I arise very early, and have some good books going, and also came across other stuff this morning worth sharing. Please indulge me if you have a few minutes.
I commented on Judith Curry’s blog yesterday as follows:
I read Dr. Curry’s summary response to public comment, and then the comments here … well, I got maybe halfway through. I was distracted by Bushkin, Joe K and Appell, who account for maybe a third of these comments. I was reminded of Cool Hand Luke, who kept getting knocked down, who kept getting back up, till Dragline said “Stay down, Luke.” Later he embraced him for coming back “with nothing.”
Maybe that is the point of those three, as they have certainly tried to derail this thread. But I suggest we all go back and reread a comment by Rails at 2:45 on 9/2. What he is saying is profound, that our power grid is slowly being dismantled by inattention, and this would be the object of the Climate Change crowd, at the very top anyway. Since the public is not attune and does not care much about climate change anyway, the real work is being done by attrition, absence of new plants, and fewer entrants into the engineering field. The Climate Change movement is powerful, but not scientific. That’s a side issue. It is political. We can yak all we want about how off base it is, as was done by the DOE report, but none of that will derail the political thrust, to de-energize our society.
It is to be done slowly, over time, with great patience and total purpose. It is essentially a misanthropic movement. To argue about the bad science involved scores points along the way, but lands no punches.
I should not have included Joe K among the three who are essentially trolling JCs work, and he let me know it. He linked me as follows: (the article only begins with what is shown here, and is very interesting. Politicians normally distort and exaggerate. Newsom essentially lies, easily, and with no one of note fact-checking him.
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From National Review (paywalled), October 2025, page 42:
Doom and Gloom in the Classroom:
Maya is 13 years old and in eighth grade.
First period is English, where her class is reading a young adult novel about a teenage girl who self-harms, spirals into depression, and eventually attempts suicide. Her teacher praises the book for its honesty and “unflinching emotional truth.” After a brief discussion, the class writes about how trauma shapes identity.
Second period is social studies. Today’s reading assignment comes from the 1619 Project, followed by a worksheet asking students to reflect on how racism is “baked into the structure of American life.” Last week, students read a chapter from A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, and discussed whether the US was founded to protect the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. Maya takes notes quietly, worried she might say the wrong thing.
In science, the class is studying climate change. The teacher plays a documentary that includes images of wildfires, melting glaciers, and disappearing coastal towns. Meyer learns that humanity will face catastrophic collapse if global carbon emissions do not reach “net zero” by the time she is in her 30s. During lunch, she tells a friend she’s not sure she wants to have kids someday.
In the afternoon, my joints are “action civics” project group. Their capstone project is about gun violence. They are creating a slide deck and organizing a letter writing campaign. The project guidelines encourage students to “identify a systemic injustice” and “propose a structural solution.” Her group advisor urges them to “center” their personal stories.
Tomorrow is half-day. Teachers will spend the afternoon in professional development workshops on “trauma-informed pedagogy,” where they’ll learn to spot signs of anxiety, disengagement, and despair in students – and to treat these as evidence of trauma.
Almost no one will consider the possibility that we are the ones traumatizing students.
I am most concerned about the teaching of climate change in classrooms these days by teachers either too stupid to figure it out on their own, or afraid to speak up for fear of job loss. In either case, the result is, as the paragraph above states, that kids are unsure they want to have kids when they grow up. I regard this manner of teaching a false and misleading “science” to them as nothing less than child abuse.
From Public Opinion, by Walter Lippman, 1922, pp 21-22:
The editor of the French communiqué tells us that as the battle dragged out, his colleagues and he set out to neutralize the pertinacity of the Germans by continual insistence on their terrible losses. It is necessary to remember that at this time, and in fact until late in 1917, the orthodox view of the war for all Allied peoples was that it would be decided by “attrition.” Nobody believed in a war of movement. It was insisted that strategy did not count, or diplomacy. It was simply a matter of killing Germans. The general public more or less believed the dogma, but it had constantly to be reminded of it in the face of spectacular German successes.
“Almost no day passed but the communiqué… ascribed to the Germans with some appearance of justice heavy losses, extremely heavy, spoke of bloody sacrifices, heaps of corpses, hecatombs. Likewise the wireless constantly use the statistics of the intelligence bureau at Verdun, whose chief, Major Cointet, had invented a method of calculating German losses which obviously produced marvelous results. Every fortnight the figures increased hundred thousand or so. These 300,000, 400,000, 500,000 casualties put out, divided into daily, weekly, monthly losses, repeated in all sorts of ways, produced a striking effect. Our formulae varied little: “according to the prisoners the German losses in the course of the attack have been considerable”… “It is proved that the losses”… “the enemy exhausted by his losses has not renewed the attack”… Certain formulae, later abandoned because they had been overworked, were used each day: “under our artillery and machine gun fire”… “mowed down by our artillery and machine gun fire”… Constant repetition impressed the neutrals and Germany itself, and help to create the bloody background in spite of the denials from Nauen (the German wireless) which tried vainly to destroy the bad effect of this perpetual repetition”
The theses of the French Command, which it wished to establish publicly by these reports, was formulated as follows for the guidance of the sensors:
“This offensive engages the active forces of our opponent whose manpower is declining. We have learned that the class of 1916 is already at the prompt. There will remain in 1917 class already being called up, and the resources of the third category (made above 45, or convalescents). In a few weeks, the German forces exhausted by this effort, will find themselves confronted with all the forces of the coalition (10 millions against 7 millions)”.
According to M. de Pierrefeu, the French command had converted itself to this belief. “By an extraordinary aberration of mind, only the attrition of the enemy was seen; it appeared that our forces were not subject to attrition. General Niville share these ideas. We saw the result in 1917.”
We have learned to call this propaganda… Through its control over all news from the front, the General Staff substituted in view of the facts that comported with this strategy.
Since the Western participants (and Russia) in this war were essentially on the same page, I think it might be safe to suggest that the estimate 40 million casualties in World War I is greatly exaggerated, and the 116,000 American casualties, likewise. By the way, 116 is an expression of 8.
Piece of Mindful 
just wait until the U.S. and in turn the world start building small nuclear plants to fuel the data centers, among other things essential to our every day energy needs. There is a gentleman talking about the power sources and the tech that will be coming out in the next several years that should resolve all energy needs. His name is General Kwast and he heads a company similar to Elon Musk. The tech is already operational, just not on a large scale.
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Speaking of war.. I read an article on NakedCapitalism that summarized the history of Yugoslavia – surprisingly interesting, convoluted saga. Supposedly they lost half their male population during WWII.. Or was it WWI. Either way, seems hard to fake that.
I’ve been meaning to look up the casualty numbers for Ukraine. One gets the impression that they’re just being fed inexorably into the Russian meat grinder. But maybe it’s greatly exaggerated, I don’t know what goes on in these war zones. Clearly the official stories about it are bunk.
The Creel Commission was the famous propaganda group for WWI, of course. Later renounced as scandalous. Until the next war, when they did it all over again. Rinse and repeat. One of their master strokes was to have young women pin yellow ribbons on men who didn’t volunteer – something like that. Those cowards who weren’t interested in dying in a trench on behalf of a rather large and abstract “nation” and its Creel Commission sitting comfortably at home, agitating for young men to go shoot other young men across the ocean.
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Hey Mark,I saw Trump’s post
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I am not sure what you are talking about here, Lisa. Can you elucidate? Is that a word?
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I can’t reply
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They do use climate change on the kiddies, all around the world. I was so pissed when I saw my 10 year old niece in Thailand posted on Facebook some climate bullshit – the poor kid doesn’t know any better, knows zero about science to be honest. If I ever meet the people who pushed that garbage on the kids…
But now it seems AI is the new dystopia. Frankly, it’s working on me – I do really feel for the future generations, I don’t see a happy future for them in this country, or world. I see grinning psychopaths like Kill Gates on Facebook quoting “AI will eliminate many jobs for humans in the near future, making them unnecessary…” Clearly the elite like Gates want to pay as few people as possible for their hired help in the future, and prefer a select group of slaves. I see the present movement as a slow strangulation of the middle class, and upper middle class.
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This current “lifey” (life movie) about a conservative activist being assassinated is a reminder though that there’s a strong backlash (albeit a controlled dialectic) among the younger generation, against the programming.. NoAgenda mentioned this recently, it’s been noted that many young men say they’re conservative, and they’re pulling some women (the less ideological ones presumably) in that direction. Despite all the programming, I could see it shaking out that way, as the main thrust of their cultural impact. After all the people who raised them, at least the middle and upper middle class families, would have been among the most culturally conservative of their generation. The more liberal Gen X often have no children. And so many of them, their parents literally inoculate them against any programming from school – I know this anecdotally, they just just jump through the hoops while internally rejecting it and sticking to the frame their parents give them.
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Lippmann goes into depth on Creel, and I had read about it all long ago too. They were masterful. They had both a riotous assembly and a book burning bonfire inspired by the work of Creel … in Lewistown, Montana. That’s a small town in the center of the state.
Regarding numbers of casualties, I don’t know what to think, much more to understand. I wonder if they include the Spanish Flu. After the Rosenau experiments on both coasts, in which they found it was not contageous no matter how hard they tried, they stopped studying it.
One of the items on my lists of projects is Gallipoli, as it sounds suspicious, two major movies made about it (Mel Gibson and Russell Crowe, decades apart).
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I know the name but nothing about it.. isn’t that where Pete the magic dragon hails from?
The surprise would actually be if it’s NOT loaded down with numerical markers and strange implausible claims though.. since everything else is.
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Here’s a little joke: How do you know when a murder is fake?
Answer: when they call it an “assassination”.
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Dassagoowon.
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I don’t know anything about this Kirk character, but considering the response I assume it’s a psyop. And supposedly the killer is still on the loose I guess? Anyhow let us know what the hoax markers are if you follow the story.
Totally agree about the backlash, that’s a great pickup. Its partly why i have been more optimistic past few years, at least for the short term – I don’t see any of the ultra-dystopian scenarios playing out, just more and more BS you need to step around and avoid.
And I am more optimistic because in many ways I see a strong rebound post Covid. And I think it served to wake up a significant portion of the population. As far as conservative families, i know several, including some cousins, who are anti-vax, very religious, with several kids. And very not woke. I live next to a large Catholic complex – a school, convent, monastery, and my house has doubled in value since 2020 because people are fleeing Boston and the city and public schools and a small, but significant number of them are choosing a traditional Catholic or Christian education.
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Gallipoli? It was a WWI battled fought around Istanbul where the Brits used Aussies and Limeys instead of their own troops, and casualties were massive. That’s the official story.
But I liked your answer better, Pete the Magic Dragon?
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Yeah, who’s Pete the Magic Dragon?
Considering Churchill was supposedly in charge I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a culling of the most athletic and patriotic of the that generation of British “foreigners” in the commonwealth, to keep the numbers who might revolt in check. The British are notorious for their complete lack of sympathy for the lower classes, and their zeal to keep them in check. The Boer war seems a pretty clear cut case of genocide against Dutch settler farmers who were doing well in South Africa, which could have hindered their plans for total exploitation of the mineral and other resources by the Anglo-Euro elite.
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Puff the Magic Dragon… no?
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D’oh.. that’s it of course, it must be these old spiderman comics I’m reading that substituted Pete in my faulty memory.. what were they thinking calling him Peter Parker anyway? I do actually remember though that Puff “lived in the land of Galilee”.. that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
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Puff the magic dragon, lived by the sea, and frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honalee.
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Okay, I give up.. I’m not even smoking anything and my memory’s shot
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Like in many other cases, the intended core meaning of the Gallipoli story was to sound and be remembered as a blatantly stupid and pointless action, where hundreds of men were sent to certain death after being ordered by some stubborn pompous high official to exit the trenches and to attack the machine gun posts held by the turks. It’s no accident that in war’s chronicles and storiography there’s no shortage of similar tales of tragic losses caused by a mix of sheer incompetence, stupidity and vanity on the part of the military commands. Reason is they arise anger and indignation, both powerful sentiments that build in your mind a strong emotional bond to the fact, so that you tend to wholeheartedly believe it losing sight of the poor logic of the story, let alone ever venture so far to think that wars are basically a big hoax. It goes without saying that this cheap trick works fine to boost belief in any kind of hoax or absurd story, the Challenger televised disaster, allegedly caused by a sloppy trivial miscalculation, being another good example.
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Excellent point.. that is also pretty much the plotline of Paths of Glory, an early Kubrick movie I recently watched.
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Agreed, excellent point. I’ve got a stack here somewhere of paper from Wikipedia on Gallipoli, my idea that I would read it looking for inconsistencies and spook markers. I still mean to do that, only need to energize a bit.
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So when people are saying war is a hoax, to what extent are you suggesting the circumstances are hoaxed. I completely agree that most conflicts, especially modern ones we have a good record of for the past 250 years, appear to be scripted conflicts with predetermined outcomes.
However, concerning the casualties and fighting, I tend to believe there is quite a bit of real fighting and dying that goes on. I have heard battles called “dogfighting”, which seems an apt term. Give a bunch of young men with hormones, something to prove, an indoctrination in propaganda, guns, and throw them into a field and let them blast at each other for a while. So that the most violent and idealistic wannabe soldiers are turned into goo, reducing the future population (by taking out fertile males) while making obscene profits on armaments and ammunition.
And also the aspect of wars being used for land clearance and confiscation of land that was once farmland for government use, or scooped up by the rich after the battles at rock bottom prices.
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For example, there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that the wannabe heroes from America, and other places, that went to Ukraine since 2022 to be soldiers or help out somehow, like as a doctor or medic, have disappeared. Which is another potential bonus of war, to draw in the young and idealistic from all places, to volunteer and then go away.
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Yes war are hoaxes in the sense that the outcomes are well known in advance, therefore the actual fighting and military actions are irrelevant. In some cases they even let you know that, like when putting the armistice’s date (more than four years away) on the plate of the car where the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and wife were allegedly assassinated, allegedly by a terrorist, allegedly igniting the escalation to WWI (some conspiracy nut like us would call it revelation of the method, someone else, the great majority, just a weird creepy coincidence).
Not so much today in the realm of AI generated reality, but in the past at least a certain amount of actual casualties was required, to give credence back home to the whole charade, hence lots of casualties were real, even without the need of actual battling. Just give an assorted array of firearms, ammo, hand grenades, weapons and machinery to poorly trained, stressed young men, then amass them for months into cold, rats infested, muddy holes in the ground, or in the middle of a boiling desert, or on top of snowy mountains, poorly equipped and poorly fed, and heaps of very bad things are guaranteed to happen anyway.
We should expect that they would have been ashamed and gone to great length to hide horrific, criminal, totally stupid and unjustifiable war actions like Gallipoli and others, since they cannot bring anything good to the general war cause, actually they should only stir a strong anti war sentiment. The fact that, on the contrary, this kind of disgraceful episodes were allowed to be largely popularized, including Hollywood big production movies, tells all we need to know about how real they are, and about the real meaning of this propaganda.
As a side note, can anyone explain what’s the logic, from a military point of view, behind the great field battles of the past? Because I’m unable to see any.
First of all field battles don’t happen by chance, two big armies just don’t happen to randomly meet, the top commands have to agree very well in advance to be ready and bring their armies in the same place at the same time. We must assume that nobody in his right mind would agree to go to a fight without having a good knowledge of the respective forces, so let’s take for granted that each military intelligence have already gathered the needed information. At this point there are two possibilities:
a) It turns out one of the army is clearly inferior to the other.
In this case the weaker army, in the certainty of being defeated, would never accept an open face to face clash. No battle is going to happen.
b) The two armies are supposed to be of practically equal power. In this case the outcome of the battle would be totally unpredictable, it can easily go one way or the other depending on random fortuitous circumstances, bordering gambling. Especially in a winner takes all scenario (think e.g. of Waterloo), would it be smart to put all your eggs in one basket on such uncertain premises? Again, in a real world no battle is going to happen.
It seems to me that in order to win a war there are other viable alternative strategies that would be much more cost effective and less open to random chance than clashing two big armies face to face in a muddy field in the middle of nowhere.
I’m unable to see any scenario where a large field battle would be a clever move, but I can easily see how they are perfect for staging a huge, impressive “war theatre” that will enter the legend and the history books, forever remembered, and that as a bonus can even be reenacted every year in some flashy smoke, bangs and costumes show, just to keep the memory alive.
Did the famous historical battles actually take place? I don’t know, but if they did, I don’t believe it was for military purposes.
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Great insight … one additional thought, that of the idea that the further away from actual killing, the easier to kill, so that weaponry has supposedly made combat much more efficient. I don’t think most humans have the ability to kill within them, especially at close range. There is never an incentive to kill the general population, so Dresden, Hiroshiima, Nagasaki, Hanoi are out the window.
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The armistice date for World War I was the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, i.e., 33. These people are so very superstitious. Initial construction ot the Twin Towers was 1968, their destruction in 2001, 33 year later. JFK was “shot” on 11/22 (33), first shot fired at 12:30 (33). The Columbine “massacre” ended at 3:30 PM that day. Covid was declared a worldwide pandemic on 3/11/2020, another 33. The oxygen-based fire that killed three astronauts in 1967 lasted 33 seconds.
How can they not know in advance when their coding system virtually mandates use of their superstitions?
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Excellent.
c. Eliminate both sides.
“Honor”, “glory”, “patriot”… now “freedom”. Plenty of ignoramuses and impoverished to feed into the meat grinder – I am supposing back then as well.
Didn’t Miles’ offer up a story about the incredulity of the “Civil War”, especially the lack of [authentic] photographic evidence?
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To your second comment – I’ve thought about that too, the weirdness of war between nation states. You can sort of imagine it between small tribal peoples, fighting over some great natural resource or location maybe. Or ethnic/ culture clash or rivalry of some sort. But the logistics get strange at a larger level.
Why in WWII do you need to land right in a heavily fortified part of the coast and get ripped to shreds? They can’t heavily fortify the entire coastline everywhere.. maybe have scouts seeing where you will land, but then they’d have to bring their forces there and be much less effective. But yes, land, coastlines, it’s all so vast and even a large army is just a dot by comparison. Why not go AROUND the heavily fortified dot on the map?
Kubrick has another movie, Barry Lyndon, showing a great field battle of the 18th century, very formal or ritualistic as the two colorfully dressed sides march closer and closer, firing on each other and then clashing with bayonets and personal combat. Our young hero doesn’t know quite what he’s gotten himself into. It’s clearly absurd but there he is. There is a kind of tragic romance to it, the sense of noble ideals in the abstract, meeting the absurdity or pathos of the reality. It’s plausible in a way as something that may have actually happened – not as actual military strategy, but for the reasons you describe. And also some of the officers could be attached to it out of a sense of the tragic grandeur, a kind of romantic feeling about it all. There’s pathos in knowing it’s all just vain ritual, but at one time maybe they were idealists too. And some are just sociopathic careerists and cynics.
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Littmans description of WW1 reminds me in many ways of the “war” in Ukraine. It’s shocking, though not really, how long that “war” has dragged out. In less than a year it will surpass the length of WW1. I hope readers here can remember the breathless early days of the “war” in 2022, when Russia was supposed to be routed by these underdogs, and Russia was near collapse. Of course everyone (well most everyone) forgot that in a real war Russia would rout and overrun the Ukraine in a few weeks. It would be like America vs. Mexico.
Also, there are clearly many reasons for the Ukraine “war” distraction. Miles would suggest it was started in Feb 2022 to distract from the Vaccine genocide, but if you remember the early days leading up to the start of the “war”, the casus belli was that America was setting up bioweapons labs in Ukraine, which aligns with the prevailing conspiracy theory that Covid was an engineered bioweapon.
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Just because some guys got killed, it doesn’t matter because other guys will step in and get the job done. Remember #1 above.
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An aside about Paths of Glory – Peter Sellers plays one of the high ranking officials, a bastard indifferent to the lives of the plebes. In one scene he’s at a ball, shown only in long shot dancing with a woman, then talking to someone. Except the woman I’m pretty sure has got to be a man in drag. Just does not have a female frame or face, and explains why it’s shown only small at a distance. Note Sellers played a pervert in Kubricks Lolita, I think with some references to gender inversion in that movie too but can’t recall exactly.
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I once heard that Thomas Cook made their fortune during the Boer War. They shipped out onlookers to view the battles (similarly, there is a painting of onlookers at some battle during the American Civil War also I recall). One has to remember that travel was much slower in those days, so battles would have to be advertised well in advance. Unfortunately, I am recalling this over 30 years after the initial hearing, though I’ve heard once or thrice since on TV. War is a racket.
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If that were so, and if the battles were not completely scripted/ staged, it would be more like a sporting contest, or a duel perhaps. “Let’s decide this by seeing who can field a bigger badder army, and having them meet in a formal contest.”
As Reader says, it would only be in question if the sides were roughly equal, and then just a coin toss – but so were gentlemanly duels, if we’re to believe any of those were real. It’s a different conception from 20th C “total war.” Similar to when people say jokingly, why don’t they just settle it with a boxing match between the two country’s leaders, or duel or whatever.
Not that it was definitely that way or anything, just that sensibilities do change, so maybe there have been real planned (as an appointment) battles, whose outcomes were still left to chance, as a wager between two wealthy families or factions.
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Regarding the Charlie Kirk fracas, what really indicates it was ‘fake’ to me is the way his widow Erika expressed her “grief” over Charlie’s loss. It’s almost like watching an SNL skit. I know people deal with grief differently, but speaking from experience, is this how a normal human being reacts to losing someone they love in such a frightening way? You be the judge.
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I first suspected something wrong at Columbine when I notice people with grimaced faces and breaking voices who were not actually crying, but rather acting. Mrs. Kirk too.
Funniest thing, when I mentioned absence of tears at Columbine around some former classmates, I was told “Yeah, people are all cried out, no more tears to give.” I thought it odd that knowing nothing before of the behaviors, they could instantly explain them!
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Even if we give benefit of the doubt to the pathetic excuse that the people at Columbine weren’t filmed crying because they had “no more tears to give”, that still wouldn’t explain the grimacing faces that you describe. Who in their right minds would be grimacing over such a brutal tragedy?
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They need to give them tear pumps, like Dickie Attenborough at 1 minute 28 seconds. I remember this scene well since I was a child.
Monty Python, Season 3, Episode 13 – 4
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