That Woman From Michigan Bans Buying Gardening Supplies

By William Teach April 11, 2020 – 3:55 pm

Remember when Trump referred to Michigan governor Gretchan Whitmer as “that woman in Michigan”? So, of course she’s gotten all sorts of glowing praise from the utterly unbiased media. What does the media think of this?

While some are saying this is fake, well, um

(WNEM) On Thursday, April 9, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer extended her “Stay Home, Stay Safe,” executive order through the end of April.

As part of Executive Order 2020-42, Whitmer also placed restrictions on stores including how many people are allowed in the store at a time and what type of items they can sell.

Large stores must also close areas of the store that are dedicated to carpeting, flooring, furniture, garden centers, plant nurseries, or paint.

So, no seeds.

(Bridge) Brian Tillery walked into Home Depot on Friday morning and did a double take.

“What — they’re not selling paint?” he exclaimed.

Signs taped to orange buckets lined with yellow caution tape told the story:

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s latest stay-home order to battle the coronavirus pandemic allows home improvement stores to stay open, but only to sell “products necessary to maintain the safety, sanitation and basic operations of residences.” (snip)

Whitmer’s order also requires large retailers to close carpet or flooring, furniture, garden and plant nursery sections, either by blocking them, placing signs in aisles, posting prominent signs or removing goods from shelves. Bottle return sections at grocery stores must also remain closed.

Starting Monday, large retailers cannot advertise products that are not groceries, medical supplies or items necessary to maintain the safety, sanitation and basic operation of residences.

If you own a second house in Michigan, you are not allowed to travel there. Landscaping businesses are closed by her decree.

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If All You See…

By William Teach April 11, 2020 – 1:00 pm

…is an evil 1%er boat causing extreme weather, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is The Last Refuge, with a post on the Kentucky governor ordering police to take photos of license plates at Easter church services.

Doubleshot under the fold, so check out The Other McCain, with a post on Oregon’s pointless bat soup virus lockdown.

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Doom: Hotcoldwetdry Is Causing Problems For Craft Brewers

By William Teach April 11, 2020 – 10:30 am

It’s always some sort of doom with this crowd over a minimal 1.5F increase over 170 years

Climate change impacting craft brewers

There is no surprise that craft beers have been on the rise over the last ten years. In fact, they account for nearly a quarter of the national $144 billion beer market. They also enhance the local economy by contributing to over 550,000 jobs. However, recent changes in climate are forcing brewers to adapt.

Beer consists of four main ingredients: water, yeast, hops, and barely. In order for the crop to have a successful season it needs the right amount of water, relatively cool temperatures, and little storm activity. If any of these are not adhered too, the crop will be more prone to disease and potentially die. The real issue tends to be surrounding heat and drought, which becomes more common under a warming climate. This can translate to seed yields declining as much as 95%, an increase in starch levels, and altering proteins within the seed. All of these can have devastating effects when creating beer, and can alter taste or inhibit fermentation.

What is also concerning is that winter snowpack is trending downward, meaning that there is less water to feed crops. The majority of U.S. hops are grown in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, but snowpack has been on a steady decline over the last several decades. The average snowpack in the Oregon Cascades has declined 50% since 1950, and is likely to be cut in half again over the next 30 years. Another concern is that about 58% of power across the Pacific Northwest comes from hydroelectric dams, so as snowmelt decreases the availability of power does as well.

There are only two more paragraphs in the article, and neither of them tells us exactly what effect a mildly changing climate, whether anthropogenic or natural, has actually had on craft beers. Something that would be rather important to know, wouldn’t you think? But, that’s not the point. The point is that this could be doom, and you, as a beer drinker, are supposed to become Concerned and give your money, freedom, and choice to Government.

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Entitled Young Climate Cultists Find This Whole Bat Soup Virus Pandemic Rather Inconvenient

By William Teach April 11, 2020 – 7:18 am

So, they’re looking for new ways to protest

Their schools and streets empty, teen climate activists find new ways to strike

It was supposed to be the spring that launched Sophia Kianni’s climate career.

She had eight speaking engagements lined up at big-name universities — Stanford, Princeton, Duke. She had a 35-minute presentation prepared, explaining how concern for family in polluted Iran inspired her climate activism. She even had outfits: a favorite was the knee-length white skirt, paired with a green sweater and matching white blazer.

Then came the virus.

“Within a week, basically every single thing I had planned for got canceled,” said Kianni, 18. That included a speech at a Smithsonian museum in the District, a roughly 30-minute drive from her home in McLean, Va.

Aw, what a shame. People getting sick and dying is just so inconvenient for her, along with this whole economic collapse. Anyhow, was she going to get paid for those speaking engagements? If not, then it isn’t a career. It’s not even a side hustle. Further, why should anyone listen to Sophie? She hasn’t graduated high school, has no degree in any sort of science, and her claim to fame is confronting people after taking a fossil fueled trip to D.C.

The coronavirus pandemic is threatening protest movements in countries ranging from Hong Kong to Lebanon to Chile, halting pushes to expand civil rights, topple authoritarian leaders and fight sexual harassment.

But it poses particular challenges for teen climate activists, who built a movement around the act of skipping school on Fridays and parading through streets in a highly visible show of rage.

Apparently, all those concerned with authoritarian leaders, civil rights, and sexual harassment should take a back seat to high school kids worried the climate change scam.

“Usually, climate activism for me, would be to go out and act what I think,” said Erik Christiansson, 15, who has organized marches in his hometown Soest, in the Netherlands. “Now we can’t go out together, and even if we did, no one would see it.”

Everyone Christiansson knows is obeying “stay-at-home” orders adopted by cities, states and nations across the globe. Some advocates have left the movement altogether, forced to prioritize family, health or financial concerns.

“It felt,” Kianni said, “like our movement was being taken away.”

Sniffle. This is what happens when the real world and its concerns put the kibosh on interests by 1st Worlders who live good lives, so they have to make up something to be mad about.

Iris Zhan quickly saw possibilities in the upheaval.

Zhan, 16, attends River Hill High School in Clarksville, Md. She started pondering how to shift the climate movement online more than a year ago, when she wanted to participate in the Friday strikes but feared retribution from her school.

She connected with another student, George Zhang, whose school in California has similarly harsh rules about unexcused absences. Last year, they launched a virtual strike for students unable or unwilling to skip class. “#DigitalStrike,” she and Zhang called it. They asked participants to post pictures with climate slogans ahead of class on Fridays. Each week, she and Zhang combined all of the photos into a collage.

OK, so this is where they’re going with the story. Posting pictures with signs and stuff. Basically not that much different from what they do anyhow, but, instead of sexy selfies they post pithy messages, while still refusing to give up their own big carbon footprint lives.

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Shock: NY Times Offers Good Relief Idea On Coronovirus Response

By William Teach April 11, 2020 – 6:55 am

This isn’t the first time the NY Times editorial board has offered a good relief idea. They offered one about paying up to 90% of worker’s salaries a couple weeks ago, along with other measures. And now they note something similar

‘We’re Going Down, Down, Down, Down, Down’

The federal government is struggling to deliver financial aid to faltering employers — and workers are suffering the consequences…..

The federal government was slow to react to the pandemic. Local officials began ordering businesses to shut down weeks before Congress moved to provide those businesses with the lifeline they so obviously needed. Timely action by itself could have saved millions of jobs.

Wait a minute. What’s this about the federal government being slow to act? That’s shocking, isn’t it? Kinda puts the whole federalism thing into the idea pool, eh, where we should rely more on states, counties, and municipalities, where the power belongs.

European nations, including France, Germany and Britain, are fighting mass unemployment by paying companies to hold on to their employees. The government gives money to the companies, which give it to the workers; the workers stay home and get paid.

Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, has proposed an American version. Under his plan, the government would pay up to 80 percent of payroll costs for each employee up to the median wage — which the Social Security Administration pegged at $32,828 in 2018.

OK, so the idea is really that of EU nations and Josh Hawely, but give the NYTEB credit for pushing this

The most important shortcoming with Mr. Hawley’s program is that it’s still not big enough. It would provide a maximum of about $500 per week per employee, which is less than the $600 per week in extra unemployment benefits that Congress authorized in March.

Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington, proposed on Friday that the government pay 100 percent of weekly wages for workers making up to $100,000. That’s overly generous. The payment is basically an unemployment check with the added bonus that people will eventually return to the same jobs.

The government doesn’t need to carry workers making $100,000 at their full salaries to get them through the crisis. But it shouldn’t be hard to find a sensible middle ground between the two schemes.

Of course, there’s a couple big problems with this: first, Democrats are trying to use these relief bills to push all sorts of their pet policies, including abortion funding, instant contact tracking, transforming to mail in ballots (with no security measures), doing away with student loan debt, giving money to illegal aliens and legal non-citizens, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and more. Rather than a targeted focus, they see this crisis as a way to implement their wish list.

The NYTEB is missing one big problem

Pelosi: House May Not Reconvene Until May — Or Longer

And here we thought they ran for office to actually lead. In an interview with Politico, Nancy Pelosi warned Donald Trump against reopening businesses too soon, even though the federal government has no real authority to shut them down in the first place. Pelosi also announced that she won’t be re-opening the House any time soon either, certainly not by their April 20 return date:

It’s rather hard to do something when the Democrat run House is absent, especially when Queen Nancy has not interest in virtual voting. Let’s be honest, Democrats want the pain to go on as long as possible and make any recovery tepid, in order to defeat Trump in November.

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Cow Poop Could Power California’s Clean Energy Future Or Something

By William Teach April 10, 2020 – 4:38 pm

Well, hey, the People’s Republik Of California needs something for when the solar panels and wind turbines are not supplying power, right? Something to limit the rolling brown and blackout? Let’s go old school with cow poop

Cow poop could fuel California’s clean energy future. But not everyone’s on board

Lyle Schlyer grinned as a river of frothing manure oozed down a concrete channel, the murky greenish fluid soon disappearing into a storm drain-like hole.

It was a sunny March afternoon, a few days before the novel coronavirus began shutting down much of California, and the smell of cow dung was doing nothing to dampen Schlyer’s enthusiasm. He stood atop a towering contraption that separated the manure into solid and liquid parts. A conveyor belt deposited the brown solids at the top of a stinking mound. The fluids filtered through narrow slits in a metal screen before continuing down the concrete channel.

The liquids would eventually reach a double-lined holding pond, larger than a football field and covered by a thick black tarp. A stew of gases — mostly methane and carbon dioxide — bubbled up under the tarp, creating enough pressure that you can walk across the undulating surface with sinking steps, like an open-air bounce house or a bizarre sand dune.

A few steps away, thousands of Holstein cows looked on, their moos audible over the industrial whir of the manure separator.

“It’s the grittier side of renewable fuel,” Schlyer said.

It wasn’t that many years ago when a major paper like the LA Times would have deemed this disgusting and put it in the strange news section, not propped it up as awesome. Let’s use an energy source from the B.C. era.

Of course, this probably smells less than the poop filled streets of San Francisco.

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If All You See…

By William Teach April 10, 2020 – 1:00 pm

…are plants that will soon die from carbon pollution induced temperature rise, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is The Daley Gator, with a post on the statism of Ezekiel Emanuel.

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Whiny People Are Whiny About UK Surfers Having A Good Time

By William Teach April 10, 2020 – 12:00 pm

Checking out the beach cams for North Carolina (also has Manasquan NJ and a few others), there haven’t been that many out surfing, because there really haven’t been waves. Swellmagnet shows beaches in the Los Angeles area, and, there are still people going out, though less than would be normal with some good waves (no one out right now, looks like crummy weather plus blowing out the waves at high tide). But, when I do see them, they are staying apart. And they are exercising. Now we have

From the Yahoo UK article

People are furious after pictures showed surfers flouting social distancing and taking to the waves at a Newquay beach during the coronavirus lockdown

Next week, the government is due to carry out its first review of the draconian lockdown measures introduced two-and-a-half weeks ago.

But as the Easter weekend approaches, dozens of people were pictured in the sea at Fistral Beach in Newquay on Thursday – in defiance of the social distancing measures.

Surfing has been officially banned in countries such as Portugal, Spain and Italy – but no direct legislation has been brought in for the UK.

Sounds like they are jealous. The photos of the folks in the water show them at least 6 feet apart.

Members of the surfing community claim they are entitled to be out on the water as part of their permitted daily exercise.

Exactly.

Stunned on-lookers said the scene in the sea and around Newquay town was no different to what they would normally expect to see on a sunny day.

One said: “I could not believe it. Walking around Newquay there were people everywhere dressed in wet-suits and holding surfboards.

“You wouldn’t have thought there was a pandemic. It feels more like a hot sunny day.

What were these nags doing out and about themselves? They can mind their own business.

“Although some are social distancing, it is very difficult to know when riding a wave who is near you, or who you might bump into.”

Believe me, you know where the other people are in the water the vast majority of the time, because you want to be in position to grab the wave. Some people just need to mind their own lives.

This missed the scheduled posting yesterday, so, let me add this on

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People In Wake County Love Them Some Bat Soup Virus Snitching

By William Teach April 10, 2020 – 10:30 am

This is going on all over, but, so far here in Wake County, law enforcement hasn’t rolled out fines

Nearly 500 stay-at-home order complaints filed in Wake County

Law enforcement agencies throughout Wake County have received hundreds of complaints since county commissioners implemented a stay-at-home order two weeks ago to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

Gov. Roy Cooper issued a similar statewide order that took effect March 30. Sit-down service at restaurants was banned in an earlier order that took effect March 17.

Area police departments and the Wake County Sheriff’s Office say they have chosen to educate and warn people and businesses about the restrictions under the orders before issuing citations.

On March 24, Rolesville police issued two citations to employees at Main Street Tavern after warnings to shut down were ignored.

Does it disturb anyone else that a governor can simply order businesses to close without getting specific permission from the duly elected lawmakers? Obviously, not just Roy. If people want to take the chance, isn’t it “my body my choice”?

On Thursday, Fuquay-Varina police announced they will begin issuing citations for repeat offenders of the stay-at-home order. Records show officers in Fuquay-Varina have received 75 complaints. (snip)

The Raleigh Police Department has received 139 calls since March 19.

“The RPD has not had to issue any citations or warnings,” department spokeswoman Donna-maria Harris said in a statement. “People have been very responsive to our educational approach and complied immediately.”

Most people are smart enough to comply in the moment.

Cary police have received 164 compliance calls since March 28, the most of any jurisdiction in the county.

A Cary spokesperson said officers responded to at least 35 businesses, and all of them were either exempt from the order or complied with warnings to close. (snip)

The Wake County Sheriff’s Office has received only eight complaints, while Morrisville police got 42 and Wake Forest 27.

Raleigh is the biggest city in the county. The other cities basically surround Raleigh, so have decent populations, as well. Most of the other towns in proximity haven’t reported data. I guess we’re in the age of snitching for being outside. Perhaps Excitable Paul Krugman should worry more about this march to authoritarianism.

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Posted in Barking Moonbats, NC News | 39 Comments | Trackback URL

The Climate Crisis Could Maybe Possibly We Think Cause Lots Of Extinctions Or Something

By William Teach April 10, 2020 – 7:17 am

I caught this study yesterday, but, didn’t bother posting on it, because I wanted to wait to see where the media went with it

Climate change could cause sudden biodiversity losses worldwide

A warming global climate could cause sudden, potentially catastrophic losses of biodiversity in regions across the globe throughout the 21st century, finds a new UCL-led study.

The findings, published today in Nature, predict when and where there could be severe ecological disruption in the coming decades, and suggests that the first waves could already be happening.

The study’s lead author, Dr Alex Pigot (UCL Centre for Biodiversity & Environment Research): “We found that climate change risks to biodiversity don’t increase gradually. Instead, as the climate warms, within a certain area most species will be able to cope for a while, before crossing a temperature threshold, when a large proportion of the species will suddenly face conditions they’ve never experienced before.”

“It’s not a slippery slope, but a series of cliff edges, hitting different areas at different times.”

Dr Pigot and colleagues from the USA and South Africa were seeking to predict threats to biodiversity over the course of the 21st century, rather than a single-year snapshot. They used climate model data from 1850 to 2005, and cross-referenced it with the geographic ranges of 30,652 species of birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and other animals and plants. The data was available for areas across the globe, divided up into 100 by 100 km square grid cells.

“Climate model data.” Why not use the actual data? It’s 2020. The actual temperature and other readings are available. And why stop in 2005? Could it have something to do with being deep in a warming pause?

The researchers predict that if global temperatures rise by 4°C by 2100, under a “high emissions” scenario which the researchers say is plausible, at least 15% of communities across the globe, and potentially many more, will undergo an abrupt exposure event where more than one in five of their constituent species crosses the threshold beyond their niche limit within the same decade. Such an event could cause irreversible damage to the functioning of the ecosystem.

If warming is kept to 2°C or less, potentially fewer than 2% of communities will face such exposure events, although the researchers caution that within that 2% includes some of the most biodiverse communities on the planet, such as coral reefs.

There’s been just a 1 degree Celsius rise since 1850: 4C may be the worst case, but even another 1C rise in the next 80 years is silly.

The researchers predict that such unprecedented temperature regimes will begin before 2030 in tropical oceans, and recent events such as mass bleaching of corals on the Great Barrier Reef suggest this is happening already. Higher latitudes and tropical forests are predicted to be at risk by 2050.

And what will these climahysterics do when this doesn’t happen by 2030? Will there be apologies for perpetuating doomsaying prognostications?

Of course we get

Just a smattering of “we’re doomed. Maybe. Possibly.” We can fix this all with a tax and you giving up your freedom, liberty, and choice.

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