Read it.

A few days ahead of last year’s presidential election, Kamala Harris tweeted: “There’s a big difference between equality and equity”. In an accompanying video, Harris effectively argued that equality of opportunity was a sham and that “equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place.”

You could interpret Harris’s words as a Marxist argument for equality of outcome (a bold move just before polling day). Thankfully, however, the Vice President of the United States is not a full-bore Communist. Instead, she is a Democratic politician eager to keep up with the left’s ever-changing orthodoxies. According to those rules, “equality” is out and “equity” is in, a rhetorical change that is about more than words. Rather, it represents a profound shift in thinking — a shift that the Biden administration has so far embraced wholeheartedly.

The white distribution approximates a normal one. The non-white distributions display various levels of Lake Wobegon effect.

We’re told society pedestalizes whites while causing people of color to feel bad about themselves. The data say otherwise.

Read it.

Today’s at the Capitol, a car crashed into a barrier, injuring two officers.  The driver of the car got out with a knife, and was shot by authorities.  I think.  So I went to the Fox News website, to see what they know about all this.  Not much, as it turns out, which is understandable – this just happened a couple hours ago.  The news article did not identify the shooter, except to refer to him as “a lone wolf” which is generally media-speak for a devoted member of al-Qaeda or some other Muslim terrorist group.  But perhaps not this time.  Hard to say.  I have no idea, of course.  There are very few facts to be had, this early on.

Is America Burning?

Further estimates on the cost of climate change and global warming

Thicker-leaved tropical plants may flourish as CO2 rises, which could be good for climate

Big Oil Beats NYC Appeal On Climate Change Lawsuit

Read it.

There was a running gag in Kevin Smith’s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back about the “Miramax backlot”. There was no such thing. When Miramax made a movie, they rented facilities at the lowest price wherever they could get them, like every other small-time producer, and not a few larger ones. Make no mistake about it, though, Miramax was a real studio, because Bob Weinstein could pick up one telephone and get a substantial line of bank credit to make a film, then his odious brother Harvey could pick up the other phone and get a binding financial commitment to release that same film in theaters and on TV networks in Europe and India.

That’s all it takes. It can be a single individual, or a small risk-taking group, with no more than a minimal office staff, if it has the established connections to make those global distribution deals and a seriously strong checkbook. This has always been the case. United Artists was a major studio for sixty years without ever owning a physical studio to make the films in. When it launched James Bond or made The Great Escape and Midnight Cowboy, it didn’t own so much as a single movie camera, or so much as one square foot of backlot property. When billionaire Philip Anschutz decided to buy and make a Narnia series, Walden Media didn’t need any of that either.

Read it.

How does an organziation get to be a ‘media watchdog’? Is there a form to be filled out? Or it just a matter of what you ‘idenify’ as?

Read it.

There are lots of libertarians at the end of a pandemic — and for good reason. For more than a year now Americans have watched the actions of dysfunctional government officials play out like the worst reality show of all time.

If the ineptitude wasn’t so infuriating, it might make for entertaining TV. There was the episode when the smug governor who asked his constituents to stay home got caught dining at French Laundry. Or what about the one when the White House coronavirus response coordinator broke her own travel restrictions to winterize her vacation home — and got ratted out by members of her own family?

Read it.

Gov.Kristi Noem has been taking a lot of flak from the conservative punditry over her “veto” of South Dakota HB 1217 intended to protect girls’ and women’s sports from transgender athletes. I use veto in quotes because there are technical and procedural rules in South Dakota that either made Gov. Noem’s rejected “form and content” revisions a veto or the legislature’s inaction on them a veto. Be that as it may, South Dakota currently has no statute in place. I say currently because Gov. Noem has announced she will call a special session of the Legislature to resolve this. In the meantime the Governor has issued two executive orders to fill the gap.

Her objections were not to the substance of the bill but rather to its mechanics. They seem well-founded, and all of the hair-on-fire antics in the news misplaced.

Claim: Great Barrier Reef Set to Disappear Because of Global Warming

Biden Wants $10 Billion for a Climate Army. It’s Not Enough  Wired ‘Science’.

‘Immediate and drastic.’ The climate crisis is seriously spooking economists  CNN ‘Business’.

Read it.

We have the technology.

ZMan counts the beans.

The lesson of the last half century is one the monetarists learned from the battles over the gold standard. If the ruler is so corrupt you need hard money to control him, your ruler is corrupt enough to find a way around the limits of hard money. It turns out our rulers are more than capable of conniving around every limit put before them. They have reached levels of corruption that were though impossible half a century ago. The display being put on now suggest they are just getting warmed up.

This rather shabby track record should raise a question. That is, is the field of economics just pseudoscientific nonsense? It has lots of complexity and lots of very clever solutions to the complex problems it unearths, but outside of the most basic of concepts like supply and demand, economics is not very useful. In all of the important things, it turns out to be wrong. Astrologers have a better record than economists, because they know they are grifters, not scientists.

Progressives Push Biden to Include $10 Trillion Climate Plan in Infrastructure Package

Volkswagen Lied To Reporters, Public About Branding Change To Promote New Electric Car

Read it.

The right doesn’t have a monopoly on science denialism.

You heard it here first. (Just getting ahead of the Narrative.)

Severian peers ahead.

I forget who said “History is but the biographies of great men,” but I largely agree with it. If you add the modifier “or the lack thereof,” I’m all but 100% on board. So many crises were only handled because a Great Man stepped up to the plate… and all of those crises became crises, almost universally, because there wasn’t some Great Man around to deal with them before they blew up. I don’t want to get lost on a tangent here, so I’ll simply mention Roman history, which is littered with both Great Men, and crises which fell to Mediocre Men by default. Study the latter.

But that’s the thing, here in our new GloboHomo world: Are Great Men even possible anymore? How would we even go about starting to identify a Leader, and, once identified, what is there for him to do?

ZMan does a deep dive.

Democracy, of course, is majority rule. Liberal democracy, in theory, is majority rule within a framework of principles, like equality before the law, separation of powers and human rights. A proposition is put forward and it carries the day if fifty percent plus one supports it. Its rightness is therefore determined by the majority, not by some intrinsic quality it possesses. The majority is the legitimizing authority in a democracy of any sort, including a liberal democracy.

This is an important defect. Since it is universally true that humans are naturally hierarchical and every society has someone in charge, it means the ruling class is the result of natural factors. In other words, the most important part of a human society exists outside the legitimizing power of majority rule. Instead of invalidating the idea of truth being the result of popularity, liberal democracy flips things around and demands that the majority, real or imagined, grants legitimacy to the rulers.

It is a good example of the immutability of belief. When a person or a society comes to believe something about itself, reality is willed in support of that belief. That which confirms the belief is held up as proof, while that which contradicts the belief is ignored or disputed. It is why a disbeliever is always the prey for believers. The destruction of the disbeliever not only validates the belief. It validates the believer. This is why democracy breed fanatics operating in the name of the public.

This is why the Hunt for Heretics and Sinners is so intense. Nobody can be allowed to dissent from the Narrative, because the Narrative is a flimsy fantasy construct that cannot survive doubt.

UK government scraps green homes grant after six months

Google Maps to Start Directing Drivers to ‘Eco-friendly’ Routes

Zman does some ‘splainin’.

The main difference in form between a liberal democracy and a republic is that the latter is defined by a fixed set of rules. The former, in contrast, is formless as it is defined by the will of fifty percent plus one. The republic has clearly defined roles for itself, including limits on its power. In a liberal democracy, there are no limits, because truth itself is just a simple majority, so the roles and limits of the liberal democracy are whatever the people want at the moment.

Read it.

Forbes Magazine reported, in an unsigned order issued without comment, the justices declined to take up Judicial Watch’s petition stemming from the organization’s lawsuit over the government’s response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The group had sought to depose Clinton and one of her top aides, Cheryl Mills, over electronic communications, and other records in connection with the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Weekly Climate And Energy News Roundup

The Rat Island Saga

SHOCK! Outlet Questions If Environment Is Worth ‘Very Real Human Pain’ of Killing Economy

Monday Mirthiness: Latest idiocy from the “extinction rebellion”

Read it.

Sometime before the next Republican President, I’m thinking.

Severian is delightfully dyspeptic today.

Our Neo-Stalinists — let’s call them, provisionally, the Stolenists — are obviously not like that. I’d love to say that their errors are both tactical and strategic, and hell, maybe they are, but the sad truth is: I can’t figure out what the fuck they’re doing. And that’s why “Villain Decay” is the best I can do to describe them. I mean, all previous revolutionaries — Bolsheviks, Nazis, the Jacobins, pick one or all of them — were equally hateful, equally bloodthirsty, equally committed to the idea that everything before them was one long catalog of error. But they had an actual ideology, such that you could sort their mistakes, and even to some extent predict what they’d do, or at least the kind of thing they’d try to do.

This crew, though? These murderous carny folk? I have no idea. Most people in Our Thing would say that they do have an animating ideology — anti-White racism (henceforth, AWR) — but while they certainly do hate White people, the key fact is that the worst ones are themselves White. And not just any White, but uber-White — products of two-parent homes in the suburbs, who aced all the standardized tests and went to all the right schools, where they got all the right degrees. In other words, their cursus honorum, the only thing that gives their life meaning, is the very same thing they say is the most saturated with hateful Whiteness.

Climate Dynamics: The True Control Knob of Climate Change

Sea-level rise is accelerating to its highest levels in at least 2,000 years across the Northeast, including New York City, study says (CNN) I keep waiting for Manhattan to be underwater. They keep promising, and promising, and promising, and it never happens.

Climate change could be averted by HACKING glaciers to halt rising sea levels, scientists claim I’ll believe that sea levels are rising when property in Malibu and Palm Beach starts dropping in value.

African countries deem EU carbon border levy ‘protectionist’

The Latest Subsidisaster Paper

Read it.

Well, we now know what Big Brother looks like.

ZMan does a deep dive.

One of the reasons conservatives preach against identity politics is they believe it contradicts republican virtue. In a republic, people are supposed to be supremely loyal to the institutions of the republic. The men that hold office are not what matters, but rather, the office itself. You are supposed to respect the office, even if the man in the office is not respectable. This is why preventing low character people from holding office is important, as it diminishes the respect for the office.

Identity politics, in the conservative formulation, is tribalism and that means the tribe comes before everything else. A person who puts his tribe ahead of all else will sacrifice the office he holds or the political system itself, if it is good for his tribe. This is why conservatives moan about identity politics. They think it is un-American. They are not entirely wrong on this point. This is clear with the Jonathan Pollard case. His primary loyalty is to his people, so he spied for Israel.

That’s what they’d like you to believe….

I’ve heard them say it.

Greta Thunberg Tweets How Penises Are Getting Smaller Due To Pollution, Recruits For Climate Strike

Joe Biden Pledges to Make Solar Panels More Environmentally Toxic

The Coming Climate Lockdowns

Claim: Direct Observations Confirm that Humans are Throwing Earth’s Energy Budget off Balance  I’ll bet you didn’t know that The Earth even had an ‘energy budget’.

California Has A New Idea For Homes At Risk From Rising Seas: Buy, Rent, Retreat

The Ice Age Goeth

Climate Grief: “Half the wildlife in Africa has died on my watch.”

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

I am torn on whether this age should be called the Carny Age, the Crazy Age, or the Age of Hysteria. I like all three and there are probably others that work, but the last one really gets to the heart of the matter. America is like an aging woman, suddenly realizing that her biological clock is running out of ticks. All of that phony confidence she learned from modern feminism is quickly turning into anger and bitterness. Much of the lunacy is driven by early and middle middle-aged women.

…

Everywhere you look in the ruling classes, the people who should be secure in their position are desperately shouting, “Look at me! look at me!” Despite their wealth and power, they carry on like they need affirmation. That is the carny culture. The engine that drives that sort of society is the willingness to do anything for some applause, some attention, or some laughs. Whatever it takes to get the crowd to perk up and take notice of you is acceptable. There is no bad publicity.

Michael Pollan Follows The Science.

Last winter came the news that a low-fat diet, long believed to protect against breast cancer, may do no such thing — this from the monumental, federally financed Women’s Health Initiative, which has also found no link between a low-fat diet and rates of coronary disease. The year before we learned that dietary fiber might not, as we had been confidently told, help prevent colon cancer. Just last fall two prestigious studies on omega-3 fats published at the same time presented us with strikingly different conclusions. While the Institute of Medicine stated that ”it is uncertain how much these omega-3s contribute to improving health” (and they might do the opposite if you get them from mercury-contaminated fish), a Harvard study declared that simply by eating a couple of servings of fish each week (or by downing enough fish oil), you could cut your risk of dying from a heart attack by more than a third — a stunningly hopeful piece of news. It’s no wonder that omega-3 fatty acids are poised to become the oat bran of 2007, as food scientists micro-encapsulate fish oil and algae oil and blast them into such formerly all-terrestrial foods as bread and tortillas, milk and yogurt and cheese, all of which will soon, you can be sure, sprout fishy new health claims. (Remember the rule?)

Read it.

Here is a good moment to reflect on the fact that I am a Pakistani-American Muslim. Our community is warm and generous, hardworking and inventive. My parents came to this country in the 1970s because they knew it was welcoming to people like us. Unlike life on the Indian subcontinent, here you aren’t instantly judged by your ethnic group, sect or caste. In America, we were free to be whoever we wanted to be.

But every community has its problems. Antisemitism was ours. The data bears this out: one ADL poll found that more than half the Muslim populations of some Western European countries hold antisemitic attitudes.

Bjørn Lomborg: Questioning Spending Trillions on Climate Change Gets you Cancelled

Major Earth Satellite to Track Disasters, Effects of Climate Change

Greenland And Iceland Mean Winter Temperatures Continue Cooling Since Start Of The Century

West Virginia AG Blasts SEC for Trying to ‘Advance’ Biden Climate Agenda

Severian is delightfully dyspeptic today.

I just wish the term “Karen” had been around back then, because I never could quite put my finger on a good word to describe one side of the “year round school” “debate.” Karen, of course, thinks of schools as nothing more than public daycares. She’s not wrong, so her position makes a twisted kind of sense — since our “teachers” are really just (very very shitty) babysitters anyway, why not have schools open in the summer? That way, Karen doesn’t have to cast around for “enrichment” programs and whatnot into which to dump her kids while she self-actualizes on Twitter.

Unfortunately for Karen, the teachers’ union runs so deep in the Democratic Party, they could probably literally get the Army deployed against their enemies if they really put their backs into it, so they win. And since the whole point of being a “teacher” is so that you never, ever have to put your back into anything, schools will continue to be closed for the summer until the planet is overrun by superintelligent apes. They’re the laziest bastards ever to draw breath, and if you want proof, start digging into who’s really behind the “masks now, masks tomorrow, and masks forever!!” mafia in your locality. It’s 1,000:1 it’s the teachers’ union, since the masking and social distancing rules are such that no school district can comply while still holding classes, so gosh, gee whiz, golly, darn, I guess those poor put-upon “teachers” will have to keep drawing their nice salary and gonzo benefits for sitting at home on their asses….

….for another entire fucking school year. (Hey, speaking of, I’m sure you know we recently passed the one-year anniversary of “fifteen days to flatten the curve.” How did you celebrate? I sent an email reminder to all the liberals I know, but they were still too busy cowering under their beds to read it).

ZMan puts on his cynic pants.

Given the fanaticism of the managerial class, most political topics are useful only in sorting people into political buckets. Liberals support “taxing the rich” while conservatives oppose “socialism”. The only thing that matters in these “debates” is which side you are on as nothing is ever debated. In fact, the debate around the topic looks more like a distraction. The point of the debate is to provide cover for what is happening behind the scenes between pols and their handlers.

While those ceremonial debates are useless, there are some issues that are useful, because they reveal truths about the system and the people in it. Firearms policy is one of those issues. The 2A community in America is large and extremely well informed on the topic of guns and gun laws. Knowing the rules is an important part of every subculture within the gun community. Knowing the local laws is often a prerequisite for entry into the community, so the members are highly informed.

Tax Incentives Are No Way to Drive Energy Innovation. Here’s Why.

On The Climate Front: Tensions Where Green Jobs Meet Blue Collars

Sea Level & the Jersey Shore: Follow-up

Green Investing Is a Fraud

Choose verifiable facts over emotional narratives on polar bear conservation

Read it.

I guess we need knife-control laws, then, like they have in Britain.

End of Rain? Guardian Blames NSW Flooding on Climate Change

Rethinking Climate, Climate Change, and Their Relationship with Water

Climate Change Won’t Be Stopped By 593 Pages Of Green Tape

Climatista Fragility

Read it.

Former officials reuniting in the White House under President Joe Biden have gotten dramatically wealthier since the previous Democratic administration, a Sunday report shows.

Officials returning to the White House under the Biden administration have grown much richer and more intimate with the corporate world over the years, ABC News reported.

Domestic Policy Council Director Susan Rice is among the wealthiest in the Biden White House team. Rice has substantially increased her wealth since her previous White House job, reporting between $36 million and $149 million in various assets, according to her latest disclosure report released Saturday.

Doing well by doing good.

Read it.

‘Olympic surfing’?

Canadian Conservative party votes not to recognize climate crisis as real (The Guardian)

Study: Hollywood Movies Demonstrate the UN Needs More Funding to Prevent Climate Disasters

Fake Hurricane News Exposed: Average Day Of First Hurricane Formation “Contrary To Media Reports”

Former Obama-Biden federal scientist Dr. Steve Koonin declares his climate dissent

A Miscellaney of Energy News