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via JoNova
October 15, 2024 at 09:48AM
White privilege gave us Western civilization, the middle class,
and the nuclear family—you’re welcome! This book is dedicated
to the very fine people that made it all happen.
I just became aware of A..J. Rice from this American Greatness article Rice: Woke initiatives were ‘one uppercut to the face after another’ for Gen Z. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
A J Rice said Gen Z is a generation that struggles with human connection because of the mass social justice movements they grew up with. He made the comments on a recent episode of The Greatness Conversation.
“You had one uppercut to the face after another here for Gen Z where, first, it’s the Me Too movement, males are told to take it down a notch, toxic masculinity,” Rice said on a recent episode of The Greatness Conversation. “You might be a predator, you might be a rapist. And then, and then all of a sudden, George Floyd dies. You’re now a racist. All of your history stinks.”
“And then when that’s all over, they’re going to drop on you that there are 72 genders and Gary and Tim and Bill are coming into the women’s locker room and the girl’s bathroom,” Rice said. “So, you know, if you wonder why Gen Z has a hard time being authentically human.”
Rice joined the podcast to discuss his new book, “The White Privilege Album,” the use of comedy to talk about progressive “wokeness,” and the future of what society looks like for younger generations.
Who’s A. J. Rice? More from American Spectator A.J. Rice’s White Privilege Album Is a Vaccine for the Woke Mind Virus. Excerpts in italics with my bolds
Rice exposes what actual white privilege looks like
and why you don’t have it.
You already know this, but we live in deeply stuffy, oppressive times. You can get canceled for saying the wrong thing, not saying the right thing, or even looking at someone in a way they don’t like. Don’t believe me? Go to the gym and glance for more than three seconds at that 20-something girl in the bralette and bike shorts; woe betide you if you’re not in better shape than she is.
One minute you’re on top of the world — the next minute, you’re canceled and your whole world is turned upside down. It would be no small thing to just say forget all this and say and do whatever you want without fear. A younger Mel Brooks or Woody Allen might relish taking the fight to wokeness, but few others around would.
The digital gulag awaits us all, it seems. A hunger for thus imprisoning one’s fellow man is what the woke mind virus instills in its victims.
Into this climate of fear and loathing comes a writer, an entrepreneur, a madcap thinker with the sand to call the entire woke-industrial complex “zombies” and then follow that up with a book that quotes from Blazing Saddles on its opening page.
You remember Blazing Saddles, don’t you? It’s one of the funniest and most controversial movies ever made, a cultural sacrament for Generation X if ever there was one. It uses racism to mock racism, stupidity to rip stupidity, and comedy to take a sledgehammer to anyone who takes themselves too seriously — and in ways and from angles that make it an impossible movie to get produced today.
But back to the book. Its title is — mischievously —The White Privilege Album, and it’s A.J. Rice’s newest exploration of the insanity of our times.
The Worst of Times and the Worse of Times
According to Rice, we live in the worst of times, and, well, also the worse of times. Sure, we have all the technology we’ll probably ever need and the whole world’s knowledge at our fingertips at any given moment. You can explore the finest works of art, delve into the achievements of the Maya, study the miraculous founding of America — anything you want.
But millions merely use all this technology and knowledge we’re privileged to have to attack America relentlessly every hour of the day. We pay for public schools through our taxes, and those schools are filled with woke activists masquerading as teachers, indoctrinating our kids with ESG, DEI, and transgenderist trash and telling them that every generation before them was hopelessly racist and evil.
Well, only if they were white. Everyone else gets a free pass even if their ancestors owned slaves, committed genocide, or did other terrible things. Only white people need apply for the re-education camps Hillary Clinton wants, and only white people would be subject to the censorship regime that the entire Democratic Party so openly wants.
There’s your white privilege, Rice says. You’ll be subject to the whims of woke wackos and their digital shock troops. Your leaders will be cast as villains. You’ll be lied to, hoaxed, and perhaps doxxed and canceled. And you’ll like it or they’ll call you a racist and cancel you again.
Rice Exposes Hoaxes and Lies as the Foundation of the Left
As Rice documents and exposes in this extremely well-researched and written book, the major movements of our time are based on hoaxes, lies, smears, and bullying. Wokeness incorporates all of that — it’s a hoax against America and Western values, based on lies and half-truths taken out of context, aimed at smearing and undermining our history and culture, and weaponizes organized bullying to intimidate the weak-minded into submission.
Likewise, Joe Biden’s very reason for running for president was, according to him, based on the Trump “very fine people” quote — which was torn out of context and twisted into a hoax in which he is said to have praised neo-Nazis.Spoiler: He didn’t. Biden lied. A lot.
These hoaxes and lies are the foundation of the entire left now, Rice writes. Chapter by chapter, Rice takes on and tears apart the woke NBA, California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Marxist racism, Barack Obama’s stealth wokeness, Ibrahim X. Kendi’s lucrative race-hustling grift, and so much more. Along the way, you will see actual white privilege, in the form of a ne’er-do-well crackhead who suspiciously stays out of jail no matter what while black and brown offenders end up in prison for years on similar offenses. You’ll also learn why Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben were really fired. In fact, you’ll get 12 months of “white privilege” in this amazing book.
But The White Privilege Album isn’t just about mowing down woke zombies. There’s plenty of that, but it’s also about lifting up heroes who deserve it and rebuilding the sense that America is great and good and always has been. A.J. Rice delivers the triumphs amid the seemingly overwhelming evil, through chapter after chapter that you won’t be able to put down.
Rice: The left hates Western civilization, the middle class, children
“Here’s the takeaway,” he said. “I’m abducting their language and using it against them.”
It started with so-called “white privilege,” he said.
“When you hear these terms, ‘white privilege,’ ‘intersectionality,’ or ‘check your privilege,’ or these constructs of white privilege, when you hear the left, do that what they’re really talking about is three things,” he said.
“One, Western civilization, and I mean Greco-Roman Judeo-Christian civilization, which has to go, they want it to go away,” the author said. “That’s why it’s not just about tearing down statues. It’s everything from Columbus to Winston Churchill — it has to go.”
The second thing is the middle class, Rice said. “The left cultural Marxists and economic Marxists have been trying to destroy the middle class for 100 years,” he said.
“They know to do that because they want a peasant class because Marxism has never thrived,” he said. “Not in Venezuela, not North Korea, none of these places when there’s been a healthy middle class — so middle class has to go.”
The third thing is children, he said. “I believe happy people have more children; of course, more children mean more global warming, so the third thing that they have to destroy is the nuclear family,” he said.
“We know they have to destroy it because Black Lives Matter told us that they wanted to destroy it on their website.”
Rice: America is a multi-ethnic country
Rice said he is trying to untangle Americans from the labels that the left uses to confuse us.
“Let me just say, we are not a multicultural country,” he said.
“We are a multi-ethnic country, and the middle class and Western civilization in the nuclear family are colorblind,” he said.
“They’re not white, black, or anything else, and if you want to come here and you do it legally, you can come here and participate in this great experiment,” Rice said.
“As long as the cultural Marxists don’t destroy it.”
via Science Matters
October 15, 2024 at 09:27AM
Grow your own fruit and veg – and destroy the planet. Allotment produce, much prized by proud food-growing citizens the world over, has six times the ‘carbon’ footprint of conventional agriculture, according to a recent paper published by Nature. “Steps must be taken to ensure that urban agriculture supports, and does not undermine, urban decarbonisation efforts,” demand the authors. What have these people been smoking? Surely not some of the puff circulating at the recent Psychedelic Climate Week in New York. Highlights included a discussion on funding ketamine-assisted therapy and a panel on ‘Balancing Investing and Impact with Climate and Psychedelic Capital’.
The lead authors of the Nature paper are academics working out of the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. They suggest using urban farms as sites for “education, leisure and community building”. Perhaps the locals could sit cross-legged and listen to early Pink Floyd music. Maybe clap the setting sun to some Atom Heart Mother. Excuse your correspondent if he cannot take this paper seriously. It is a classic example of greens picking on a human activity – almost any will do – and complaining that it causes the devil-gas carbon dioxide to be released. At the recent New York climate happening, according to the Guardian, revellers were told that using hallucinogens can spark “consciousness shifts” to inspire climate-friendly behaviour. What climate friendly behaviour, one might ask, given that almost anything humans do to improve their lot of Earth is demonised by an increasingly weird millenarian green cult.
The authors of the Nature paper seem to have a particular down on home composting. Poorly-managed composting is said to exacerbate the release of greenhouse gases (GHGs). “The carbon footprint of compost grows tenfold when methane-generated anaerobic conditions persist in compost piles,” it says. This is particularly common during small-scale composting, apparently. With a seeming complete ignorance of how small allotments farming functions, the authors suggest that “cities can offset this risk by centralising compost operations for professional management”.
Wherever these cultists look, there are gases being released that are contributing to their invented existential climate crisis. The high application rates of compost in urban agriculture can also lead to nitrous oxide, we’re told. Needless to say, “strategic management of application scheduling and fertiliser combinations may be required to minimise emissions”.
For allotment holders, few pleasures in life compare with a break from arduous work and a hot cup of tea in the shed. Surrounded by the tools of the trade, it is the labourer’s equivalent of passing around a few liveners at National Climate Week, with the added attraction that it doesn’t turn you into a self-important dope. But such pleasure will come to an end if the climate cops have their way. Infrastructure, we’re told, is the largest driver of carbon emissions at what are termed “low-tech” urban agricultural sites. As well as sheds, this includes beds (for vegetables, not a crash pad for ketamine heads) and compost facilities. A raised bed built and used for five years will have approximately four times the environmental impact as one used for 20. Other infrastructure supplies are said to include fertiliser, gasoline and weed block textile.
Plants need water, but only the right sort of water can help save the planet. In their site samples, the researchers found that most allotment-holders use potable municipal water sources or groundwater wells. Big no, no, of course, since such irrigation emits GHGs from pumping, water treatment and distribution. “Cities should support low-carbon (and drought-conscious) irrigation for urban agriculture via subsidies for rainwater catchment infrastructure, or through established guidelines for greywater use,” it is suggested. Presumably, the subsidies will come from the magic bread tree and the infrastructure will be of the special type that does not produce GHGs.
This crackpot climate paper is just the latest sign that the green movement is riven with disagreements as its climate crisis grift starts to fall apart in the face of reality. There are no realistic back-ups for intermittent wind and solar, while carbon capture is a colossal and potentially dangerous waste of money. Without hydrocarbon use, humankind is doomed. Billions will die and society will be returned to the dark ages. Hydrocarbons are ubiquitous in modern society, and so almost everything that humans do to survive and thrive on a dangerous planet can be demonised. Eventually, you end up with Sir David Attenborough making the appalling observation that it was “barmy” for the United Nations to send bags of flour to famine-stricken Ethiopia. Or to read earlier this year the tweet from the United Nations contributing author and UCL professor Bill McGuire that the only “realistic way” to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown was to cull the human population with a high fatality pandemic.
Many green extremists seem to take the view that anything humans do, including growing their own veg, is causing existential harm to the planet. What they really hate, some may conclude, are humans themselves. Treble bongs all round.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
via Watts Up With That?
October 15, 2024 at 08:07AM
By Paul Homewood
A recent article in UnHerd by John Rapley, in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton, claimed that climate change has intensified extreme weather and increased the economic cost of weather disasters.
To quote:
“The American economy is ill-prepared for the rising frequency and intensity of such compound weather events. Of the 10 costliest extreme weather events to have ever happened in the US, six occurred in the last decade, the result of climate change intensifying weather patterns.”
https://unherd.com/newsroom/will-extreme-weather-events-break-the-us-financial-system
Is there any of evidence of this assertion though?
Far from Hurricane Milton being the storm of the century, as widely alleged in the media, it was no more than a middling Cat 3 storm, a run of the mill event as far as Florida is concerned. In terms of intensity, it ranked only 75th strongest in US recorded history.
It was the third hurricane to hit Florida this year, following Debby and Helene, but there is nothing unusual about this. Moreover, the official record dating back to 1851 provides no evidence of hurricanes becoming more frequent:
https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hurdat/All_U.S._Hurricanes.html
.
Also, the US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) concluded in their annual review of hurricanes earlier this year that “there is no strong evidence of century scale increasing trends in U.S. landfalling hurricanes or major hurricanes. “
https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/
.
So, if hurricanes are not getting more frequent or powerful, why are economic losses increasing?
Simply because as a society and as individuals, we have more stuff to lose. The population of Florida has exploded over the years, particularly in coastal areas, which are most vulnerable to hurricanes. That means more homes and infrastructure.
And as they become wealthier, people own more assets. They no longer live in wooden cabins, but luxury homes. They own cars, the latest electronic gadgets and designer clothes. On top of that, rising real wages mean that repairing the damage from a hurricane will now cost considerably more than in the past.
A weather disaster that may have cost $500 million thirty years could cost a billion now, even when the effects of inflation are allowed for.
Professor Roger Pielke Jr is one of the leading experts on the cost of disasters, having studied the topic for thirty years or more. A recent peer-reviewed study of his found that when changes in asset values are factored in, what he refers to as “normalised”, there is no long-term trend in losses from Atlantic hurricanes hitting the US.
Katrina stands out as the costliest in recent times, but even that did not compare with the 1926 “Miami” Hurricane, which effectively wiped the city off the map:
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/what-the-media-wont-tell-you-about
.
Pielke also looked at losses from floods and tornadoes in the US, and both show a marked decline in losses.
Another Pielke study analysed global weather losses, of which he reckons 60% are accounted for by US hurricanes! When measured as a percentage of GDP, the long-term trend is down:
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/dont-believe-the-hype?utm_source=publication-search
.
Rapley makes the mistake of relying on NOAA’s Billion Dollar Disaster Database, which does not take account of increasing wealth and GDP. Instead, economic losses are only adjusted for CPI.
Indeed, another peer-reviewed paper by Pielke this year has described the NOAA database as flawed and misleading.
America has always been ravaged by hurricanes and other weather disasters. But it now has the resources, technology and money to bounce back from them.
A nation that had to deal with the Miami hurricane or Katrina can surely cope with a Milton.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
October 15, 2024 at 05:52AM
