Read it.

Do you care whether Alexander Navalny lives or dies? I don’t. And I’m quite sure Vladimir Putin doesn’t, either. ‘Hunger strikes’ only work on people who have Buttons To Push, like the British and (occasionally) American politicians. Turd-World dictators like Putin (and Xi) don’t give a shit. ‘This clown starved himself to death. Not my fault; not my problem.”

Read it.

The radicalization of the Ben & Jerry’s PR department has been one of the stranger spectacles of recent years. After all, for all its hippyish origins and homespun shtick, Ben & Jerry’s is a corporate giant flogging expensive ice creams with wacky names like Cherry Garcia and Truffle Kerfuffle. And yet it has become remarkably preoccupied with virtue-signaling and moral hectoring. It is hard to tell whether this is a deliberate strategy for attention, or if someone’s pious nephew has simply seized control of the social-media accounts at head office.

Read it.

I was pretty sure. (Must’ve been his human half….)

Chris Rock.

A public service announcement.

Glenn Greenwald.

The most significant Trump-era alliance is between corporate outlets and security state agencies, whose evidence-free claims they unquestioningly disseminate.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

n the political realm, the absurdity of it all is too much to ignore. I was talking with a friend who was never fond of Trump. He voted for him, at least that is what he said, but he thought Trump was a clown. He said to me, “You’re my age. Did you ever think Joe Biden would be President?” It was one of those moments when the ridiculousness of the age jumps out at you. Normal white people are walking around with the same thought in their head. We live in clown world.

At lunch the other day, the economy was the topic. One person would mention the bad news, like the rising cost of most things. Someone would counter with the stock market or the supposed hiring spike. This went back and forth until someone finally said, “You know, none of this could be true at all. No one knows what’s going on because we can’t trust anything we’re being told.” Again, I detected that detached bemusement that comes when you stop pretending it matters.

Read it.

Oklahoma lawmakers have passed a bill that they’re pretending is about protecting citizens when it’s really about their contempt for anti-racism protesters. The legislation that passed in the Republican-controlled Senate on Wednesday increases penalties for protesters who block streets while granting blanket immunity for drivers who injure or even kill protesters. To the GOP legislators in Oklahoma, I say: If you hate Black Lives Matter so much that you want to run it over in your Honda Pilot, just say so.

The Root is a Black Supremacist website with content as you might expect.

Taki takes a look around.

Uncharacteristically, the golden geese are fleeing south in April, and by that I mean the fat cats are fleeing to Florida and other points south, leaving the muggers, the homeless, the gang members and Taki behind. Tax-heavy high-cost Bagel may be a magnet for criminals but it’s a turn-off for banks and investment houses that are drawn to low-tax states like Florida and Texas. Here are the facts: crime and disorder are way up, homicides have spiked to 46.7 percent and shootings 97 percent. It is the largest increase in at least 60 years. New bail laws turning every criminal suspect loose have emptied the jails. Homelessness has hit a level unseen since the Great Depression. The Bagel has 80,000 homeless, some of them parked outside glitzy Park Avenue abodes like mine.

Taxes are exorbitant and going up even further. Sales taxes are the highest in the nation, as is the cost of living. What do Bagel-dwellers get in return? From what I’ve seen, soaring crime, public spaces occupied by the mentally ill and the homeless and a non-stop campaign by the news media against white supremacists, a species I have yet to encounter in the mean streets of Noo Yawk.

ZMan is astounded.

There is no getting around the fact that our present is unimaginably weird, relative to our standards of just a generation ago. People like to laugh at what people a century ago imagined was the future, but those past predictions were based on the assumption that crazy people would not take over the country. They feared that left-wing radicals would win and impose communism. That was a legitimate fear, but mentally disturbed men in dresses was not a concern. Why would anyone think such a thing?

What makes it weirder is that we are not living in an age of bliss. We have real problems that need attention. Yet during the transition from Trump to Dementia Joe, supposedly serious people sat around a conference room table wondering how they could recruit a man in a dress to join the administration. No one in the room, presumably, bust out laughing. Some take comfort in believing that they know it is ridiculous, but there is no evidence to suggest this.

If you described modern America to someone in 1960, they would refuse to believe it.

Read it.

The Star Tribune keeps a running toll of deaths resulting from police encounters in Minnesota. For the period 2000 to 2021, the total is 207, of whom 54% were white and 27% were black. Of course, suspect behavior has a lot to do with the likelihood of a fatal encounter with law enforcement. This is evident from the fact that only 3% of those killed by police have been women.

This total of 207 includes many cases–I assume a substantial majority–where the killing was in obvious self-defense, or for other reasons there was no real question about its propriety. Still, even if we take the raw total of 207 deaths, it represents by my calculation around 0.0002 of all deaths in Minnesota during that time period. It seems remarkable that such a tiny number of occurrences have come to play such a major role in our public life.

ZMan looks at Virtue Signaling as a principle.

Montesquieu observed that different political systems have different internal motivations, an engine that drives the people in it. He used the term principle as the thing that gave the system energy. In aristocratic systems it was the desire for honor that drove people to act. In a republic it was virtue. Instead of serving a man who was the manifestation of the state, the republican man served the institutions. He respected the office, not necessarily the office holder.

The principle of liberal democracy appears to be morality. The language of this age is drenched in moral claims. The mantra of the age is diversity, inclusion and equity, which is shot through with sentiment. How much diversity is a good thing? There is no limit, of course, as diversity is a good in itself. Equity is a purely subjective term as it means distributing resources based on the needs of the recipients. The people who make that decision are those who are at the top of the moral hierarchy.

In addition to echoing and updating sentiments from the beginning of western racialism (liberté, égalité, fraternité), the point of these sorts of slogans is to communicate civic piety between the speaker and listener. Alone they are just echolalic babbling, but when spoken or written for an audience, the speaker feels virtuous, as she assumes the listener, upon hearing these code words, will see that the speaker is pious. These terms are about signaling and confirming piety.

Read it.

The Florida House took the unusual step of denouncing democratic socialism Tuesday with the sponsor of a non-binding resolution invoking the name of the country’s most prominent champion of the ideology, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, in calling it a threat to American democracy.

Though the resolution has little legal significance, Democrats disavowed the bill as political theater in a state where the specter of socialism and communism has become a potent political talking point, particularly among Florida’s sizable Hispanic electorate with relatives who have fled political turmoil of Cuba, Venezuela and other Latin American countries.

Read it.

Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, Police Officer Kim Potter, who fatally shot Black motorist Daunte Wright, 20, in a struggle after a traffic stop, has resigned along with the police chief.

Brooklyn Center Mayor Mike Elliott said the resignations came after the city council passed a resolution to dismiss both the Potter and her chief, Tim Gannon.

Potter, a 26-year veteran officer made the move “in the best interest of the community.”

ZMan looks around.

In theory, the difference between mob rule and liberal democracy is that the former operates outside of authority, while the latter is limited by a set of principles. The former is operating in the moment while the latter is deliberative. Instead of just doing what feels right in the moment, like exacting revenge, liberal democracy has processes and limits, forcing people to think about what they are doing before they act. It is majority rule slowed to a crawl by the ideals of western liberalism.

The problem is that liberal democracy is an industrial age political philosophy that is unsuited for the technological age. Fifty years ago, information flowed primarily by words on a page, carried around by men. Television and radio sped up the flow of information, but the information still got into those networks by foot. Before it could be on television, someone had to go out to the scene, make video, carry it back to the studio and then edit it. It was still a slow world.

Today, information flows at the speed of light. A conspiracy theory can be hatched and promoted to millions on-line in a matter of minutes. As the old expression goes, a lie is around the world before the truth is out of bed. It is why the race hoax has become a phenomenon of this age. By the time the truth of the incident has been revealed, we are onto the third or fourth race hoax. These stories collectively build up in the system to the point where they cumulatively become a truth of their own.

Read it.

When we look out on the world scene and how the Biden Administration is positioning itself, everyone should keep in mind the summary statement of former Defense Secretary and CIA director Robert Gates (no one’s idea of a partisan firebrand, as he’s been serving presidents of both parties since the Carter Administration): Joe Biden, Gates said, “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

Third of Antarctic ice shelves ‘will collapse amid 4C global heating’  Betcha it doesn’t.

Warm Water Under The ‘Doomsday Glacier’ Threatens to Melt It Faster Than We Predicted  Which ‘we’ is that? Many ‘we’ (Paul Erlich, AlGore, Michael Mann) predicted that it would already have happened by 2021.

Canada’s Green Shift Could Displace Three-Quarters Of Oil Workers

How we fool ourselves. Part II: Scientific consensus building

First-Ever Observations From Under Antarctica’s ‘Doomsday Glacier’ Are Bad News

A Mass Extinction Event Is on The Horizon if Marine Life Keeps Fleeing The Equator

Greta Thunberg Threatens to Boycott the Glasgow COP26 Climate Conference  OH NOES!

Clean energy? The world’s demand for copper could be catastrophic for communities and environments  It’s always something.

s

Read it.

Ed Bastian makes $17 million a year as chief executive officer of Delta Airlines, Georgia’s largest employer.

Bastian just blasted Georgia’s new voting law. He thinks it is racist to require the same sort of ID to vote that Delta requires for its passengers to check-in.

Read it.

In southern Spain (Malaga province, just east of the Straits of Gibraltar), a March 2021 police raid on a drug gang coastal warehouse found a ten-meter (31 foot) narco-sub (drug smuggling submersible vessel) under construction and nearly completed. The sub had a fiberglass and wood hull containing twin 200 HP engines. The sub could carry about two tons of drugs. This type of narco sub is used for offshore transfers of drugs from ocean-going fishing trawlers or cargo ships carrying cocaine from South America or hashish and heroin from Africa. Belgium and Spain are major centers of the European drug trade and together account for about ten percent of the drug seizures worldwide.

Building narco subs in Europe was suspected after the long-anticipated appearance of South American narco-subs in Europe finally happened in November 2019. This occurred off the Spanish coast when a trans-Atlantic narco-sub was having engine and ventilation problems made worse by rough seas. The three-man crew was discovered by police as they were abandoning the sinking narco-sub close to shore. Two of the crew, both from Ecuador, were arrested while the third man got away but was captured a few days later and found to be Spanish and the pilot of the sub.

Read it.

Republican New York Assemblyman Colin Schmitt slammed Democrats in his state on Thursday over their policies that he said were driving New Yorkers to leave for other states.

Schmitt, who is running for Congress in New York’s 18th congressional district, argued on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that the actions of Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and “the radical left,” have transformed “the empire state” into “the exodus state.”

Malcolm Turnbull Claims Climate Change Deniers Conspired to “Take Him Out”

Seven Climate Change Protestors Arrested For Smashing Windows At Barclays’ London Headquarters

FLASHBACK: Climate Czar John Kerry Said in 2009 That Arctic Summer Ice Would Disappear In 5 Years

CBS Blames Climate Change for Border Crisis, Not Biden

How Could a House Work in a Post Climate Change Scenario?

Why Climate Panic Is Unfounded Hysteria

Sea Level Rise Is Killing Trees on the Atlantic Coast, Creating ‘Ghost Forests’ Visible From Space

Why Climate Panic Is Unfounded Hysteria

The collapse of ‘big steel’ should be a warning for climate skeptics

Black people agree: Race relations ‘worse’ under Biden

Ex Aussie PM Malcolm Turnbull Dumped from a Climate Board, as a Coal District Election Looms

How climate change affects Colombia’s coffee production

Germany’s Energy Disaster

A review.

In the 2019 British general election, the Labour Party was eviscerated, losing 60 seats and handing the Conservative Party a massive 80-seat majority. The most dramatic repudiation came in the Midlands and the North, where seats that had never voted Conservative fell to the Tories. It was an electoral catastrophe, and Paul Embery’s book Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class is intended to provide an autopsy and an analysis of the Left’s deeper ideological and cultural errors.

Embery comes from within the left-conservative, Blue Labour tradition of Tory Socialists like John Ruskin—a left-wing form of post-liberal politics that leans left on economics and right on culture. Cultural distinction without exclusion; relationality over autonomy; community self-help over government centralisation. In clean, clear prose over 200 pages, he mourns the destruction of his party as a serious political force, and sets out what he thinks it must do if it is to be able to fight again effectively.

Read it.

Naomi Hasegawa’s family sells toasted mochi out of a small, cedar-timbered shop next to a rambling old shrine in Kyoto. The family started the business to provide refreshments to weary travelers coming from across Japan to pray for pandemic relief — in the year 1000.

Now, more than a millennium later, a new disease has devastated the economy in the ancient capital, as its once reliable stream of tourists has evaporated. But Ms. Hasegawa is not concerned about her enterprise’s finances.

Read it.

One of the dominant themes of the last few years is that nothing makes sense. Donald Trump is president, QAnon has mainstreamed fringe conspiracy theories, and hundreds of thousands are dead from a pandemic and climate change while many Americans do not believe that the pandemic or climate change are deadly. It’s incomprehensible.

I am here to tell you that the reason so much of the world seems incomprehensible is that it is incomprehensible. From social media to the global economy to supply chains, our lives rest precariously on systems that have become so complex, and we have yielded so much of it to technologies and autonomous actors that no one totally comprehends it all.

Read it.

Tell the truth: I’ll bet you didn’t even know that there was a ‘protein folding problem’.

UPDATE: Protein folding: Much more intricate than we thought

Read it.

Until recently, Antoine Ricardou was, in no way, a cheesemaker. An architect and co-founder of the branding and design firm Be-poles, Ricardou spent his days jetting between the firm’s Paris and New York City offices, overseeing projects for such clients as Eleven Madison Park in Manhattan and Les Roches Rouges on the Côte d’Azur.

…

Then, this past March—well, you know what happened this past March. So, the 47-year-old, along with his wife and their three children, left a pandemic-stricken Paris for the relative isolation of France’s Haute-Savoie region, where the family owns an early-1800s chalet. Ricardou, who chuckles at the word “chalet,” is quick to dispel any notions of grandeur: “It’s simple and traditional, and did not have heat or hot water when we bought it last year.”

CHEEEEEEESE!

Japan just recorded its earliest cherry blossom bloom in 1,200 years. Scientists warn it’s a symptom of the larger climate crisis (CNN)

Belong To The Climate Club Or Get Penalized: The EU’s New Trade Protectionism

Reforestation Is Great! But We’re Running Out of Seeds  Wired ‘Science’.

Dangerously Stupid Science: Solar Geoengineering Hey, a nuclear war would cool everything down. Guaranteed.

ZMan waxes philosophica.

In his essay Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Ever since it has been a useful dismissal of the pedant, but it is also a useful way of understanding American politics. One side in the political fight spends all of its time fussing about inconsistencies of the other side, while the winning side is happy to dismiss their own hypocrisies. As Emerson understood, it is the latter who always has the edge over the former.

It is the Right, of course, that spends all of its time fussing about inconsistencies on the Left, while the Left just wins every fight. The American Left, unlike the European Left, grew out of that peculiar form of American Christianity that has informed its worldview since the 19th century. Filled with self-righteous fury over the inequity of the world, the righteous are free to do as they please to right the wrongs of the world. Even their own past statements are no impediment to them.

The New Pause lengthens by three months to 5 years 10 months

Evidence of Antarctic glacier’s tipping point confirmed for first time  Except that the article doesn’t say that, it says that it ‘could’ reach a tipping point.

Read it.

A recent poll made public Monday reveals that Republican Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski is facing a significant threat from a new Republican challenger.

The new Cygnal poll shows Murkowski trailing Republican Commissioner of Administration Kelly Tshibaka by 15 points in the 2022 all-party Alaska Senate primary. The poll found Murkowski to have just a 33% favorability rating among all Alaskans, compared to 63% unfavorable.

Couldn’t happen to a more deserving RINO.

“YPCCC Helps Facebook Debunk Climate Change Myths”

Environmental Justice campaign to replace New York City peaking power plants

Will John Kerry Sell Out Chinese Human Rights to Win a Global Climate Agreement?  I bet Yes.

Read it.

One of the most commonly heard debater’s challenges, online and in real life, is: “Are YOU an expert in (X)?” The obvious if generally unspoken corollary is: “If not, then shut up.” However, very often, you don’t need to. There is little evidence that a smart normal citizen, capable of effective analysis of empirical data, cannot criticize the work of academic or journalistic “experts” in most fields—or any reason that he or she should be intimidated by these title-holders.

Obviously, some professional background in a topic that one is discussing or researching is a good thing. However, no credential can substitute for a relatively unbiased and non-partisan approach to data, or for what can bluntly be called intelligence. Whether due to political motivation or plain incorrect statistical assumptions, credentialed experts have a long and entertaining history of wildly false predictions—like the recent predictions of between 1,000,000 and 10,000,000 COVID-19 deaths in the United States before the end of 2020.1, 2 This sort of thing is likely to become even more common in the politicized academy of today, where essentially no statistical support appears to exist for theories of “white fragility” and univariate white privilege. When debating such questions as “How many human sexes are there?” a taxpayer who finds the experts arrayed against her need not feel a fool.

Read it.

I don’t know why anyone would want to drink that crap in the first place, since Pepsi is available.

Read it.

I attended a small Episcopal church for more than thirty years until COVID closed it down last year. Or, to be more precise, the bishop of the Diocese of Southern Virginia closed it down. After Governor Ralph “Coonman” Northam allowed places of worship to reopen (with capacity restrictions), the bishop, in her infinite wisdom, decided that Episcopal congregations would not be safe if people attended services in churches, so she issued a ukase insisting that they remain closed.

St. Paul tells us that “Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow — not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love.” (Romans 8:38) But he didn’t know about COVID, which is more powerful than all those things he mentioned. It not only separates Episcopalians from God’s love, it obviously deprives them of their ability to reason.

Inside the Church of Climate

UAH Global Temperature Update for March 2021: -0.01 deg. C

Once climate change deniers, the agriculture industry positions itself as part of the solution  Don’t think of it as selling out; think of it as buying in.

Read it.

StemExpress, a Sacramento-based biotech company, and PayCertify, a financial tech services company in the San Jose area, are expected to combine to create more than 200 jobs in Reno over the next few years, the Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada said Wednesday.

“Northern Nevada’s tech ecosystem is thriving and high-growth companies, like Stem Express and PayCertify, are increasingly vital to our region’s economic recovery and future,” EDAWN CEO Mike Kazmierski said.