Just as no amount of flat temperature data would dissuade the climate cult, so no amount of flat (or even negative!) data on mask effectiveness will shake the faith of the Church of Covid. Beautiful Theories cannot be disproven by mere information.

Every crisis becomes a religion if it lasts long enough.

One factor in that transformation is the Beautiful Theory phenomenon: the power elite insists its remedies are logical and politically correct so they MUST work, even if the actual evidence shows they obviously don't.

Around the world, very much including the Western world, real power is measured by the ability to silence criticism.

The highest reaches of power are measured by the ability to force people to speak in politically-approved ways.

The ability to silence criticism is a signifier of power. It's how truly powerful groups and regimes recognize each other. If free people can challenge your ideals or mock you without fear, you aren't TRULY powerful, no matter how much authority you might nominally possess.

And if you can force people to speak, force them to use your preferred language, penalize them socially or legally for failing to signal their support for your agenda, then you've entered the winner's circle. Your government or movement has taken a seat at the highest table.

This is one of the reasons people with authoritarian or totalitarian inclinations are constantly screaming that opponents are trying to silence them, even when it's manifestly untrue. It's a means of signaling their contempt for the opposition, of diminishing its stature.

These people would cheerfully allow themselves to be silenced by a regime or movement they truly respected. They pretend to be victims of oppression as a means of signaling the illegitimacy of leaders they despise.

It's funny how so many people who claim to worship "democracy" also dismiss nationalism as selfish xenophobia. Democracy is absolutely meaningless without strong national sovereignty. Under globalism, citizens of any given state have little influence over how they are governed.

Nationalism isn't just mindless tribalism. People are correct to insist their government has a responsibility TO THEM that vastly outweighs any imagined responsibility to foreign governments they have absolutely no influence over, or foreign populations.

We've seen that point taken to absurd extremes by the Left during the Trump administration, with whack-job judges ruling that foreigners have rights that EXCEED those of American citizens, including absolute rights to enter the U.S. and influence its government.

And we're frequently told that some international elite "consensus" completely overrides our ability to make individual decisions - or even to petition our own government, or vote for representatives who disagree with whatever "the world" has supposedly decided.

All of that is the absolute negation of "democracy" in any form, including the dangerous mob rule and majoritarianism that the Left selectively advocates. (Notice they always have a list of things nobody gets to vote on anymore, no matter how strong the majority vote would be.)

I thought often during the latter Trump years about the contrast with Barack Obama's "stray voltage" strategy, which involved saying provocative and often flatly untrue things to prompt discussion of Obama's preferred topics for political gain.

Is it possible to fight against totalitarian statists without ever compromising conservative "principles?" Is it better to play "fair," and constantly lose? Can you grapple with monsters without becoming a monster? That's the question at the heart of the schism on the Right.

1.Hydrocarbon extraction
2.Sterlite
3.Kudankulam
4.Chennai-Salem Expressway
5.Neutrino
6.GAIL pipeline
7.Kattupalli Port
8.Uppur Thermal
Each one of these projects stalled/delayed.
Tamil Nadu is on its way to becoming a Kerala or Bengal. Oh! Kerala allowed GAIL & Vizhinjam Port

Those who say Kerala has highest social/educational indicators need to understand theirs is a remittance economy sustained by inflows from Gulf. 36% of Kerala's GDP is Gulf money. Without this their per capita income wd be half that of TN or at best 2/3rds.

Despite Gulf money per capita income of Kerala is less than TN. With a jobs crisis in Gulf due to the pandemic and falling Oil prices Kerala will face the moment of truth sooner than later.There is almost no project that causes zero environmental damage.

No highway has ever been built without trees being cut or land being acquired. No SEZ has ever been developed without land being acquired.Of course environmental protection is important. That is why we ask for safeguards. That is why there is an NGT. If Govt officials

are corrupt & ignore rules,solution is to hold them to account not stop all projects. Everyone of us including the protesters now travel on highways built by cutting lakhs of trees&on land acquired from farmers. Lakhs of our youth work in the same SEZ that were once paddy fields

Daily Bookmarks to GAVNet 01/01/2021

Long thread here... from Keith, on tree guards:

I really don’t want to spread 120,000 plastic tree guards across the side of our lovely hill, the hill where I grew up and now farm, on the eastern edge of the Black Mountains. So, I’ve taken a good look at the pros,... 1/25

the cons and the alternatives, to try and decide rationally, which is the best approach for our plant on the Bryn Arw.

It has become the accepted norm in the UK that to plant a tree, you need to put your sapling in the ground and then wrap a plastic tree guard around it.

This is simply ‘how it’s done’ now. This practice uses a huge amount of plastic; worse still, it disperses plastic extremely efficiently around the countryside. In some rural places, un-retrieved tree guards are by far the biggest source of plastic pollution.

And yet the first commercial plastic tree guards only came on the market 38 years ago. There are many perfectly healthy woodlands and trees that are older than this, and which became established without plastic – which begs the question: do we really need guards?

Plastic tree guards have several uses, some of which did revolutionise tree planting when they first came out. In particular, they:
•protect your saplings from things that want to eat them;
•provide a microclimate, which enhances tree growth, according to the manufacturers;

To "The Sky Is Falling" Idiots

Read this thread 👇🏾

The proof is ALL OVER THE INTERWEB 🧐

GLOBAL WARMING (as described by the Left) IS A HOAX and Being Used Against You As A Money Making Machine 🧐

I Have Posted this Many Times Before, but here YOU ALL go again INVESTIGATE IT

This #NewYear we must get serious about climate change. A big obstacle: our brains.

Current risks are vastly different from our ancestors, but our brains are wired the same. Knowing the science behind decision-making helps us better talk about climate threats & spark action. 1/

I’ve dedicated my career to understanding what factors influence our perceptions of risk & shape behavioral outcomes, especially around climate action.

We clearly do not judge risks accurately. Let’s try this example. What is more likely to kill you:

Ppl often say shark attacks even though plane parts are 30x more likely to kill us. Attacks are more sensational/easier to recall.

Brains react in certain ways to risks around us, rapidly scanning environmental cues (e.g. snake’s stance) with subliminal and automated processing.

How does brain wiring relate to climate action? We're influenced by triggers such as if we can see risk or if we trust who communicates it to us.

Bluntly, we overestimate unserious risks like vaccinating children and underestimate seemingly far away risks like rising sea levels.

Sociology shows how even political identities influence risk perception. A human evolutionary trait allows us to avoid cognitive dissonance from info 1) that isn’t pleasant or 2) contradicts beliefs integral to our identity/tribe. We’re wired to make snap judgements for comfort.