THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Fifty-year storm dumps snow from Texas to Maine

Fifty-year storm dumps snow from Texas to Maine

As I read the report below, I had a number of thoughts. Where I live in sub-tropical Australia, just stepping outside my front door feels like diving into a large bowl of warm soup. The air is steamy: very hot and very humid. Such a contrast with the USA at present! But not too different from NYC in midsummer.

Yet such a HUGE variation in climate is COMPLETELY NATURAL and normal. The huge temperature range concerned is one that people have coped with from time immemorial. Yet the Warmists try to tell us that a temperature difference of just a few degrees is going to send us all to perdition. I am sure that both Americans and Australians wish that their temperatures at the moment differed by such a small amount. As it is, the temperatures differ by as much as 100 degrees Fahrenheit and at least 30 degrees Celsius!

Australia also has a big storm raging at the moment, though big is not the word. Cyclone Yasi covers an area nearly as big as the continental United States. And the winds are blowing at around 200 miles an hour. It makes Hurricane Katrina look like a breeze. Fortunately, the place where I live these days is hundreds of miles South of the directly affected area.

Yet, amid such a huge weather event, no-one in the directly affected area has died as a result of it. Luck? In part, but not mainly. Australians are overwhelmingly of British and European descent and Australia has been an advanced Western society since not long after the first white settlement. So Australians prepare for foreseeable disasters. In North Queensland (where I come from and where the cyclones hit) houses have been constructed to cyclone resistant standards for a hundred years or more. So the buildings get damaged but the people survive. They have made their own luck. I am pleased and proud to be one of them

A paralysing, 3200-kilometre-wide storm has dumped snow and ice over most of the US, closing schools, roads and airports in more than 30 states.

Airlines cancelled thousands of flights. Governors called out the National Guard. Schools closed early, if they opened at all. Interstate highways became treacherous ribbons of black ice.

Emergency officials briefed President Barack Obama of their plans to battle the foul weather. By Tuesday evening, the storm had brought Tulsa, Oklahoma, to a virtual halt with more than 30 centimetres of snow. It had layered the roadways of St Louis with an icy sheen and draped Chicago with a swirling snowfall that merged the white-grey sky with the grey-white terrain.

As the storm moved inexorably from the Rockies to the north-east, many people watched the television weather reports of blinding snow and stranded cars and imagined what their Wednesday would bring.

Throughout the day the National Weather Service issuing warnings that read like snippets from a disaster-movie screenplay: "Dangerous multifaceted and life-threatening winter storm, before making decision to travel, consider if getting to your destination is worth putting your life at risk, do not travel! If you absolutely must travel, have a winter survival kit with you."

An interactive map on the service's website showed a pink-and-red band (denoting blizzard and winter-storm warnings) stretched from Dallas, Texas - where plans for Sunday's Super Bowl continued - to northern Maine.

"It's having a gigantic geographical impact," said Bob Oravec, a meteorologist for the service, explaining a cold air mass from Canada had become entrenched over the north-central part of the US while storms in the Mississippi Valley to the south were drawing moisture from the Gulf of Mexico. Cold air plus moisture equals snow and ice.

In Chicago, the city's emergency workers braced for a storm that might rival the blizzard of 1967, when nearly 60 centimetres of snow paralysed the city for days. Chicago and St Louis, Kansas City and Detroit and hundreds of other communities prepared for what they knew was coming, based on reports from Tulsa, where City Hall shut down, part of the roof of the Hard Rock Casino collapsed and firemen had to rescue people from stranded public buses. The fast-falling snow and the strong winds transformed parts of the city into a municipal parking lot.

By mid-afternoon the storm had made it to Chicago, a city that tends to regard snow storms as inadequate tests of its stoicism. In this case, at least, the city benefited from the timing and all the warnings.

Cab driver Mahrous El Gamal, whose windscreen wipers could not keep up with the falling, slushy snow, said the anxious chatter of passengers desperate to get home had convinced him to call it a day. "They're saying it's going to be remembered for the rest of our lives?" he said. "They scare the hell out of me with that. That's it. I'm done."

SOURCE

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Fifty-year storm dumps snow from Texas to Maine

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