singapore?

 I've been getting a lot of hits lately from Singapore. Do any of you have comments or questions?

a thought experiment

So let’s run a little thought experiment using our fabulous ‘laboratory of the states.’ Let’s pick a couple small states—say New Hampshire and Vermont, cute little side-by-side New England states. Let’s say New Hampshire decided to try to become a high-IQ state. First off, they’d give everybody IQ tests. Then they would encourage (i.e., financially incentivize) high-IQ people to reproduce and discourage (financially disincentivize) low-IQ people from reproducing—not providing further welfare benefits for out-of-wedlock children, providing free hysterectomies, abortions, vasectomies, etc. Similarly, they would encourage high-IQ in-migration and low-IQ out-migration.

 

Then, just for the sake of argument, let’s say that left-wing, Vermont went in the opposite direction. They would also give everybody IQ tests but would use them to encourage low-IQ reproduction and discourage high-IQ reproduction. Similarly, they would encourage low-IQ in-migration and high-IQ out-migration. (No rational government would ever do this, of course, for obvious reasons.)

 

What would these two states look like after a couple generations? New Hampshire would be a civilized, prosperous first-world state, well-versed in the science and technology of the modern world, with great public schools and a low-to-nonexistent crime rate. Vermont, meantime,  would have become an impoverished, corrupt, crime-ridden third-world hellhole.

 

Do you doubt it?

affirmative action

 Affirmative action is a zero-sum game that selects less qualified people over more qualified people on the basis of irrelevant characteristics. It's counterproductive and immoral and should be abolished.

bringing down planetary population

 United Nations aid and US foreign aid should be based on countries presenting and implementing plans for plateauing and then reducing population. Countries should identify a specific population goal based on land area, type of economy (subsistence agriculture, hunting/gathering, etc.), type of residence (house, apartment, farmstead, etc.).

world war climate

 The media should be covering climate change the way they covered World War II, as an ongoing crisis being covered on a daily basis. All these natural disasters should be treated like battles in a war, battles we are losing in a war we are losing.

One could say that the tide is turning when greenhouse emissions have plateaued and started going down. But even then, the consequences will be with us for decades, maybe centuries. It would be as if Europe and Japan had just continued to lie in ashes after WW II.

 #MediaClimate #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateEmergency

THE MEDIA ARE *NOT* THE MESSAGE

 The media are simply not doing their job in reporting on climate change. This has been brought to my attention in recent days by two separate incidents. 

First, about a thousand climate scientists around the world engaged in acts of civil disobedience in a desperate attempt to get the message out about the seriousness of climate change. This got just about zero press coverage.

Then there was the ridiculous disparity in coverage between the Will Smith/Chris Rock nonsense and the release of the IPCC Working Group 3 report on climate change mitigation. This rich piece of show-biz gossip got about 100-- or was it 1,000?-- times as much coverage as the latter. Absurd.

The media continue to deal with climate change as if it were of interest only to some minor demographic called 'environmentalists.' This has got to STOP!

THE BIG PIVOT

 Bill McKibben is right. We should use Putin's energy blackmail as a rationale to begin the Big Pivot away from fossil fuels.

'So now is the moment to remind ourselves that, in the last decade, scientists and engineers have dropped the cost of solar and windpower by an order of magnitude, to the point where it is some of the cheapest power on Earth. The best reason to deploy it immediately is to ward off the existential crisis that is climate change, and the second best is to stop the killing of nine million people annually who die from breathing in the particulates that fossil fuel combustion produces. But the third best reason – and perhaps the most plausible for rousing our leaders to action – is that it dramatically reduces the power of autocrats, dictators, and thugs.'

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/25/this-is-how-we-defeat-putin-and-other-petrostate-autocrats?fbclid=IwAR01wu4c6CSmO2ave1iVKUpVdjUb7Ol8qUUYbv7VzZIESg8zWiGdKTSzexo