Read it.

Oops.

Read it.

Paul Hastings, the law firm hired to conduct a “comprehensive review” of the Lincoln Project’s “operations and culture,” could be hard-pressed to deliver a credible result given several of its senior partners have donated to the scandal-plagued super PAC.

Greg Nitzkowski, the firm’s managing partner of more than two decades, donated $3,000 to the Lincoln Project in 2020, according to federal election records. Elena Baca, who chairs the firm’s employment law department, has donated almost $2,000 to the Lincoln Project.

Read it.

Amazon deplatformed the social media site Parler for violent content, but it has no problem providing violent, terrorist or Nazi content to its customers.

A flag from the terrorist group Hamas, a beanie that has the word “lynching” emblazoned across it, and a shirt with the slogan, “All My Heroes Killed Colonizers” are proudly sold on Amazon. In a previous study, the company was found selling a “Kill All Republicans” T-shirt. A shirt with an image of Jesus Christ wearing the crown of thorns had the logo, “Kill Your Idols” across it. Several pieces of jewelry and articles of clothing promoting Nazi symbols are also sold on the platform.

Steve is disappointed.

Every day, normal people who miss America get a fresh axe handle to the face.

…

A “woke” James Bond. It’s like Ellen DeGeneres holding a revival.

…

As crazy as the public is, it still wants strong male characters who save attractive female characters. It doesn’t want to see Nancy Pelosi save Richard Simmons, and it never will, because traditional sex roles are hard-wired into human beings.

Why “Trusting the Science” Is Complicated

Tree Remnants Show Greta’s Thunberg’s Northern Sweden Was 3°C Warmer 9300 Years Ago…Trees Where There’s Tundra

Himalayan flood disaster exposes risks of India’s rush for green energy

More trees do not always create a cooler planet, Clark University geographer finds

Where Energy Modeling Goes Wrong

Biden’s climate ‘fix’ is fantastically expensive and perfectly useless-Bjorn Lomborg

Suspect science threatens US farming – again

Read it.

A man who had to hire a lobbyist to help him navigate regulatory hurdles to become the first and only licensed Washington, D.C., gun dealer in nearly a year is now seeing business boom.

Shawn Poulin, the owner of D.C. Security Associates, located on K Street in Northwest, said he had to spend thousands of dollars on a lobbyist to help navigate the city’s complex rules and regulations on firearms businesses. “People told me, ‘Be prepared to deal with D.C. government, they’re as corrupt as anyone else,'” he said. “I had to get a lobbyist and I was getting friction from the permit zoning guys.”

Read it.

One of the key members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team looking into where COVID-19 originated has a lengthy history suggesting he may hold a vested interest in determining the virus did not leak from a lab – and the media is hardly talking about it.

Much reporting on the WHO’s recent visit to Wuhan has done little to characterize Dr. Peter Daszak, the sole U.S. citizen on the team, and his background. Daszak has a long financial history with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), previous reporting shows. He even organized a PR campaign in early 2020 to paint the lab leak hypothesis as a “conspiracy” in order to relieve the lab and Beijing of any potential scrutiny.

Here comes the new generation of climate models: the future of rainfall in the Alps

Review of Biomass Calculations in Achieving Net Zero Emissions Scenario.

Read it.

“Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them.”

Read it.

Republicans are “radicalizing against democracy” because they rely on our constitutional process when governing. This is the essence of Chris Hayes’ recent Atlantic piece contending that the GOP is descending into authoritarianism.

The MSNBC host notes, without any suggestion of self-awareness, that “the Constitution puts a wind at the backs of Republicans and makes them more competitive than they would be otherwise.”

What does “otherwise” mean here, exactly? A return to the British Empire? Or does it mean functioning as the centralized direct democracy that progressives covet, but that’s never existed in this country? There is no “otherwise.”

Read it.

I’d sooner ride in a Tesla than fly on United.

Read it,

Dr Peter Ridd, a professor of physics at JCU, was sacked by the university for serious misconduct for questioning the climate change science in the IPA’s publication Climate Change: The Facts 2017 around the Great Barrier Reef, and for public statements made on the Jones & Co program on Sky News Australia.

“James Cook University has engaged some of the most expensive legal representation in the country to stifle the free speech of one of its own staff, despite crying poor about university funding in the wake of coronavirus. It creates a massive chilling effect for any academic engaging in public debate in Australia,” said Mr Rozner

Climate crisis pushing great white sharks into new waters Pushing!

Guardian Reader: the Ecological Term “Invasive Species” Is Racist

Environmentalism is the New War on the Working Class

Biden & Democrats conceal U.S. CO2 decreases of 3.4 billion tons from natural gas

Major Aussie Refinery Closing, Due to Hostile Government Policy

Progressive Pleased To Discover That Hell Has No Climate Change  Babylon Bee.

Environmentalists Sue EPA to Improve Air-Quality Standards

Scott Alexander.

To what degree are psychiatric conditions more like diseases (always bad) vs. diverse neurotypes (potentially good)?

Well, what else is it good for? It’s not as if he’s going to eat it.

John Hinderaker at PowerLine.

How can this be, since wind turbines only produce electricity when the wind is blowing sufficiently, which is around 40% of the time, and solar only works when the sun is shining and the panels are not covered in ice and snow–in a northern climate, something like 18% of the time? Obviously the Greenies have a problem. Today, their problem is solved by building natural gas plants that carry the load when wind and solar are AWOL–which is to say, a large majority of the time. Of course, the natural gas plants are dispatchable, which means they can produce energy reliably, at will, 24/7. Which raises the obvious question: if we have to build fully-capable natural gas plants to make wind and solar sort-of work, some of the time, what the heck to we need the wind and solar for?

Climate “Crisis” Update

Environmentalism Is the New War on the Working Class

Achtung Baby! (It’s Cold Outside) – Germany’s “Green” Energy Fail Rescued By Coal And Gas

INSANITY: NYT’s Ezra Klein Ponders Having to ‘Dim the Sun’ to Fight Climate Change

Could a Nuclear Reactor Actually Last for Hundreds of Years?

Roderic: ‘The More Electric Vehicles We Build, the Worse CO2 Gets’

Chilton Williamson.

I sure am.

What, after all, is a professional politician if he is not a supposed expert, first in the business of getting himself elected to office, and second in the art of statecraft that competent governance requires? Before 2016, expertise in politics was expected and admired by the American electorate, as Americans admired expertness in every other occupation. In electing Trump voters were expressing their distrust — indeed, their contempt and positive dislike — for the professional political wizards who had transformed their country beyond recognition over the past half-century, in the process half-destroying it. But because political expertise has been merged in modern activist-progressive democracies with techno-scientific-bureaucratic expertise, expertise as a concept — even as a word — has been discredited along with expertness of the political kind, to the point where this overworked nine-letter word is close to becoming the popular equivalent of a four-letter one.

Scott Alexander.

Klein calls this “the Democratic party more successfully resisting polarization”, and thinks of this as related to structural differences between the two parties. He says that the Republican Party represents the modal American on various characteristics, eg Christian (the most common religion), white (the most common race), straight (the most common sexual orientation), etc, whereas the Democrats represent everyone else (eg Muslims, Jews, atheists, and every minority religion; blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and every minority race; etc). That means the Republicans are more ideologically uniform – Christians are genuinely similar to other Christians, but Jews are only superficially similar to Muslims by virtue of their non-Christianness. That means ideology can’t really capture the Democratic Party in the same way it captures the Republican Party. One point kind of in support of this – ask Democrats their favorite news source, and you get a long tail of stuff (most popular is CNN at 15%, then NPR at 13%, and so on). But ask conservatives and it’s dominated by FOX (47%). Does this lack of news-source diversity reflect a lack of ideological diversity? Could be.

Freeberg nails it.

Leftists who want to have all the election fraud evidence lined up so they can knock it over item by item by item, are just adorable. It looks like they want to debunk just three to five items — to their own satisfaction, not to anybody else’s — announce their check-mate, and if they don’t get immediate capitulation, announce to everyone in earshot something like “See? Nothing will ever convince this guy.”

They don’t understand. There are five big bundles of evidence.

Massachusetts climate official proposes targeting regular people who heat their homes: ‘We have to break your will’

WVU biologists uncover forests’ unexpected role in climate change

Experts Blame Global Warming for Cold Weather in Thailand and Singapore

Biden to Kill 200,000 More Jobs Because… Climate Change

Read it.

Why don’t they just day ‘Democrats’ and get it over with?

Audacious Epigone runs the numbers.

Apropos a discussion in a recent comment thread regarding political orientation, race, and intelligence, let’s take a look at what the GSS offers us.

Claim: Global Warming May have Started in 1825

Researchers Warn Sea Level Rise Worse Than Feared

Green Groups Object to Swedish Climate Geoengineering Experiment

Read it.

I suspect that removing the humans from the process is designed to insulate against charges of racism.

If it has the added benefit of selecting intelligent over unintelligent people, that’s gravy.

Climate change may have driven the emergence of SARS-CoV-2  Climate Change – is there anything it can’t do?

Read it.

Works for me.

Roger Scruton liked to say the the core of the contemporary left is a “culture of repudiation,” in which the inheritances of our civilization must be denied and rubbished precisely because it is our civilization, rather than the imaginary one of the left’s making.

Read it.

“How To” books are a dime a dozen and cover every imaginable topic, or so it seems. But one might think another genre would also be popular, even important: “How Not To” publications. That advice can often prove more valuable. It can at least help one avoid missteps.

Take the role of White House Press Secretary, filled since January 20th by former Obama Administration Communications Director Jennifer Psaki. I’ve never seen so many rookie mistakes in a spokesperson in a relatively short time, even while granting her some grace for being “in the arena” in one of the toughest White House jobs, even while performing before a friendly, even fawning audience.

Read it.

The coming wave of digital regulation may claim to target “Big Tech” but will inevitably end up harming citizen-innovators most because regulators have forgotten to include them in their process.

No government has yet succeeded in writing a law that manages to hit the assholes and miss the heroes.

Read it.

Not to mention vulnerability to any jihadist with an airplane. Yeah, it attracts attention, but the military has a technical term for ‘attracting attention’: It’s called ‘drawing fire’ and that’s not a good thing.

Scott Alexander.

In most journalistic settings, you can’t just write “here’s what I think”. You have to write “here’s what my source, a recognized expert, said when I interviewed them”. And the experts are pretty sparing with their interviews for contrarian stories.

The way my correspondent described it: sources don’t usually get to approve the way they’re quoted in an article, or to see it before it gets published. So they’re really cagey about saying anything that might get misinterpreted. Maybe their real opinion is that X is a hard question, there are good points on both sides, but overall they think it probably isn’t true. But if a reporter wants to write “X Is Dumb And All Epidemiologists Are Idiots For Believing It”, they can slice and dice your interview until your cautiously-skeptical-of-X statement sounds like you’re backing them up. So experts end up paranoid about saying potentially-controversial-sounding things to reporters. And since reporters can’t write without sources, it’s hard for them to write anything controversial about epidemiology.

UN Climate Envoy Bloomberg’s Private Jets Emitted More Than 500 Times The Carbon Footprint Of A Typical Car

Climate Researcher’s New E-Book: IPCC Significantly Overstates CO2, “The Sorry State Of Climate Science”

The problem with climate models

Read it.

“Disinformation” and “misinformation” are used to excuse incompetence and punish opposition.

Read it,

If you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em (and suck up the government subsidies).

Read it.

In a speech delivered at a degree ceremony at the California Institute of Technology, Richard Feynman, a noted physicist and Nobel Prize winner in 1974, compared the social sciences to the cargo cult. Representatives of the social sciences, he argued, imitate the behaviour of other sciences but to no effect. Feynman did not end with this comparison, but added examples from the fields of rehabilitation, psychotherapy, and parapsychology. He stated that despite the enormous effort invested in researching and perfecting teaching methods, students’ results are worse every year. The same goes for criminality and the other problems which the social sciences attempt to resolve. Was Feynman right?

Looks that way to me.

Scott Alexander on a problem of modern life.

WebMD is the Internet’s most important source of medical information. It’s also surprisingly useless. Its most famous problem is that whatever your symptoms, it’ll tell you that you have cancer. But the closer you look, the more problems you notice. Consider drug side effects.

…

Drug 1 is aspirin. Drug 2 is warfarin, which causes 40,000 ER visits a year and is widely considered one of the most dangerous drugs in common use. I challenge anyone to figure out, using WebMD’s side effects list alone, that warfarin is more dangerous than aspirin. I think this is because if WebMD said “aspirin is pretty safe and most people don’t need to worry about it”, people might use aspirin irresponsibly, die, and then their ghosts might sue WebMD. Or if WebMD said “warfarin can be dangerous, be careful with this one”, people might refuse to take warfarin because “the Internet said it was dangerous”, die of the stuff warfarin is supposed to treat, and then their ghosts might sue WebMD. WebMD solves this by never giving the tiniest shred of useful information to anybody.

Read it.

Watching American liberalism in action always reminds me of Churchill’s observation about Stanley Baldwin: “Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.”

Measuring melting ice

Claim: California’s Rainy Season Starting Nearly A Month Later Than It Did 60 Years Ago  ‘Highiimpact short-form reports with immediate implications’ means click-bait shrieks of DANGER WILL ROBINSON!

Are you ready for the climate lockdowns?

Read it.

Yeah, an ex-con is a tech executive’s first choice for a coding job.

“So what am I going to work on?” “You’re not. Your job is to sit here and Be Black so we can’t get sued for Lack Of Diversity. Just don’t touch anything.”

Millenial snowflakes are bad enough.

Actually, it taste’s like squirrel.

Read it.

If you’ve got enough money, acres upon acres of undeveloped land and an “innovative technology,” you soon could form a new local government in Nevada.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

UPDATE: Nevada bill would allow tech companies to create governments

Yeah, but you’re still in Nevada.