, the trust and esteem built by things like The Manhattan Project and the Moonshot carried on for decades, but when Covid arrived, and science was the number one public topic of debate, many scientists sat silent on the sidelines. The lab leak theory came and went and then turned out to have been true all along. When ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine could have saved lives, scientists said nothing. When vaccines were sold as “safe and effective”, researchers who knew there were risks, sat on their hands. When borders could have been shut to stop bioweapons, Trump was left on his own. When universities failed the nation, scientists mostly sided with the […]
By Jo Nova
Something is going wrong with teenage girls. Horribly wrong. Zach Rausch and Jon Haidt have published a bomb of an article. Across the Anglosphere (and perhaps elsewhere) Gen Z girls are more anxious, more depressed, more likely to self harm and less happy, and not just a bit more, but in a seismic kind of way. Things are not exactly great for teenage boys either, but the trends are worst for girls and young women and most of the downturn started around 2012, uncannily in at least five different countries.
Rausch and Haidt make a compelling case that this coincides with the rise of smart phones and selfie-culture, and perhaps that is all the rocket-fuel we need. But the rise of the Glorious Victimhood Era of Woke was surely the guidance system that pointed a whole generation in a race to climb Mental Disability Mountain.
Teenage girls are magnets for fashion — not just in clothes but in ideas too. They may be collecting diagnoses like teenage boys collected football cards, but self-poisoning is not a sport.
The culture that acts like a teenage girl seems to be having trouble breeding healthy women.
Substack: After […]
By Jo Nova
Zion Lights
If we don’t teach our children how to spot cults and con artists they might grow into adults who lie on roads, tie themselves to cranes, and throw soup on a Van Gogh. Those who benefit from Climate “action” are exploiting mentally ill people.
A lady with the unlikely name of Zion Lights was once a spokeswoman for Extinction Rebellion but quit and is now speaking out about their brainwashing, destructive behaviour, and the way they never seemed to want to solve climate change.
“The whole thing was a masterclass on how to manipulate emotions”, she says. She was told to “cry on TV” and bring her children to protests. Fellow activists there were so brainwashed some were sure they were going to die before thirty, and the leader of the movement, Roger Hallam offered them salvation, preyed on their guilt, compared himself to Gandhi and MLK and called himself a prophet. But was rude to followers, wouldn’t listen, and really didn’t care about “the people” at all. Ultimately, while he talked about armageddon, “he did nothing to prevent it” she said.
The hypocrisy finally got to her. Ms Lights wanted to talk […]
Someone who knows what life in a poor country and what having children means explains why Woke Culture has gone too far to young people at the Oxford Union.
The only thing Wokeness has to offer in exchange is to brainwash bright minds like you that you are victims and to complain, to protest, to throw soup on paintings.
Konstantine Kisin is a British satirist, author, and commentator who was born and raised in Moscow.
9.7 out of 10 based on 91 ratings
A new study in the Lancet shows that people don’t get more amiable when temperatures are 42 to 45°C. Apparently hate tweets were lowest at 12 to 21°C but reached a “prevalence of 22%” at the highest temperatures. Lo, verily and ka-ching, it follows that climate change will cause nastier tweets. If we pull on this logic-string, your car exhaust is making people mean, your beef steak causes political polarisation, and if everyone owned an EV, there would be no more wars.
Obviously believers will argue that we should solve our social media angst with subsidies for solar panels and cricket-chips. But skeptics will say we just need lots of reverse cycle heat pumps at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour. Burn oil and calm the world…
Airconditioners save 20,000 lives in USA each year and reduces indoor air pollution as well.
Oh the dilemma — to stop snarky tweets on hot days, we could spend $100 trillion dollars to try to change the climate and wait for next century, or we could just go back to what we had 20 years ago — the miracle of cheap air conditioning?
Bad climate policies breed hate and discontent. In Spain people are […]
One side of politics maintains its support through fear, but it’s an invisible wall until you touch it. Most people within the bubble think they got there through persuasion and reason. They think they are free to leave, they “just don’t want to”. But once an errant thought occurs, or they ask an unpermitted question, the wall of fear appears — it’s the unexpected poison barb, the mockery a reasonable question provokes. It quickly escalates to full blown “primal rejection”.
Leil Leibovitz lived within the bubble, and writes about The Turn — the moments he realized that he was afraid to ask, to speak his mind.
I sense a phase change coming as more and more people reach The Turn.
The Turn
By Leil Leibovitz
You might be living through The Turn if you ever found yourself feeling like free speech should stay free even if it offended some group or individual but now can’t admit it at dinner with friends because you are afraid of being thought a bigot. You are living through The Turn if you have questions about public health policies—including the effects of lockdowns and school closures on the poor and […]
Who voted for Superannuation funds to decide energy policy?
And you thought we elected a government to manage our National energy policy?
Businesses must adopt Paris emissions targets even if the government fails to do so, big investors say.
The Guardian
So even if voters don’t want “climate action”, by default, it’s sneaking in the back door, unless they pay attention.
The “big investors” in this case being a small team of activists running a club that some Superannuation corporates have joined, though it’s not clear why. Perhaps they joined to “look Woke” or perhaps they are feeding the crocodile for fear of being targeted?
The Australian Council of Superannuation Investors (ACSI) is not trying to persuade funds or investors to go Green with reason, instead they seem to operate by Cancel Culture principles on a corporate scale. Their aim, apparently, is to bully Directors of your Superfund into themselves bullying the companies they invest in. In a Saul Alinsky fashion they effectively threaten Directors that they might be personally isolated and targeted if they are not seen to be supportive enough of the Woke religion (ie, climate, slavery, femo-glass-ceiling stuff). Somehow ACSI may “recommend members […]
It’s all a bit much for snowflakes
The ABC is just a Lifestyle Magazine for the Upperclass, paid for by everyone else.
For twenty years the media EcoRulers told people they will destroy the Earth if they use disposable coffee cups and nappies. Their whole identity as a Good Person depended on doing the right thing. And “every little bit matters” — etcetera, and ad nauseum.
Who would have guessed that asking people to save the Planet with every purchase would cause anxiety, a perpetual sense of failure, and long term stress?
And it never mattered anyway — the point was not the environment, but the political power. So now that hapless fans are being struck down with “Climate Distress” — it’s time to forgive them.
Here’s the ABC Agony Aunt column letting all of them off the hook:
Climate distress is real and it’s rational. Here’s how to manage it
Edwina Seselja
While researching how to reduce her carbon footprint a few years back, Brisbane woman Zara Monteith quickly fell down an anxiety-inducing rabbit hole, with each search opening her eyes to a different environmental problem to try to solve.
“It feels overwhelming — […]
We’re in a Culture War, and there has been no name to label the group who are driving this war. The old Left-Right canard isn’t working. The DINO-RINO’s are one and same Swamp-creatures. The left-leaning Bernie fans got screwed by the Upper Class as much as the Trump fans did.
It’s not about the rich versus the poor either: Donald Trump is a billionaire but he isn’t upper class. Green hippies in XR Superhero-Monk costumes needn’t be wealthy, but they aspire to be in the popular upper class. It’s about status and the pecking order. The same is true of the high school students who lecture grown ups on climate change. They might be poor but they’re aiming to climb class rungs.
Words matter. People can unite behind an idea that has no name, but the movement is fragile, prone to fragmenting. But here, in a rather scathing blast from someone who isn’t Republican and doesn’t even like them is a suggestion that’s got a lot going for it. Bring back a new version of the class war, against the Upper Class, and a war on classism. It is something that can unite the Deplorables, the workers, the minorities, and […]
Hypothetically, if someone were trying to divide a nation this survey is Paydirt
It’s almost like a team is winding up the young and impressionable, stoking their fears. Republican Voters worry about policies, but Democratic voters are just scared of Republicans.
h/t David for the “school of fish”.
Look at the top four concerns:
Matt Margolis, PJ Media
According to Kristen Soltis Anderson, the cofounder of Echelon Insights, Democrat voters are more concerned about “Donald Trump’s supporters” than anything else.
Democrats
Democrats are less concerned about policy issues than they are about people with whom they disagree politically. To them, Trump supporters are more dangerous than Islamic terrorists, a more pressing issue than gun violence, and even more important than issues that affect their various constituencies, like discrimination against LGBT Americans, sexism, student debt, alleged voter suppression, etc.
To these voters, Trump supporters are a bigger issue than all of those and more. Imagine being a store owner minding your own business and thinking that the Democrat voters around you think you are a bigger issue facing this country than anything else, even more than the issues that directly affect […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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