Why, we were just telling scary stories – say the climate-doomers

The New Neo Posted on by

For some reason, Now It Can Be Told:

You’ve probably never heard of the term “RCP 8.5” — the highest-emission scenario used by climate scientists to project the planet’s future. But if you’ve read about climate change, you’ve seen the numbers and nightmarish outcomes it produced: 4°C of warming by 2100, sometimes 5°C, sea level rising multiple feet, parts of the planet too hot for humans.

Those numbers shaped a decade and a half of climate journalism, including a lot of my own when I covered climate change at Time magazine. I didn’t always know — and didn’t always communicate — that the scenario behind the most apocalyptic, attention-getting findings was largely an attempt to imagine how bad things could get, not a true forecast. But I wasn’t alone. RCP 8.5 was a frequent background presence in climate journalism.

So are we to conclude that author Bryan Walsh sometimes did know and yet failed to communicate that he was writing the equivalent of a Hollywood script?

As for why he’s telling the tale now, it’s a domino effect:

Last month, though, the scientists who built that scenario formally retired it. In a paper published in Geoscientific Model Development, Detlef van Vuuren and more than 40 co-authors eliminated RCP 8.5 from the scenarios that will feed into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Seventh Assessment Report, which is due in 2029. Based on falling clean-energy costs, climate policy, and recent emissions trends, the highest-emissions pathway had become, in their words, “implausible.”

Walsh still says things will be bad, just not as bad. But why would we trust that prediction?

Was RCP 8.5 ever realistic? One camp of experts, led by climate scientist Zeke Hausfather and energy modeler Glen Peters, argues that RCP 8.5 was plausible in 2011, but was taken off the table by genuine policy and technology progress. The other camp, led by Roger Pielke Jr., argues that the rate of global decarbonization has been roughly linear for decades. That would mean we didn’t actively avoid RCP 8.5; it was just never realistic to begin with. Both camps agree on what counts, though: RCP 8.5 should be gone, and the planet is still on track to warm between 2.5° and 3° by 2100.

Walsh seems to be saying, in most of the article, that if we could predict the policy we could predict the climate. But I have always thought that’s a case of hubris. There are too many variables and too many unknowns interacting in too complex and too poorly-understood a fashion. And that’s even if you assume that scientists and journalists are always acting in good faith, which is – as they say – somewhat implausible.

“Butler was staged”

The New Neo Posted on by

Why do so many people believe the Butler assassination attempt was staged? Or that all the assassination attempts on Trump were staged?

About 1 in 4 Americans think the April shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner was staged according to a new survey.

Roughly 1 in 3 Democratic respondents said they believed the event was staged, compared with about 1 in 8 Republicans. …

Perhaps the most striking finding was that 42% of Democrats said they believed the Butler shooting was staged.

Among independents, that figure fell to 21%, while just 7% of Republicans said the same.

My explanation? If you believe that there is no objective truth, you are free to choose your truth – and the internet will assist you in doing so. There are also many people for whom most of life is lived online, watching a screen and coming to think of people as actors on that screen. The idea that these attempts were fake is one that’s spread online, and for people who believe the worst of Trump it’s a “truth” they can get behind. The fact that other people were wounded and one person killed at Butler? Fake. The photos of the assassin on the roof? Fake.

As just one example of the folks spreading this particular set of ideas, I bring you the odd couple, Candace Owens and Hunter Biden. Yes, you heard that right (the clip is less than a minute long):

Or a conspiracy. The JFK conspiracy theories have spawned countless others. But to the best of my knowledge, it never became a widespread idea that he hadn’t died and that the killing was fake; he was obviously dead in a way that would have been difficult for even the most devoted conspiracy theorist to deny. As far as I know, though, the other attempted presidential assassinations between then and now – for example, the shooting of Reagan, or the attempt on Ford’s life – never engendered any sort of widespread notion that they weren’t real.

Perhaps that sort of idea began with 9/11 Truthers. There was a not insignificant number of people who believed the WTC and Pentagon attacks were, if not exactly fake, then a performative plot by the US government:

The most prominent conspiracy theory is that the collapse of the Twin Towers and 7 World Trade Center were the result of controlled demolitions rather than structural failure due to impact and fire. Another prominent belief is that the Pentagon was hit by a missile launched by elements from inside the U.S. government, or that hijacked planes were remotely controlled …

Extraordinary. And there are also the people who think the moon landings were faked.

The other day I heard two jokes about conspiracy theorists and the tenacious quality of their beliefs. Here’s the first:

“Three conspiracy theorists walk into a bar. You can’t tell me that’s just a coincidence.”

And the second:

“A JFK assassination conspiracy theorist dies and goes to heaven. At the Pearly Gates, God welcomes him and says, ‘To reward your lifelong search for the truth, I will answer one question for you.’

“The man doesn’t hesitate. ‘Who really killed John F. Kennedy?’ he asks.

“God smiles and says, ‘Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone shooting from the Texas School Book Depository with a Manlicher-Carcano rifle. There was no second shooter and no conspiracy.’

“The man mutters, ‘Shit. This goes much higher up than I thought.'”

Once again, Iran

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “physicsguy” writes:

… [W]e have:

“Trump has set a final offer on the table with his minimum demands while pointing a gun at the IRGC’s temple: “Sign or die.” ”

And we’ve seen this same scenario of “final offer” multiple times for the past 7 weeks with no “sign or die” result happening. So why believe it this time? The Iranians just keep stringing it out

I think many of us (including me) share at least some of that impatient and uncertain feeling of unease. Why wouldn’t we? The outcome is uncertain and the propaganda around this enormous. Everyone reporting on the possibilities or probabilities has an agenda. Most of the agenda is anti-Trump.

Last night I was thinking about the need for patience. As physicsguy says, it’s been something like seven weeks since the ceasefire began. In the culture in which we live, that seems like a long time to wait while seemingly being jerked back and forth. But is it a long time, really? I submit that it is not, especially considering the stakes and the players.

Now, you may think – as I sometimes do – that there shouldn’t be negotiations at all with this entity. But I know I don’t have the full story. I strongly suspect (without actually knowing) that the reasons for the negotiations are as follows: (1) to reset the clock on the war for purposes of the need for Congress’ approval (2) intelligence gathering and planning (3) turning up the economic screws and letting the Iranian leadership fester in the problems that result (4) giving the Gulf States a needed rest; and (5) waiting to get what we want – the open Straits and the nuclear material – and then following up with more regime-weakening moves. The latter could definitely involve Israeli action, probably behind the scenes.

In the past, the only war endings that didn’t take a lot of time were situations in which one party surrendered unconditionally. Otherwise, when for example an armistice was involved, it ordinarily took many many months to iron things out. I’m not going to take the time to analyze each case, and often the peace achieved wasn’t on terms that were so great, but seven weeks is very short compared to the examples that come to mind (Versailles, Korea, Vietnam). For Korea, for example, Google AI says, “Negotiations for the armistice spanned over two years (1951-1953), the longest negotiated armistice in history.”

I don’t think there’s any chance of these talks going on that long. But at what point Trump will run out of patience I don’t know. It could happen any day now, or it could go on for another month or two. As a society we lack the patience for any more. Perhaps we lack the patience for even seven weeks.

If I had a dime for every headline I’ve seen lately with things like “disastrous deal” and “Trump surrenders,” I’d have a fair amount of extra cash. This is something to remember:

The whole message is this:

I hope people understand what’s happening because it’s been the same story over and over again.

The Islamic Republic and their allies leak their preferred details as if they are agreed to western sources. Then when U.S. refuses to agree to those absurd terms and insists we stick to the deal that had already been under discussion, they claim the U.S. is backing out of the deal.

Then they blame America or Israeli influence for the lack of a deal instead of The Islamic Republic making unreasonable demands for a settlement after they lost the military fight and are facing an economic crisis.

We saw the same thing with Gaza repeatedly.

And Trump himself has warned about that, for what it’s worth – in his own characteristic braggadocio style:

I laugh at all of the Dumocrats, RINOS, and Fools who know nothing about the potential deal I am making with Iran, things that haven’t even been negotiated yet, weak and ineffective people like failed Senator Thom Tillis (Soon out of office!), Bill Cassidy, who just suffered a massive Primary loss, really bad Congressman Thomas Massie, a major sleazebag who lost in a landslide to a great American Patriot (Endorsed by “TRUMP”) after showing tremendous disloyalty to his Party (and Country!), and almost all Dumocrats, people that have totally lost their way, constantly supporting bad policy and even worse candidates, but are constantly critical of each and every fantastic win I have. These people should go home and rest, they do nothing but create division and loss. In other words, they are losers! The deal with Iran will either be a great and meaningful one, or there will be no deal. It will be the exact opposite of the JCPOA disaster negotiated by the failed Obama Administration, which was a direct and open path to a Nuclear Weapon for Iran. No, I don’t do deals like that! President DJT

Trump is responding to this sort of thing:

Having started something he cannot finish, the US president, egged on by Israel’s warmonger-in-chief, Benjamin Netanyahu, has boxed himself into a corner. Either he resumes the illegal bombing of Iran on an even bigger scale, brazenly threatening war crimes in hopes of forcing surrender; or else he accepts a negotiated compromise that falls embarrassingly short of his initial aims, including eliminating Iran’s nuclear programme, and leaves an angry, more hardline, strategically strengthened regime in power. …

A peace deal, with add-ons, that is broadly in line with Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear pact with Tehran, which Trump foolishly wrecked and is now the most Iran seems willing to offer, would rightly be counted an abject Trump failure. It would represent a landmark US strategic defeat with significant implications for the global contest with China and Russia. And any deal that left the regime charging transit fees in the strait of Hormuz would be utterly humiliating. No amount of spin could conceal such a presidency-defining calamity.

You can feel the author’s excitement at the prospect.

For Memorial Day: on nationalism and patriotism

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: The following is a repeat of a previous post.]

The story “The Man Without a Country” used to be standard reading matter for seventh graders. In fact, it was the first “real” book – as opposed to those tedious Dick and Jane readers – that I was assigned in school.

It was exciting compared to Dick and Jane and the rest, since it dealt with an actual story with some actual drama to it. It struck me as terribly sad – and unfair, too – that Philip Nolan was forced to wander the world, exiled, for one moment of cursing the United States. “The Man Without a Country” was the sort of paean to patriotism that I would guess is rarely or never assigned nowadays to students – au contraire.

Patriotism has gotten a very bad name during the last few decades.

I think this feeling gathered more adherents (at least in this country) during the Vietnam era, and certainly the same is true lately. But patriotism and nationalism seem to have been rejected by a large segment of Europeans even earlier, as a result of the devastation both sentiments were thought to have wrought on that continent during WWI and WWII. Of course, WWII in Europe was a result mainly of German nationalism run amok, coupled with a lot more than nationalism itself. But the experience seemed to have given nationalism as a whole a very bad name.

Here’s author Thomas Mann on the subject, writing in 1947 in the introduction to the American edition of Herman Hesse’s Demian:

If today, when national individualism lies dying, when no single problem can any longer be solved from a purely national point of view, when everything connected with the “fatherland” has become stifling provincialism and no spirit that does not represent the European tradition as a whole any longer merits consideration…

A strong statement of the post-WWII idea of nationalism as a dangerous force, mercifully dead or dying, to be replaced (hopefully) by a pan-national (or, rather, anational) Europeanism. Mann was a German exile from his own country who had learned to his bitter regret the excesses to which a particular type of amoral nationalism can lead. His was an understandable and common response at the time, one that many decades later helped lead to the formation of the EU. The waning but still relatively strong nationalism of the US (as shown by the election of Donald Trump, for example) has been seen by those who agree with Mann as a relic of those dangerous days of nationalism gone mad without any curb of morality or consideration for others.

But the US is not Nazi Germany or anything like it, however much the far left may try to make that analogy. There’s a place for nationalism, and for love of country. Not a nationalism that ignores or tramples on human rights (like that of the Nazis), but one that embraces and strives for and tries to preserve them here and abroad, keeping in mind that – human nature being what it is – no nation on earth can be perfect or anywhere near perfect. The US is far from perfect, but has been a good country nevertheless, always working to be better, with a nationalism that traditionally recognizes that sometimes liberty must be fought for, and that the struggle involves some sacrifice.

So, I’ll echo the verse that figured so prominently in “The Man Without a Country,” and say (corny, but true): …this is my own, my native land. And I’ll also echo Francis Scott Key and add: …the star-spangled banner, O long may it wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave. Those lines from the anthem express a hope that has been fading. But even though things had been looking dim for both liberty and courage in recent years, it is not over.

When I looked back at my original, longer version of this post, I saw that it was written on Memorial Day in 2005, not that long after I began blogging. Seems longer ago than that. This is another portion of what I wrote then, and although I was describing my post-9/11 thoughts, I think it’s especially appropriate now [updates in brackets]:

I’d known the words to [our national anthem] for [over sixty years], and even had to learn about Francis Scott Key and the circumstances under which he wrote them. But I never really thought much about those words. It was just a song that was difficult to sing, and not as pretty as America the Beautiful or God Bless America (the latter, in those very un-PC days of my youth, we used to sing as we marched out of assembly).

The whole first stanza of the national anthem is a protracted version of a question: does the American flag still wave over the fort? Has the US been successful in the battle? As a child, the answer seemed to me to have been a foregone conclusion – of course it waved, of course the US prevailed in the battle; how could it be otherwise? America rah-rah. America always was the winner. Even our withdrawal from Vietnam, so many years later, seemed to me to be an act of choice. Our very existence as a nation had never for a moment felt threatened.

The only threat I’d ever faced to this country was the nightmarish threat of nuclear war. But that seemed more a threat to the entire planet, to humankind itself, rather than to this country specifically. And so I never really heard or felt the vulnerability and fear expressed in Key’s question, which he asked during the War of 1812, so shortly after the birth of the country itself: does that star-spangled banner yet wave, o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

But now I heard his doubt, and I felt it, too. I saw quite suddenly that there was no “given” in the existence of this country – its continuance, and its preciousness, began to seem to me to be as important and as precarious as they must have seemed to Key during that night in 1814.

And then other memorized writings came to me as well–the Gettysburg Address, whose words those crabby old teachers of mine had made us memorize in their entirety: and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. Here it was again, the sense of the nation as an experiment in democracy and freedom, and inherently special but vulnerable to destruction, an idea I had never until that moment grasped. But now I did, on a visceral level.

Insane man decides to commit suicide by Secret Service near the White House

The New Neo Posted on by

Here we go again:

A crazed gunman who belived he was Jesus Christ pulled out a revolver and opened fire outside the White House Saturday night, before he was quckly taken down by a barrage shots from the Secret Service, sources said.

Nasire Best, 21, fired at a checkpoint at about 6:10 p.m. after being seen pacing in a strange manner up and down 17th St. Northwest, sources told The Post. He only got off a few shots before he was shot and killed in a hail of bullets from federal officers.

At least one bystander was hit and seriously wounded in the fusillade, the sources said.

While a motive for the attack hasn’t been confirmed, sources said Best is a mentally troubled individual who was well-known to the Secret Service for repeatedly loitering around various entry posts and who has violated a previous court order to stay away from the White House.

In case you’re wondering why this guy was wandering around at liberty, it’s really hard to involuntarily commit someone for long. This is what had happened with Best:

Best … had previously been involuntarily committed on June 26, 2025, for obstructing vehicular traffic at 15th Street and E Street NW, before being arrested again on July 10, 2025, for Unlawful Entry. …

In that incident, Best bypassed a restricted White House pedestrian control post by walking through an exit turnstile lane — and made crazed statements when D.C. police and Secret Service agents detained him.

“[Best] claimed he was Jesus Christ and that he wanted to get arrested,” court records of the incident said.

My guess is that he was involuntarily committed, stayed a few days and got slightly stabilized on meds, and refused to stay after that. Then he got out and stopped taking any medication, and now one person is seriously wounded (another has been reported slightly wounded) and Best himself is dead.

At least he didn’t get close to the White House. But it’s not as though there wasn’t plenty of warning with this guy. I wonder whether he was armed in his previous encounters; perhaps not, or he might have been charged with something serious and detained longer. But there’s a limit to how long that can go on involuntarily.

I find it hard to believe he possessed the firearm legally.

Running in ballet

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I was going to put up a bunch of smaller posts, after my post earlier today on Iran. But the news of a possible deal – and the nervousness about its terms and whether they will amount to a concession to the Iranian regime – has unnerved me. So far I’ve thought Trump won’t cave, but it’s not as though I have some sort of certainty on that, because he’s a mercurial character who has always been in love with the deal. So I’m extremely nervous about this, although I’m waiting to see the details. I figure I”ll be updating later tonight or tomorrow.

In the meantime, I think I’m just going to post something that has nothing to do with politics, and then go take a walk.]

Walk like an Egyptian and run like a ballerina:

The greatest practitioner of the ballet run was Galina Ulanova, whose ballet heyday with the Kirov and then the Bolshoi was during the 1940s and 1950s. She was the child of two ballet dancers and felt she never had a choice about ballet, but she certainly made the best of it. She was unique as a dancer and as an actress, earning praise such as these statements:

Sergei Eisenstein: “Ulanova — cannot be grouped together with, compared to other dancers. In terms of what is most cherished, By the very nature of her secret…She belongs to a different dimension.” …

Margot Fonteyn: “I cannot even begin to talk about Ulanova’s dancing, it is so marvelous, I am left speechless. It is magic. Now we know what we lack.”

But it is this comment by dance critic Arnold Haskell with which I most agree:

My memories of Ulanova are, to me, a part of life itself, bringing a total enrichment of experience. To me, hers are not theatrical miracles but triumphs of human spirit. Where Pavlova was supremely conscious of her audience and could play upon its emotions as upon an instrument, Ulanova is remote in a world of her own, which we are privileged to penetrate. She is so completely identified with the character she impersonates that nothing outside exists.

But it’s running we’re talking about here. Ulanova originated the role of Juliet in the Prokofiev ballet, and it featured this famous run. Here Ulanova is running to Friar Lawrence’s cell in desperation. I believe she’s in her forties in this clip:

Iran watch: does the administration understand what they’re dealing with? [scroll down for UPDATES]

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Oldflyer” wrote a little while ago about Iran:

We have very smart people running this show. I worry that smart people can be dangerous if they do not understand the fight they are in. Robert McNamara and his Whiz Kids were smart. Too damn smart to listen to people in uniform apparently. Likewise, Colin Powell and Richard Armitage were presumably smart, as was Gen Petraeus. They all underestimated the enemy’s resilience and the complexity of the environment.

It makes sense to be concerned. What’s going on in terms of tactics and strategy? Is Trump feinting, is he bluffing, is he confused, is he flailing? What you see isn’t necessarily what you get. But maybe it is. One of the drawbacks of his desire to not telegraph his plans to the Iranians is that he doesn’t telegraph them to the American people, either.

There are certain constants in the message, however. One is that Iran can’t be allowed to have a nuclear bomb and must surrender its highly-enriched uranium. Another is that traffic must flow through the Strait of Hormuz without game-playing and toll-taking. Yet for this entire time, the administration has not said the Iranian government must fall, although they’ve made it clear they would like for that to happen.

I pay a lot of attention to what Marco Rubio says, even more than what Trump says. It’s not that Rubio is in control – he’s not. But his messages are more clear. For example, here’s what Rubio is saying today:

Talking about whether an imminent strike on Iran is possible in an exclusive conversation with NDTV’s Vishnu Som, Rubio said he would not “characterise it in terms of a timeframe.”

“I would say that what’s happening now cannot become the status quo and it cannot go on forever. At some point, there has to be a resolution to this problem,” he told NDTV.

The top US official reiterated that “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon”. …

Speaking on the issue [of the enriched uranium], he claimed that it can be removed easily from a technical point of view but Iran has “refused to even discuss it”. …

This problem needs to be solved one way or the other. We would prefer it be through diplomacy, but it will be solved one way or the other,” the US Secretary of State said.

We all yearn for regime change, but the administration isn’t focusing on that and never has. My guess, for what it’s worth – and I’ve said this quite consistently – is that Trump and company don’t think regime change will happen as a result of the war unless it was some sort of totally destructive war that would wreck the possibility of the people of Iran having any sort of foreseeable viable future, and the US doesn’t want to go that far. The idea seems to be to let Israel try to work on that after the pressing problems of the uranium and the Strait are solved, if in fact they can be solved. If not, there will be an escalation of the war. And still another idea is that regime change, if it does happen, will not happen soon even if these things do happen.

I’ve seen people also question whether this administration is aware of the apocalyptic vision of the Iranian leaders, their fanaticism, and their desire to cause chaos and conflagration in order to bring about the Mahdi’s return. My answer is “yes.” At least, it’s “yes” regarding Rubio, and I think we can safely say he has communicated this perception to the rest of the people in charge, if in fact they didn’t know it already.

Rubio referred to this even before the war began. Remember back in February, when people were getting frustrated that nothing seemed to be happening, and peace talks were occurring? Here’s Rubio back on February 16, 2026:

“Doing a deal with Iran is not easy. I said it yesterday, I’ll repeat it again today,” he said. “We have to understand that Iran ultimately is governed, and its decisions are governed, by Shia clerics, radical Shia clerics. There people make policy decisions on the basis of pure theology.

He added that while Washington long acknowledged the difficulty of negotiations with Tehran, the United States would continue to try.

What’s more, Rubio has been very aware of the situation since as far back as 2015, when he made the following speech. I’ve cued up a very short but telling excerpt:

That’s pretty unequivocal. Rubio gets it, and he got it over ten years ago.

UPDATE 5:40 PM:

Legal Insurrection has posted this message entitled “BREAKING: Trump Says Iran Deal Near, Hormuz to Reopen.” As I read it, there are two points. The first is that nothing has been settled, and it may indeed be that, like so many other supposed agreements, this one won’t be finalized. The second is that it seems to involve opening the Strait of Hormuz but nothing else has been specifically mentioned. The supposed agreement could include more, but that’s not at all clear. Trump lists a bunch of countries involved in the negotiations.

This makes me very very nervous. I am trying to be patient and ignore rumors – rumors of a type we’ve heard before, which include the idea that Trump is giving the Iranians all sorts of concessions. But we just don’t know, and we don’t even know if this deal is really going to go through or not. It’s very nerve-wracking.

UPDATE 12:20:

Here’s a NY Post story reporting that Iran has agreed, as part of the deal, to give up the enriched nuclear material. No way to know whether this is true or not, but here’s what it’s based on:

Tehran has agreed to a statement pledging to relinquish its cache of highly enriched uranium — believed to be enough to build 11 nuclear bombs — the New York Times reported, citing two American officials.

That nuclear material has been a major sticking point. Time will tell if this report is accurate, and what the details might be.