If you believe in climate change, shutting down the Strait of Hormuz is the best thing that ever happened to Mother Earth because it reduces fossil fuel supply and, thus, reduces CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuel. Bizarrely, however, people and organizations who’ve been reliable climate change alarmists describe the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, and the resultant obstruction of oil and gas exports, as a catastrophe. Example from today’s New York Times:
Here’s CNN. For a Follower of Science, the headline should be “Key method of destroying our planet shut down” and high oil prices should be welcomed as a spur to conservation. Instead, we learn that high oil prices should be “fixed” (i.e., oil should be cheap enough to burn in a profligate Earth-destroying CO2-emitting-as-fast-as-possible manner) by Trump and that the strait being closed is a bad thing.
An Obama-generation Democrat in 2022 says that he wants to make it illegal for people to purchase gasoline or, at least, the cars that burn gasoline. This will be an “important climate change policy”:
A few years later, Gavin Newsom is excoriating Trump for causing an increase in the price of the product that he thinks should be outlawed because use of that product is harmful:
Here’s a representative young Democrat saying, in July 2025, that we need to take climate change seriously:
Here is the climate change alarmist, less than a year later, saying that gas prices should be lower so that people can afford to buy and operate that 12 mpg SUV:
Was surprised to see at least 4 F-14’s were in airworthy condition during the sparse news coverage. They’re all destroyed now, but 2 were obviously moving on their own as late as 2026. All that destruction & the world is now hostage to an invincible insurgent military.
> A few years later, Gavin Newsom is excoriating Trump for causing an increase in the price of the product
I don’t want to sound bitchy, er unnecessarily gender-neutrally complaining; however, isn’t pointing out that a democrat is hypocritical like saying “That leopard has spots!” You think the Gates Foundation and Big Oil would just build an underground pipeline on the sea floor, and be done with it.
One thing about living in Seattle is that drainage infrastructure is pretty robust.
Everything that is not robust would be washed away long time ago. Even if water gets puddled on highway during major storm it gets drained in couple of hours.
Maybe they should get serious about drainage and not stealing construction project funds in New Jersey.
SK: Florida too! Any neighborhood that was built within the last 30-40 years has awesome drainage and rain capacity. Disney World is older, but it has never seriously flooded.
My subdivision in Longmont, CO (Renaissance subdivision with cute Italian-city names for the streets) was an island during the Great Flood of 2013, due to a modern drainage plan, including usually dry retention ponds. Who would have thunk that arid place would flood? Maybe the developer spent time in Venice?
I was actually really surprised by inadequacy of Disney World! There was storm the morning, and we had to waddle through really deep puddles on various plazas at EPCOT entrance and inside. Granted it got dry in few hours, but at some moment I had to remove my shoes and socks and dry them in the sun because they were soaked wet trough.
SK: I don’t think Disney World’s 1960s hydrology is up to the current standard. But, on the other hand, they’ve never had a ride wiped out by a flood…
@NobodySpecific
I’ve only been to Disneyland in the Climate Change Holyland:
> It hasn’t rained at Disneyland over Christmas since 2019. According to the National Weather Service, the record rainfall on Christmas Day is 3.01 inches, achieved in 1884. That record is expected to be broken this year.
https://insidethemagic.net/2025/12/unprecedented-storm-forcing-disneyland-to-close-early-on-christmas-eve-rl1/
Not sure how it fared.
I wonder why someone as smart as Dr. Greenspun would ask this question, :-). The whole point of Twitter for most people is to get more hearts, and thumbs, and they post whatever they think the audience would resonate with at the moment, I don’t think they have any logical flow to their Tweets.
Reminds me of a very insightful talk by Donald Knuth, which is the complement of this behavior:
@PF
He makes a good point as a general principal. But in his profession of academia, isn’t the name of the game funding, surfing the current hype wave? I mean AI research is becoming infused everywhere, even in the liberal arts for example, ostensibly due to deep pockets. It’s almost impossible now to do the right thing, if you can’t even scrape up enough money to live on ramen. Not all of us who want to do the right thing are endowed or emeritus profs. ABC, always be closing (on grant money), has seemed to be the creed and true full-time occupation of the (few) lab directors I have met.
NH:
Totally agree with you on everything. In fact, it’s this ABC stuff that leads to graphs like what Dr. Greenspun pointed out few posts ago:
https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/
When I saw this graph, I thought that another study could be done to see how the availablilty of large amounts of funding affects experts’ opinions.
> It’s almost impossible now to do the right thing, if you can’t even scrape up enough money to live on ramen.
This also is a very insightful observation. Physics Nobel prize winner Peter Higgs said a couple of very interesting things in the linked article below:
1. That the univeristy where he was employed was considering firing him if he didn’t get a Nobel prize, because he didn’t publish many papers. When I read this, I laughed a lot, this is TheOnion in real life.
2. He said that work like what he did, he can’t imagine doing now, because of how the incentives are aligned in the university.
The full article:
https://web.archive.org/web/20260304065634/https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-academic-system
My personal opinion is that the type of work these Physicist did can only be done if the only power the individual is experiencing is that of Nature, i.e. there shouldn’t be anything that the researcher does due to peer pressure, expectations by the university, etc., which does not directly aid the research in researcher’s own opinion, probably that’s what he meant by “peace and quiet” in the article.
To anyone who thinks the world is going to $#!t, or who has ADHD, they can benefit from some good therapy. I suggest starting by listening to Billy Joel. Very much everything is covered, from vaccination, Iran, to everything else. Sadly, Greta didn’t make the list… so maybe an update is over due?
youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g&list=RDeFTLKWw542g&start_radio=1
Uptown girl
She’s been living in her white-bred world
As long as anyone with hot blood can
And now, she’s looking for a downtown man
That’s what I am — Billy Joel, Uptown Girl
GenZ is sinister vibing on Uptown Girl, the song. It is kinda a DahFuq!Boomer vibe to a GenZ, looking back at it. (My nieces will make fun of my poor slay-speak.) Billy Joel was the danger too, so many car crashes. It is sad to watch our heroes fall, George. I was in a touring “honors choir” as a lad, and the music teacher refused to let us sing Billy Joel. We sang “Stairway to Heaven” in lieu. (Jimmy Page and his girlfriends, some things never change, Mr. Epstein.) Up vector now pointing down. Uptown Girl makes me miss the other Brittany, Murphy. Such a crush I had on her back in the good ol’ days, tragic modern Marilyn Monroe. I guess blog commenting is therapy too.