Government Shutdown is Government Failure

 By CE Marshall

                                                                The Parties Must Go 

     Once again, we see the two parties are incapable of coming to any sort of agreement.  They are like petulant children that need a very good spanking.  This most current shutdown is the longest in history, so now it becomes one more example of how bad government has gotten and the fact that it's not getting better.  I throw my hands up on this one, but I must say that the people voted for Trump and the Republicans so if we are truly living in a Democratic Republic then the Democrats need to plead their case to the people in the next round of elections not by stalling the process of legislation.  They seem to be at the will of their more extreme supporters who are focused only on hating Trump and it is working somewhat as the recent elections have shown.  It pays to block the other party, and that is at the core of our most current shutdown.  Anyway, once again the people "all the people" are the last of anyone's concern and it's all about posturing and politics.  The parties need to go- I'm not sure how that would look or how this could be maneuvered, but I believe that's the only solution.  Their only reason for existing is to stop each other, which means they're stopping half the population from being governed at the consent of the people.  Government shutdown is not the consent of the people it's the consent of obstructionists.    

In My Humble Opinion.....      

Great Article on Climate Change from the Free Press

Posted by CE Marshall from.....

The Free Press

I post this article by Ted Nordhaus because it's the first clear and calm explanation regarding climate change that has kept my attention with facts and addresses the hyperbole behind climate change.  It also delves somewhat into how the Silent Tyrants have been using it to control and dictate to the masses how they should live and what they should be concerned about.  The article is somewhat tedious as most academics tend to be, but there are several nuggets of truth that we all need to read. Enjoy!  

CE Marshall 

I Thought Climate Change Would End the World. I Was Wrong. My worldview was built on apocalyptic models sprung from faulty assumptions.  

By Ted Nordhaus 

 I used to argue that if the world kept burning fossil fuels at current rates, catastrophe was virtually assured. “The heating of the earth,” Michael Shellenberger and I wrote in our 2007 book, Break Through, “will cause the sea levels to rise and the Amazon to collapse and, according to scenarios commissioned by the Pentagon, will trigger a series of wars over the basic resources like food and water.” I no longer believe this hyperbole. 

      At the time, I, like most climate experts, thought that business-as-usual emissions would lead to around five degrees of warming by the end of this century. That assumption was never plausible. It assumed high population growth, high economic growth, and slow technological change. But fertility rates have been falling, global economic growth slowing, and the global economy decarbonizing for decades. Nor is there good reason to think that the combination of these three trends could possibly be sustained in concert. High economic growth is strongly associated with falling fertility rates. Technological change is the primary driver of long-term economic growth. A future with low rates of technological change is not consistent with high economic growth. And a future characterized by high rates of economic growth is not consistent with high rates of population growth. READ Steven Koonin: The Truth About Climate Change ‘Lies Somewhere in the Middle’ 

      As a result, most estimates of worst-case warming by the end of the century now suggest three degrees or less. But as the consensus has shifted, the reaction among much of the climate science and advocacy community has not been to become less catastrophic. Rather, it has five to three degrees been simply to shift the locus of catastrophe from of warming. This is all the more confounding given that the good news extends well beyond projections of long-term warming. Despite close to 1.5 degrees of warming over the last century, global mortality from climate and weather extremes has fallen by more than 96 percent on a per-capita basis. The world is on track this year for what is almost certainly the lowest level of climate-related mortality in recorded human history. Yes, the economic costs of climate extremes continue to rise, but this is almost entirely due to affluence, population growth, and the migration of global populations toward climate hazards: mainly cities in coastal regions and floodplains. So the far more interesting question is not why my colleagues and I at the Breakthrough Institute have revised our priors about climate risk, but why so many progressive environmentalists have not. 

      In the late 2000s, the climate advocacy community figured out that framing climate change as a future risk would not prove politically sufficient to transform the U.S. and global energy systems in the way that most believed necessary. And so the movement set about attempting to move the locus of climate catastrophe from the future to the present, framing extreme weather events not only as harbingers for future catastrophes, but as fueled by current climate change. But this narrative conflicts with existing evidence, including data collected by political scientist and former environmental studies professor Roger Pielke Jr. His work, going back to the mid-1990s, showed again and again that the normalized economic costs of climate related disasters, when adjusted for wealth and economic growth, weren’t increasing, despite the documented warming of the climate. 

     The reason for my shift in opinion wasn’t only that Pielke had produced strong evidence that undermined a key claim of the climate advocacy community. It wasn’t even witnessing Pielke’s cancellation, which was brutal. It was, rather, that I came to understand why you couldn’t find a climate change signal in the disaster loss data, despite close to 1.5 degrees of warming over the last century. There are two linked factors. First, what determines the cost of a climate-related disaster is not just how extreme the weather is. It is also how many people and how much wealth is affected by the extreme weather event, and how vulnerable they are to that event. Over the same period that the climate has warmed by 1.5 degrees, the global population has more than quadrupled, per-capita income has increased by a factor of 10, and the scale of infrastructure, social services, and technology that protects people and wealth from climate extremes has expanded massively. These latter factors overwhelm the climate signal. The amount of warming that is conceivable even in plausible worst-case scenarios is not remotely consistent with the sorts of catastrophic outcomes that I once believed in. Second, anthropogenic climate change is a much smaller factor at the local and regional scale than natural climate variability. Some climate scientists have pointed to anomalously high surface and ocean temperatures as evidence that warming may be accelerating, perhaps even faster than models have suggested. But even in the case where climate sensitivity proves to be relatively high, additional anthropogenic warming is an order of magnitude less than the oscillations of natural variability. The absence of an anthropogenic climate signal in most climate and weather phenomena is not paradoxical. It is simply not possible given the small amount of anthropogenic warming the planet has experienced.

      When scientists, journalists, and activists say that climate change made a given extreme event far more likely, what they are actually saying is that an event that is somewhat more intense than it would have been absent climate change could have been made so by climate change. To take the simplest example, a heat wave that is 1.5 degrees warmer than it would have been without climate change was made vastly more likely to occur due to climate change. The claim is tautological. Put these two factors together—the outsize influence that exposure and vulnerability have on the cost of extreme climate and weather phenomena, and the very modest intensification that climate change contributes to these events, when it plays any role at all—and what should be clear is that climate change is contributing very little to present-day disasters. This also means that the scale of anthropogenic climate change that would be necessary to very dramatically intensify those hazards is implausibly large. The amount of warming that is conceivable even in plausible worst-case scenarios, in other words, is not remotely consistent with the sorts of catastrophic outcomes that I once believed in. 

      For a long time, even after I came to this conclusion, I held on to the possibility of catastrophic climate futures based upon uncertainty. There might be tipping points: low-probability, high-consequence scenarios that aren’t factored into central estimates. The ice sheets could collapse much faster than we understand, or the Gulf Stream might shut down, bringing frigid temperatures to Western Europe, or permafrost and methane hydrates frozen in the seafloor might rapidly melt, accelerating warming. But once you look more closely at these risks, they don’t add up to catastrophic outcomes for humanity. While sensationalist news stories frequently refer to the collapse of the Gulf Stream, what they are really referring to is the slowing of the Atlantic Meridianol Overturning Circulation AMOC. The AMOC helps transport warm water to the North Atlantic and moderates winter temperatures across Western Europe. But its collapse, much less its slowing, would not result in a hard freeze across Europe. Indeed, under plausible conditions in which it might significantly slow, it would act as a negative feedback, counterbalancing warming, which is happening faster across the European continent than almost any place else in the world. Permafrost and methane hydrate thawing, meanwhile, are slow processes, not fast ones. Even irreversible melting would occur over millennial timescales—fast in geological terms but very slow in human terms. Likewise, even very accelerated scenarios for rapid melting of ice sheets would unfold over many centuries, not decades. Moreover, the problem with grounding strong precautionary claims in these known unknowns is that doing so demands strong remedies in the present in response to future risks that are unquantifiable, unfalsifiable, and low probability. 

      Why do so many smart people—scientists, engineers, lawyers, and public policy experts, all of whom will tell you that they “believe in science”—get the science of climate risk so badly wrong? The first reason is that highly educated people with high levels of science literacy are no less likely to get basic scientific issues wrong than anyone else when the facts conflict with their social identities and ideological commitments. Yale Law professor Dan Kahan has shown that people who are highly concerned about climate change actually have less accurate views about climate change overall than climate skeptics, and that this remains true even among partisans with high levels of education and general science literacy. Elsewhere, Kahan and others have demonstrated that on many issues, highly educated people are often more likely to hold stubbornly onto erroneous beliefs because they are adept at rationalizing their ideological commitments. The second reason is that there are strong incentives to overestimate climate risk if you make a living doing left-of-center climate and energy policy. The capture of Democratic and progressive politics by environmentalism over the last generation has been close to total. Meanwhile, the climate movement has effectively conflated consensus science about the reality and anthropogenic origins of climate change with catastrophist claims about climate risk, for which there is no consensus whatsoever. READ How China Hijacked America’s Climate Fears 

      Whether you are an academic researcher, a think-tank policy wonk, a program officer at an environmental or liberal philanthropy, or a Democratic congressional staffer, there is simply no incentive to challenge the central notion that climate change is an existential threat to the human future. And so everyone falls in line. Finally, there is a widespread belief that one can’t make a strong case for clean energy and technological innovation absent the catastrophic specter of climate change. This view ignores the entire history of modern energy innovation. Over the last two centuries, the world has moved inexorably from dirtier and more carbon-intensive technologies to cleaner ones. Burning coal, despite its significant environmental impacts, is cleaner than burning wood and dung. Burning gas is cleaner than coal. And, of course, producing energy with wind, solar, and nuclear is cleaner than doing so with fossil fuels. 

      There is no evidence whatsoever that 35 years of increasingly dire rhetoric and claims about climate change have had any effect on the rate at which the global energy system has decarbonized. In fact, by some measures, the world decarbonized more quickly over the 35 years prior to climate change’s emergence as a global concern than it has in the 35 years since. There are lots of good reasons to support cleaner energy without threatening the public with climate catastrophe. But the climate movement is actually after something different than that—a rapid and complete reorganization of the global energy economy over the course of a few decades. And there is no good reason to do that absent the specter of catastrophic climate change. And so that is what the climate movement and its supporters in academia, the media, and center-left political parties have offered for a generation. The insular climate discourse on the left may be cleverer than right-wing dismissals of climate change, but it is no less prone to issuing misleading claims, ignoring countervailing evidence, and demonizing dissent. What has resulted is a contemporary climate movement that is deeply out of touch with popular sentiment. 

 A version of this piece was originally published in The Ecomodernist. The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this 

No Kings Protest: It's all about control

 By CE Marshall

             King George III - A real king, a real tyrant 

     From work to politics- the "wrench in the works" of a prosperous society is the need for one person or a small group of people to control another group of people.  I cannot relate to this peculiar obsession but I'm understanding as I get older that it's at the core of what makes a tyrant or even a bad boss.  The leader of any situation in which he or she wants to control everyone is at the heart of tyranny.  

     In the media you also see a form of control, but much to their alarm, that control seems to be slipping through their fingers.  People who read and take a few moments to understand a given situation and then think for themselves will see things for what they are.  The media once had full control over what the public saw and then would use that power to "spoon feed" the narrative they wanted.  It worked for many years.  One could say it's been working since the Kennedy presidency when his murder was covered up and muddled by our government with the help of the media utilizing conspiracy theories and inuendo to prevent the truth from being known.   X and other social media platforms have removed "control" from the media and given more to the individual.  "You are the media now" is one of Elon Musk's favorite tag lines and I think he's correct.  It really doesn't take that long to understand a situation if you try thinking for yourself and asking questions.  The "No Kings" protests of this past weekend with all its angst and pronounced worries that we are losing our Democracy is an obvious "straw man" whereby they (and by "they" I mean the "Silent Tyrants" of our society.  The ruling elite.) create a boogeyman that doesn't exist and then orchestrate protests against that boogeyman.  This works on a lot of people from the ditch diggers to college professors suffering from "Trump Derangement Syndrome" so it's not hard to fill the streets with rabid lunatics.  What's missing is any explanation as to what they protest about.  During all conversations in the street with the old hippies and the blue haired girls a clear explanation was completely missing.  Not once did I hear a reasonable, coherent answer to the question "What are you protesting?" or "In what way has Trump behaved as a King or tyrant?".  It was like they were protesting just to protest- like window shopping or strolling through a park.  A stroll of sanctimonious screeching old fools and malcontents that cannot accept the consequences of an election they lost.   

     I will tell you what they were protesting, though.  They were protesting their inability to control the narrative of public policy through full control of the media and news.  The left has had this luxury for a long time, and it is slipping away very quickly.  They have no alternative but violence and feigned outrage over nothing.  May this be the beginning of the end for them and the beginning of the rights of mankind as individuals in society being given the respect and dignity they deserve.  

     The No Kings protesters need not demand the head of the king and an end to the tyranny they've imagined.   The Tyrant is right under their nose.  It is them.  

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Pope Leo & the rich & poor

By CE Marshall

The American Pope

   There was an article in the paper last week regarding Pope Leo. In the article he is said to be criticizing the rich for "living in a bubble".  (This was dated October 10, 2025). In his comments the headline leads the reader to understand the Pope is being critical of rich people. So, my question is “was he critical of the rich in general or a specific group of rich people?” I have a problem when somebody criticizes wealthy people for being wealthy.  I think that form of criticism is a form of envy and is coveting you neighbor's possession.  I do, however, agree that rich people can be selfish. So, should that money be taken away from them and redistributed?  This is often the next step in this conversation and  is the favorite talking point of the leaders of the left, that the rich are somehow innately bad people and should therefore have a lot of it taken away in the form of taxation. The hypocrisy is more than apparent.  The pope himself lives in a palace. Shouldn't the Catholic church hand all that over to the poor if that's where their heart lays?  I suppose that’s an instruction only to the "Other" rich people. Most of the major leftists of the ruling elite are very wealthy but they feel entitled to dictate to all of us how money should be equalized. Capitalism creates business which creates jobs which creates wealth. The left doesn’t want to look at that because it’s contrary to their belief that the government should be the source of all things. This is especially true for those whose wealth came from entertaining where they seem to have a great deal of guilt over their wealth (although they wouldn't dream of giving it all up). They'd rather force everyone to give their money up so then they can say they're "doing something" to help the poor. If government is a truly wise government, it acts as an instrument of the individual to enable us all to strive and succeed.  The government is never effective at distributing wealth, in fact, it’s absolutely horrible at distributing wealth.  So, while I agree, rich people can be selfish, I do not agree that that should somehow justify taking more of their money away.  That is a form of the "always envious" communist philosophy, and it has been shown to be a failure for a long time. Look at Cuba look at North Korea look at the Soviet Union. That is what you get with communism. Abject poverty.  

    So that brings up the issue of my original point that there is envy on the part of the Pope regarding other people’s possessions.  If he was referring to them as a bad group in general- that they are bad because they're rich- then I see this as being a sin.  It could be that he didn't mean that so I am not accusing him of that, I'm only referring to the tone of the headline from the leftist- mainstream media.  

     So in what way should we help the poor according to scripture?  Often, Jesus Christ, Yeshua, Joshua is quoted as saying "give to the poor" and He did, but He was typically referring to the spiritually poor, not necessarily the fiscally poor. He Himself was poor!  God came to earth as Yeshua the Messiah to teach us to be wealthy in our spirit not that we needed to have things. He did not teach that poor people who don’t support themselves should be handed everything because "don’t you feel sorry for them?" Giving people money to do nothing is not helping them. I sincerely believe the worst thing you can do to a person is to give them stuff so they don't have to earn it themselves. It's demeaning and condescending and ultimately yields a sense of helplessness and a lack of purpose.  Of course, we should have sympathy for the poor, but one should not be forced to give up money earned in order to help them.  All charity for the poor must come from the heart and voluntarily. Forced taxation to equalize the "doers" with the "non-doers" is an abomination and should never be a part of conversation with anyone interested in the betterment of mankind.  The men and women who build a product and/or a business that serves a need in society should be celebrated and imitated not maligned and criticized. Click your tongues and nod your head at their garish lifestyle and lack of taste all you want, but their money is not your money, and they owe you nothing, but the job given to you if you earn the place.  So, with all due respect to the new "American" pope, I have a problem with this insinuation that a group of people- in this case the rich- is all guilty of something without regard to the good they also do.  That sort of talk foments jealousy and envy and does nothing to advance mankind, including the poor.  

     One last remark on the poor.  It should go without saying that I'm not referring to the elderly or the physically incapable, or vulnerable children or the mentally ill citizens of our society.  That is an entirely different category where people are unable to help themselves and I do see society as responsible, through taxation if it's necessary, to help them. BUT- that does not mean the rich pay more.  I'm opposed to progressive taxation.  We should all have flesh in the game of protecting and taking care of those who cannot take care of themselves.  

In my humble opinion.  

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America's Silent Tyrant

 By CE Marshall 

                       

                Hero of the Individual's Right to Live Unhindered by Government

                                                            Charlie Kirk 

     As I consider the frustrations regarding our government today, the daunting obstacles to restoring the American individual's voice keep surfacing in my mind. These obstacles are what have come to be like major parts of a snake or even snakes themselves, a silent tyranny, each of the snakes of this tyrant are dependent on one another as they slither their way around our Democratic Republic- constricting and rendering the ordinary citizens powerless.   The snakes are as follows;  

  

Snake Number One- Of all the parts, this is most logically described as the "head" of all the snakes. The Federal Agencies who hold centralized power without being elected. This is very much to the advantage of Leftists because they are in favor of more government control.  Federal agencies are, well.... them!   Government control is their modus operandi.  This explains why DC is 95% Democrat.    

Snake Number two- The Lobbyists who use money to direct the nation’s law to their own specific need.  This is the biggest advantage to corporations who often require laws to do a lot of what they do at the expense of free competition in the marketplace. It is "freedom to petition the government" on steroids.  In their defense though, the government allows it and takes advantage of the relationship in many different ways.  I don't see how it benefits the people though. To petition the government should be from individual citizens or private groups not corporations and political action committees.     

Snake Number three- The Elections, which require enormous amounts of money to render any candidate capable of being elected. This naturally encourages the parties to throw enormous amounts of money towards the individual they think can win the election, never mind if they are or are not qualified.  The end result is a candidate that the party wants but not necessarily one that is good for the country.  That aspect is of very little concern, especially to the Leftists because their “reason for being” is it to subjugate the individual anyway. Why would they care what the American people actually want or need?       

Snake Number four- The political parties being the critical aspect of elections render two camps of thought in government – one always ruling over the other according to which party won.  This results in elected officials being in a position of tyranny in that the rights of the other side are ignored or subjugated.   Elected officials are supposed to be leading us all, not just those that agree with them, aren’t they?    This is much more terrifying under the Democrats because their willingness and glee to silence the individual is much easier with federal agencies and an army supporting them.      

Snake Number five - The media and their tendency towards the left.  Why?  The virtue signaling of journalists is irresistible.  Also, the money is very good if you're at the top of the media pecking order.  In their mind they're saving the poor pathetic victims from the big bad rich people even though they are often the rich ones being discussed.   Of course, there are many different versions of this "we're the saviors" ideal, but you get the point.   They get to play "superman" for their audience no matter how untrue that might be.    Conservatives are becoming more alert to the situation, though.  Cable TV has Fox News and Newsmax, which are both conservative.  Online X, podcasts and other online news sources tend to be more moderate and/or conservative.   Newspapers?  They are becoming relegated to the ash heap of history because they’re nearly 100% to the left.   Most major newspapers such as the NYT and the Washington Post are so biased as to be laughable.  I only read the newspaper to get the jest of the liberal opinions on whatever topic is running through society this week.   For the media, the money and the need to feel virtuous is a lifelong addiction for the collective.  They are emotional parasites.  The Leftists still rule in this category although their power is waning.     

Snake Number six - The court system ruling on matters of crime and punishment where the judge takes it upon himself to divvy up justice or lack of justice according to his or her emotions and his or her perception of social justice and inequality rather than the rule of law. They often favor the parasites over people who actually accomplish things and work hard.  Guess which party tends to rule in favor of social justice and sees the criminal as a victim and the victim as a villain?  The court system is the Leftist’s tool for enacting laws that the Republicans do not want by having a court rule something as a "law" such as was the case with the legalization of abortion.  No election required.  In addition, by not enforcing laws that Republicans support, they still get their way whether they were elected or not.  It’s also a wonderful source for the Leftists to feel virtuous for their “liberal” leanings- a lifelong addiction as mentioned above.  They get their way, one way or another.  It is the truest form of dictatorship in that it seeks to control justice in order for the dictators to feel better about themselves.  

  Snake Number seven- Academia and its tendency towards the left – partly due to its dependency on a generous government and partly due to its allegiance to all thing's science – usually pitting “serious” matters to science and spiritual matters to being of no importance.  (Ironically most higher levels of education such as Harvard were begun as a type of seminary for studying God and His influence on science, not "Science as the God" where it lies today.) Academia is enshrined as the government’s lifelong lapdog because it is a fountainhead of cash and they are unlikely to disagree with anything the government dictates (by that I mean agencies not the elected officials). One very convenient example is global warming or climate change.  This is a tool for more government control.  So, for example, if you’re studying climate change you will find out quickly there is no money to test IF “climate change” is real but there’s plenty of money to prove it IS real and better yet, to elaborate on how the calamity is hovering over all of us unless we obey their latest edict.       

       As you can see, at the root of all of these snake parts there is one very common denominator, the Leftists or people who gain from government relations- "cronyism".  The Leftists' aim is to get the government more power which quite naturally diminishes the power of the individual.  Money supports the head of the snake, the federal agencies, and that money comes from the American people and businesses.  It is their sly form of reallocation of wealth.  They then use the media to trumpet their philosophy.  At the same time corporations are beholden to federal agencies to stay in business so they play the game lest they get left out. The only topic that’s not totally the fault of the Leftists is, ironically, the political parties.  The Republicans are as guilty of abusing the power of the party as the Democrats.  The difference is the Republicans do work to instill personal rights of the individual such as speech, religion, and personal thought itself- the right to think for yourself and live a life you choose.  The pursuit of happiness.  Republicans can play dirty and flex their power, but they are much more tied to the reason for the existence of our country - the power of the individual and his or her absolute sanctity. We the People.  We are the sovereign of the United States just as King Charles is the sovereign of the United Kingdom.  Much to the chagrin of any pro-government philosophy, the individual is the ruler of America.  This is the secret of its power.  May it reign forever.  

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