Transparent solar cells don’t steal light from greenhouse crops

Funnily-Shaped Vortex Bladeless Turbine Aims to Reinvent Wind Energy

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When Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagún arrived in New Spain (Mexico) in 1529, he embarked on an extraordinary project: the compilation of an encyclopedic compendium of the world of the Aztecs in the wake of the Spanish conquest a decade earlier.

Finally completed between 1576 and 1577 – essentially Sahagún’s life’s work – the result was the Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España (the General History of the Things of New Spain). Sometime between 1578 and 1584 the manuscript was taken to Spain and by 1588 Sahagún’s Historia found its way to Florence, part of the Medici family’s magnificent collections. How exactly the Historia came into Medici hands remains unclear but that is where it still resides today, in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, which explains how the Historia became more commonly known as the Florentine Codex.

When I was in graduate school, a guy in the local SCA group was a bore about Nahuatl. He wandered the town looking for brightly colored feathers from which he planned to make an Aztec feather cloak. Don’t know whether he ever succeeded.

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If only Hamlet had known Jordan Peterson. To be or not to be, Dr Peterson believes, is indeed the burning question — but it’s a question that can be resolved decisively in favor of Being with a capital B. And he’s willing to walk any modern-day Hamlet who cares to listen through the math.

This reasoned position in favor of existence is at the heart of Jordan Peterson’s latest book, Beyond Chaos: 12 More Rules for Life. It’s also, I’d argue, at the heart of his popular appeal. Sure, his undeniable charisma doesn’t hurt; and of course, he’s brilliant, well-read and articulate. But so are many other public intellectuals. What’s unique about Peterson is his insistence that we can use human observation and reason, guided by traditional wisdom (contained in ‘myths’), to determine that existence is objectively better than non-existence, and that there are demonstrably good reasons (and good ways) to engage energetically in the business of living.

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Different sorts of writers have found a home there: right-leaning commentators like Jonah Goldberg and Erick Erickson, left-wing journalists such as Judd Legum and Luke O’Neil, and a swelling pool of progressive authors who have struggled to fit in at ideologically conformist progressive publications. Among these are Matt Yglesias, Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald, who left Vox, New York magazine and the Intercept respectively to build their own platforms.

This development has not gone down especially well among progressives, with inevitable results. As The Spectator’s own Stephen L. Miller said in November, ‘It’s only a matter of time before the media tech hall monitors turn their attention to Substack.’

Well, here they come — sizing up the platform like mobsters sizing up a shop that has just opened in their neighborhood.

John Hinderaker at PowerLine.

Last September, Project Veritas released a video that suggested there has been substantial voter fraud in Minnesota elections, particularly in the Somali community, and linked that fraud to Ilhan Omar’s machine. The New York Times then published a series of articles that smeared Veritas and its video as a “coordinated disinformation campaign,” alleging that the video was “deceptive” and “false.” Project Veritas sued the Times in state court in New York, and the Times moved to dismiss the lawsuit for failure to state a claim.

On Thursday, the presiding judge denied the Times’s motion to dismiss in an opinion you can read here. Denial of the motion to dismiss does not mean that Veritas will ultimately win the case, obviously, but it means that Veritas will be able to proceed with discovery and try to prove that the newspaper’s reporters and editors acted with “actual malice.” That means they knew their stories were false, or realized they were likely false, and printed them anyway.

The Other McCain.

Why has the media become so obsessed with “white nationalism” as a domestic terrorist threat? Kyle Shideler makes an interesting argument that what has happened is an indirect consequence of the refusal of national-security officials, in the post-9/11 environment, to be specific in naming the nature of the threat we faced. Because they did not wish to define the threat as Islamic terrorism, instead the national security establishment defined the problem as “extremism.”

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Police have warned students in the UK against using a website that they say lets users “illegally access” millions of scientific research papers.

The City of London police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit says using the Sci-Hub website could “pose a threat” to students’ personal data.

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one. ‘These provisions are as much for your protection as for ours.’ Yeah, right.

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As Americans reflect on the past year and how much power the federal government has taken for itself in the name of COVID-19, one of the most far-reaching power grabs came directly from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in the form of a nationwide eviction moratorium order.

Under the order, private property owners are required to allow non-paying renters to live rent-free until the federal government says otherwise, costing landlords billions of dollars in unpaid rent — all while landowners remain responsible for property taxes, mortgages, and the costs of their property. And if a property owner tries to get their property back by filing an eviction case, the federal government says it can fine them up to $100,000 and even put them in jail.

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During the last four years, one of the regular complaints about President Trump was that he was too nice to our enemies. He met with them (gasp!), he spoke well of them (horrors!), he complimented them (mon dieu!). And this was why Democrats (and far too many Republicans) kept insisting he was an agent of Russia or some such nonsense.

The fact is, when you’re trying to get someone on your side, you do exactly what President Trump did. You kill them with kindness. You show an interest in them. You speak well of them. You highlight their successes. It’s all right there in How to Win Friends and Influence People, the kajillion-selling book by Dale Carnegie. (A book I recommend to everyone, but especially those who seek public office.) It’s probably found in The Art of the Deal, too, but I haven’t read that one.

It seemed as if Democrats (and far too many Republicans) wanted President Trump to enter into delicate negotiations by insulting world leaders or otherwise telling them off.

How well does that tactic work?

Claim: Melting glaciers contribute to Alaska earthquakes

Getting Industry To Go Green Will Not Come Cheaply–Telegraph Wakes Up At Last!

National Review Prevails against Michael Mann More than eight years ago, Mann launched the suit against NR, writing privately that he saw it as an opportunity to “ruin” this “filthy organization.”

The Social Cost of Carbon and Climate Sensitivity Is Model Manipulation at Its Finest

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

This gets to the heart of the current troubles. The ruling class is stuffed to the gills with provincial mediocrities who think they are worldly sophisticates. When our betters go abroad, they go to places that are filled with the exact same people they experience in Washington, New York, or any of the elite enclaves. Look around at where these people live and work and it is always the same. Their world is an extended version of the college campus, a shelter from the reality of the rest of us.

I think this is one aspect of the managerial class that gets missed. One reason these people assume all people are the same is that in their world it is true. For the most part, race, sex, ethnicity, even class, are superficial attributes. That nice African from the sociology department has a funny accent, but otherwise he is not all that different from the Jewish guy in the anthropology department or the white woman from the psychology department with the dream catcher on her door.

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Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., says Democrats are scared because Republican women are running for office in droves.

Of the 12 seats that Republicans wrestled from the Democrats’ control so far in 2020, nine were flipped by women. A record total of 35 Republican women are currently serving in the House and Senate, including 19 House freshman, a leap over the 22 Republican women who served in the 116th Congress.

”Democrats are attacking me nonstop … they’re scared. They’re scared out of their minds because millions of women across America who had to listen to AOC and her squad act like they speak for women, and now they have a true voice in Congress. Look, women have been listening,” Boebert said Thursday during an appearance on Newsmax TV’s ”Spicer & Co.”

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In a Senate hearing earlier today, Rand Paul took Dr. Fauci to task for wearing a mask (or two) in public when he has already been vaccinated. Paul, who has been a stalwart throughout the covid fiasco, pointed out that there is virtually no chance of a person who has been vaccinated getting the Wuhan bug, so why the mask? Further, if people have to continue wearing masks for years after being vaccinated, as Fauci yearns for, what is the incentive to be vaccinated?

Burning wood pellets won’t help us fight climate change

Claim: “None of the fifty-five Murdoch publications studied … were ‘good’ on climate change” Award winning journalist Wendy Bacon is intensely disappointed that not even The Guardian seems interested in her efforts to root out climate heresy.

‘Not Grounded In Science’: GOP Senators Warn Federal Reserve Against Promoting Environmental Policies

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Beth Stelzer walked into her first powerlifting match expecting to encounter a room full of individuals who were there to support strong women. Instead, a biological male who “identified” as a woman distracted from the competition by protesting throughout the event because he was not permitted to compete with the women.

As a result of the experience, Stelzer took action to protect women’s sports from transgender athletes.

Climate Activists Launch $10 Million Ad Campaign Pressuring Democrats To Spend Trillions On Climate Change

Humanity survived previous warming cycles

ZMan goes ethnic.

Today is St. Patrick’s Day, which is when people around the English speaking world celebrate having driven the Irish from their community. Businesses dust of the old “Irish Need Not Apply” signs and post them up. People mock the Irish by getting drunk and starting fights in public. Everyone wears green. Going out for corned beef and cabbage is a big thing, even during the pandemic. The meal is capped off by leaving a small tip in the tradition of the flintiest people on earth.

This is not true, of course, but it would probably be a better way to respect the Irish people than the current way of celebrating the day. St. Patrick’s Day in America is mostly just another version of Cinco de Mayo. That is, a reason for restaurants to roll out some themed specials and college kids to wear silly outfits. The difference is the college kids will not get in trouble for making fun of the Irish or for culturally appropriating them by wearing stereotypical Irish clothing.

The Water Planet Earth And Its Climate

Increasing Hurricane Frequency Due To Better Observation, Not Climate Change–BBC

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The “For the People Act” (FTP), designated HR 1, is by far the most comprehensive federal voting rights act ever proposed. The bill was introduced into the House of Representatives on January 4 and passed there along strict party lines two months later—220 for and 210 against. This divisive legislation represents a concerted effort by the House Democratic majority to consolidate and build on its gains from the 2020 election cycle. Its unabashed supporters, such as New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, hail the legislation as “a roadmap to an inclusive, diverse, and equitable democracy.”

While there is much to criticize about the act’s hamhanded efforts to expand the regulation of campaign finance and disclosure requirements, I will concentrate on the FTP’s effort to organize a federal takeover of the electoral process as it applies to members of Congress and the president via the Electoral College. Its proposed changes are manifold. The FTP would mandate an expansion of automatic registration and same-day voting. It would create a two-week early-voting period and extend the franchise in federal elections to all former convicts. Finally, it would allow those citizens who lack any appropriate photo ID to gain access to the polls with sworn affidavits to their identity.

ZMan does a deep dive.

Christianity has been subject to the primitive – modern dichotomy by radicals since the French Revolution. With the rise of science, all religion has been gratuitously lumped into with primitive beliefs. Ironically, this is a primitive belief itself, as humans are biologically wired to believe. Belief is one of the oldest modern human attributes that probably coevolved with language. Like language, belief facilitates knowledge by providing a way to efficiently containerize abstract concepts.

In this regard, radicalism is best seen a primitive reaction to the advance of our material understanding of the world. The French Revolution may have started as a reasonable objection to the aristocratic system, but it quickly led to the Cult of Reason, which looked like a Bronze Age pagan festival. Today we see the same thing, but the pagan god at the center is called science. People are wearing codpieces on their faces and using grimy canvas sacks because science.

Clouds From Both Sides Now

Cain Celebrated By Environmentalists For Reducing Humanity’s Carbon Footprint By 25%  Babylon Bee.

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the term “engram” to designate the physical trace a memory must leave in the brain, like a footprint. Since then, neuroscientists have made progress in their hunt for exactly how our brains form memories. They have learned that specific brain cells activate as we form a memory and reactivate as we remember it, strengthening the connections among the neurons involved. That change ingrains the memory and lets us keep memories we recall more often, while others fade. But the precise physical alterations within our neurons that bring about these changes have been hard to pin down — until now.

Biden & Democrats emission reduction schemes misguided, unrealistic, costly & globally irrelevant

Why are most climate models in Fortran

The Problem with Climate Models

Why Isn’t Manhattan Underwater Yet?

Oil in the ocean photooxidizes within hours to days, new study finds

Major Survey Shocks: German Youth Rejecting Need For Radical Behavior Change To Fight ‘Climate Crisis’

Indoor-Grown Weed Is Spewing Carbon Into the Atmosphere

Record Breaking Rain Claims Don’t Stand Up To Scrutiny

U.S. surface temperatures drop to the lowest in over 30 years during February

First-ever study of all Amazon greenhouse gases suggest the forest is worsening climate change (National Geographic)

BBC: Switching Consumers to Green Energy Tariffs Without Asking Permission Increases Acceptance

Climate adaptation follies. Part II: scenarios of future sea level rise

The Unreasonable Ecological Cost of CryptoArt  I’ll bet you didn’t know that Crypto Art even had an ecological cost.

Buttigieg Shuns Public Transit, Takes SUV Convoy to Pizza Hut for Bicycle Purchase

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he American cloud is the product of a national makeover that started in 1791 with Alexander Hamilton’s American School of economics — a developmental vision of strong national institutions and protectionist policies designed to shelter a young, industrialising nation from British dominance. Hamilton’s vision was diametrically opposed to Thomas Jefferson’s competing vision based on small-town, small-scale agrarian economics. Indeed, the story of America is, in many ways, the story of how Hamilton’s vision came to prevail over Jefferson’s.

By the early 19th century, Hamilton’s ideas had crystallised into two complementary doctrines, both known as the ‘American system’. The first was senator Henry Clay’s economic doctrine, based on protectionist tariffs, a national bank, and ongoing internal infrastructure improvements. The second was the technological doctrine of precision manufacturing based on interchangeable parts, which emerged around Springfield and Harpers Ferry national armouries. Together, the two systems would catalyse the emergence of an industrial back end in the country’s heartland, and the establishment of a consumer middle class on the urbanising coasts. But it would take another century, and the development of the internet, for the American cloud to retreat almost entirely from view.

Trending on Twitter.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

In a private conversation, there was a lively back and forth about the books that new people to our politics should read. One of the hidden truths about this side of the great divide is it is a highly literate movement. People drawn to this type of politics tend to enjoy reading. Then there is the fact that our politics is not cut off from the Western intellectual tradition, which is the case for most conventional politics. As a result, we have a vast library of writing on our topics of interest.

Wind Power Is A Disaster In Texas, No Matter What Paul Krugman Says

Media Amplification of Forister’s Feeble Butterfly Science and Climate Fearmongering

Climate Policy: COVID on Steroids?

Can planting more trees keep cities from heating up?  Popular ‘Science’.

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When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife handed out hundreds of millions of dollars last year for a national safe-voting initiative, the “donation” was heralded as vital support to “protect American elections” and to “bolster democracy during the pandemic.”

But what the grant money really purchased in battleground states such as Wisconsin was infiltration of the November presidential elections by liberal groups and Democratic activists, according to hundreds of pages of emails and other documents obtained by Wisconsin Spotlight.

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Could timber really be a major building material in the dense, vertical cities of the future? In fact, this possibility is well on the way to being realised. In recent years, architects and planners around the world have hailed the coming age of “mass timber”. This term refers to prefabricated wooden building components, such as cross-laminated timber, which can replace concrete and steel in large-scale construction.

Until some jihadist flies a plane into one.

Richard Dawkins, whose God is Science.

Safe spaces, diversity quotas, gender-neutral pronouns, culturally relative facts, heteronormative hegemony. Are my right-on credentials right on enough? Am I sufficiently penitent for being white, cis and male? Will I be canceled or de-platformed by the Pronoun Police? What is my woke-quotient? At least as far as science is concerned, it’s a satisfactory zero. Science is not a patriarchal instrument of colonial oppression. Nor is it a social construct. It’s simply true. Or at least truth is real and science is the best way we have of finding it. ‘Alternative ways of knowing’ may be consoling, they may be sincere, they may be quaint, they may have a poetic or mythic beauty, but the one thing they are not is true. As well as being real, moreover, science has a crystalline, poetic beauty of its own.

I’ve just joined a new initiative set up to oppose postmodern metabaloney and bossy woke bullying. Look up ‘Counterweight’ + ‘Helen Pluckrose’, its founder. She’s also co-author of Cynical Theories, an excellent history and analysis of Francophoney postmodernism and the pernicious influence of ‘theory’, driveling out of the universities into the culture at large. The book’s only fault is that, bending over backwards to be scrupulously fair to its subject matter — queer theory, social justice theory etc, chapter by thorough chapter — it can’t help inheriting some of the subject matter’s obscurantist style. The result is not as stupefyingly boring as the original. Nevertheless, busy readers might prefer to skip to the concluding pages of each chapter, where the pretentious original is decisively skewered.

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Humanity had a vaccine that prevented COVID-19 in January last year. What we did not have was a regulatory system to facilitate rapid assessment of its safety and efficacy or the capacity to manufacture and inoculate at scale.

COVID-19 subsequently caused immense human suffering: over 2.5 million deaths and lockdowns upending the lives of billions. It will be years before most of the world is vaccinated and the global economy recovers.

The problem, as always, is not developing a solution – that is easily done – but in getting the heavy hand of government out of the way of using that development.

Steve Sailer.

As we all know in the United States, conspiracies couldn’t possibly happen because of Reasons, so anybody accused of being a conspiracy theorist must be low class (unless you are black, such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose conspiracy theory about why his having been beaten up so much by the other black boys was actually the fault of “those who think they are white” made him a MacArthur Genius).

Study: Global Warming is Raising the Tropical Wet Bulb Maximum Temperature

Keeping Your Cool on the Climate Debate with Bjorn Lomborg  Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson. Highly recommended.

India Ignores John Kerry  Can’t say that I blame them. This appears to be a sinecure job for Old Democrat Pol Kerry.

Steve Hayward at PowerLine.

Steve fisks a paragraph from Harry Jaffa, author of a radical history of the U.S. much used in government schools.

Severian points out some strange stuff.

One of my favorite under-reported stories of the Kung Flu panic — by which I mean “completely unreported, because it might make people think” — is the fact that these idiotic, ever-changing mask requirements must be causing huge spikes in other kinds of disease. For one thing:

You want to know why masks are and always have been bullshit? If the virus survives on surfaces for days, weeks, months, as I’ve heard some “experts” hyperventilating — and not just the Twitter MDs either — then the fag rags should all be considered major biohazards. The very suggestion of a “washable” COVID mask should be enough to land you in public health jail. They should be disposable-only, and guys in full MOPP-4 gear should be waiting near the entrance of every store, waiting to burn the disposables in secure incinerators.

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On March 8, President Biden seemed to forget the name of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and where he worked in a White House event to announce the nomination of two female generals to lead combatant commands.  Since the theme of Biden’s mental acuity is still considered a Trump meme, the media desperately wanted to forget this happened.

Indoor Weed Farms Are Hotboxing the Planet

The Revolutionary Weather Observers

Michael Mann Urges OECD to Reject “Climate Inactivist” Mathias Cormann’s Leadership Bid

EV subsidies, fantasies and realities

“Not Nearly Enough”: Greta Barks At Biden For Slacking On Climate Action

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Nations are pledging to plant billions of trees. But a new study shows that we’ve underestimated the power of natural forest regrowth to fight climate change.

Chilton Williamson.

I suspect that were Mencken alive today having attained the respectable age of 140 years, he would be busy preparing The American Language: Fifth Edition and contemplating titling the book ‘The New American Language’ in recognition of the media-speak developed over the past couple of decades by news broadcasters and commentators, chiefly those belonging to the television industry.

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First, the video clip that horrified the world was heavily edited. We see Floyd, pinned to the ground by Chauvin, piteously crying ‘I can’t breathe.’ Conclusion? That he can’t breathe because Chauvin is pressing on his windpipe. But a look at the police bodycam footage shows that Floyd was complaining that he couldn’t breathe before he was restrained by the police. Why? Because, as the FBI’s interview with the local medical examiner on July 8, 2020 revealed, Floyd was suffering from pulmonary edema, i.e., his lungs were full of fluid. And why was that? Partly because of an underlying heart condition, partly because Floyd was full to the gills with fentanyl, a drug known to affect respiration and cause pulmonary edema.

…

Here’s something else. Although Chauvin’s restraint looks brutal, it was actually part of the standard Minneapolis police protocol for dealing with persons exhibiting ‘excited delirium,’ a dangerous, often fatal, condition brought about by too much fentanyl with one’s afternoon tea. According to the medical examiner, Chauvin did not appear to have obstructed Floyd’s airway — Floyd would not have been able to speak if he had — and Floyd did not die from strangulation. Bottom line, George Floyd died from the effects of a self-administered drug overdose, effects that might have been exacerbated by his interactions with the police, i.e., his exertions in resisting arrest. For their part, the police were trying to help Floyd. It was they who called the ambulance because they recognized that Floyd was in extremis.