Read it.

I only see one Blue state on that list.

Audacious Epigone.

Outdated carbon credits from old wind and solar farms are threatening climate change efforts

Trump Baby Blimp To Be Showcased At Museum As Part Of Protest Collection  Can’t get much more childish than that.

Read it.

Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley will have his book “The Tyranny of Big Tech” published by the conservative publisher Regnery after Simon & Schuster canceled their deal with him after the pro-Trump riot on Jan. 6 at the U.S. Capitol.

Ought to have gone to them first. He’ll know better next time.

Read it.

Used to be, the major difference between Republicans and Democrats was that Democrats never forgot which side they were on. Maybe Republicans are waking up.

ZMan sums it up.

As the military begins the process of installing The Pretender as the figurative leader of the American Empire, it is a good time to take stock of what has happened over the last five years. From the perspective of political psychology, the world all of us inhabit today is a vastly different one from the world of 2015. This includes the dissident right, which has been transformed by the Trump experience. In the before times, politics was all shades of gray, while today it is in black and white.

 

Just imagine. What would we have to talk about?

Unfortunately not.

Left stranded: US military sonar linked to whale beachings in Pacific, say scientists (The Guardian) Linked!

Polar bears can come ashore any time of year and cause trouble: a timely reminder

This Tuesday, Jan. 19: Dr. Roy Spencer’s Friends of Science Society Livestream Talk: ‘Why There Is No Climate Emergency’

The Ocean Warming Enigma

What Global Warming? 148 New (2020) Scientific Papers Affirm Recent Non-Warming, A Degrees-Warmer Past

Read it.

If this were a normal January, free from the specter of COVID-19, Davos would be bracing itself for an invasion by several thousand of the world’s most self-important people: pompous politicians, slick CEOs and — worst of all — freeloading journalists. Normally this pretty Alpine town is the venue for the World Economic Forum in the last week in January, but this year that annual schmoozefest is safely confined to the internet. ‘Key global leaders will share their views on the state of the world in 2021,’ forewarns the WEF website but, for the first time in the WEF’s 50-year history, they’ll be doing it remotely. Due to the pandemic, Davos rests in peace.

Read it.

On the heels of Forbes magazine editor Randall Lane threatening companies that hire Trump officials, we now have that periodical politically cleansing its own website of an article critical of their beloved social media monopolist that also engages in cracking down on free speech. Such was the case on Monday when Forbes deleted an article by frequent contributor, Jim Collins, that dared to strongly criticize Twitter which is now obviously a prohibited activity.

Collins pulled no punches in his strong criticism of Twitter as you can see just from reading the title of his article, “Twitter Is The Worst Company On Planet Earth. Here’s How To Bet Against The Stock—and Deactivate Your Account.” Since Forbes apparently found this to be heretical towards its increasingly woke attitude, the article was soon deleted and all that remains on the page is this message: “This page is no longer active. We regret any inconvenience.”

John Hinderaker at PowerLine.

Democrats are making extraordinary efforts to suppress all discussion of whether Joe Biden actually won the 2020 presidential election. In fact, they go even farther: they want to suppress all discussion of the extent to which voter fraud occurred. That naturally makes me want to write about voter fraud, and who really won the election.

First, this question: why are the Democrats so hysterical in their insistence that fraud not be mentioned? One reason is obvious. Joe Biden will take office under a cloud, since close to half of all Americans doubt that he really won the election. The Democrats want to stamp out such doubts to preserve Biden’s authority as president.

But there is a second reason that may be more important. The Democrats want the lax voting procedures that prevailed in 2020 to continue in the future. They know that efforts will be made in many states to improve ballot integrity, and they want those efforts to fail. By rendering all discussion of voter fraud out of bounds, they hope to forestall reforms that would make it harder for them to cheat, or enable cheating, in the future.

Paul Ehrlich… Again?

2020 Was the One of the Hottest Years on Record  And yet I feel completely cool. How do you account for that?

Read it.

The publisher of The Bulwark and executive director for one of NeverTrumper Bill Kristol’s get-rid-of-Trump campaigns is a donor to President-elect Joe Biden. Kristol’s Republican Accountability Project (RAP) is working to protect anti-Trump Republicans in Congress. It is guarding those who “vote to impeach, remove, and disqualify President Trump” by warding off primary challenges, according to the campaign’s webpage. RAP announced that it would also be looking to punish more than 100 GOP members who objected to certification of the Electoral College. Specifically, RAP would do this by “standing up primary challenges” to Republicans who didn’t toe the line and “promote Republicans in open contests who do not align themselves with Trump’s MAGA ethos,” according to Politico. The campaign had “pledged to amass $50 million” in its efforts to defend pro-impeachment Republicans. But it turns out that RAP Executive Director, Bulwark publisher and “Never Trump Republican” Sarah Longwell isn’t just anti-Trump. She’s pro-Biden.

One of the chief benefits of the Trump era is The Rectification of Names. The RINOs are revealing that they are actually proglodytes after all in a Clever Plastic Disguise.

Read it.

Get a Mac.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

Now that The Pretender is about to be installed, I am assuming the Democrats will start demanding everything open back up. They are that shameless. Still, they spent a year convincing their drones that Covid is the black death. Lots of people are now deeply invested in being afraid. Turning the economy back on will not come easy. That and the damage is mostly done at this point. If you are a business that survived this, then you can keep surviving. It will take years for the lost to recover.

The Pretender’s script writers say he will ask for a trillion dollar relief bill, but given the mess that is Congress, that will not happen easily. Mitch McConnell is a massive d-bag to everyone, not just his voters. He will use every trick he can to hamstring it. The Dems are a fractured party right now and we’ll see that clearly over this bill. Even if they pass it, you can run a country this way. Throw in their efforts to criminalize dissent and our rulers look like they are carelessly smoking on a powder keg.

Read it.

Lucky Australia.

Read it.

Boston mayor Marty Walsh (D.), President-elect Joe Biden’s pick for labor secretary, funneled nearly $1.2 million into a consulting firm that employs his longtime girlfriend.

Walsh’s mayoral campaign pushed the payments to LB Strategies, where his live-in girlfriend, Lorrie Higgins, works as a fundraising consultant. The firm received the cash through a contract that allows it to compensate its employees with the money.

What’s the use of having power if you can’t abuse it?

Top scientists warn of ‘ghastly future of mass extinction’ and climate disruption (The Guardian)

Top scientists warn of ‘ghastly future’ for planet as leaders underestimate ecological threats (CNN)

Environmental Extremism Is Creeping Into Every Domain of Public Policy

A new Pause?

Betting Against Collapsing Ocean Ecosystems

Read it.

In late December, I posted Living in the Hate of the Common People, which was inspired by the comment of an anti-Brexit Brit who said “I think we need to find a way to stop the working class from voting altogether” and also “Idiots and racists shouldn’t be able to ruin the lives of people who do well in life by voting for things they don’t understand. The problem in this country boils down to low information morons having the ability to vote.” I cited other examples of the same kind of thinking.

Yesterday, it was reported (by Veritas) that a lawyer employed by PBS had resigned after being caught saying things like it was “great” that coronavirus cases were spiking in red states because they might infect Trump voters and suggested that Republican voters should have their children put in re-education camps.

Read it.

Dire wolves are iconic beasts. Thousands of these extinct Pleistocene carnivores have been recovered from the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. And the massive canids have even received some time in the spotlight thanks to the television series Game of Thrones. But a new study of dire wolf genetics has startled paleontologists: it found that these animals were not wolves at all, but rather the last of a dog lineage that evolved in North America.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

Read it.

To help design improved membranes, a team of researchers has used electron microscopy and 3D computational modeling for a nanoscale understanding of how water flows through the barriers. It turns out that uniform membrane density down to the nanometer scale, and not the thinness of the membranes, is crucial for improving water flow. Improving uniformity could increase efficiency by over 30 percent, the team, from the University of Texas, Penn State, and DuPont, reported in the journal Science last week.

 

Severian.

Below, reader Frip suggested that we need to stop being nice guys. Which violates the spirit of Joe Biden’s America, in which the people who stole the election and pissed in our faces have commanded us to come together in unity, so regretfully I have reported you to the Thought Police, comrade. With that unpleasant task out of the way, here’s a history lesson, on a topic totally unrelated to passive resistance to power, with no modern day applications whatsoever.

Sarah Hoyt allows us to learn from her experience under socialism.

Now that our newspapers are mostly just making up bullshit, it is very important to know how to read the newspaper.

 

Climate Censorship Revealed [Updated]

UW Researchers Find Wildfire Smoke is More Cooling on Climate Than Computer Models Assume  Burn ’em up!

“A Headline That Will Make Global-Warming Activists Apoplectic”

Female scientists focus on a secret weapon to fight climate change: Moms (Washington Post)

The Climate Litigation Industry Comes to SCOTUS

Top scientists warn of ‘ghastly future of mass extinction’ and climate disruptio

May/Middleton: Rebuttal to Geological Society of London Scientific Statement on Climate Change

New Senate leadership could finally help us fight climate change  Popular ‘Science’ goes all in on Wokeness.

Read it.

After banning President Donald Trump from their social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter have seen their combined market value plummet by $51.2 billion over the last two trading sessions. The news was first reported by Business Insider.

Following the Capitol upheaval last week, Facebook and Twitter indefinitely banned Trump’s accounts, claiming there was risk of additional violence. Their decision prompted a major tech sell-off.

Climate Change Is Turning Cities Into Ovens Cities have always been ovens.

Clean Energy Hydro Plant In Canada Dubbed A “Boondoggle” After Economists Predict $8 Billion In Losses

New Study: Sea Level Rise Rates The Same Since 1958 As They Were For All Of 1900-2018

Impacts of climate change on our water and energy systems: it’s complicated

Read it.

Schumer’s message during the media gathering in Manhattan centered on asking the Transportation Security Administration to add last week’s Capitol rioters to the agency’s no-fly list. Near the end of Schumer’s statement, a mask-wearing woman stepped in front of the podium and hurled insults at the lawmaker, the New York Post reported.

“You racist socialists can dish it out, but you can’t take it and remember this, Adolf Hitler was a socialist and that’s exactly who you follow, you’re nothing but a coward!” said the woman, who added she was “glad” about the insurrection at Capitol.

Read it.

Speaking to lawmakers on Monday (11 January), Prabhat Agarwal, an official who heads up the eCommerce unit at the European Commission’s DG Connect, noted how the EU executive’s Digital Services Act attempts to realign the balance between effective content removal and preserving freedom of expression online.

“It is no longer acceptable in our view that platforms take some key decisions by themselves alone without any supervision, without any accountability, and without any sort of dialogue or transparency for the kind of decisions that they’re taking,” Agarwal said.

“Freedom of expression is really a key value in this,” he told the European Parliament’s internal market committee.

Pretty bad when Europe has greater respect for free speech than America.

Read it.

After her website faced repeated domain name revocations, Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan has registered her website on the distributed domain names network Handshake.

The pirated database of academic papers is now accessible directly through the service’s portals as well as through NextDNS, a privacy-focused, cloud-based domain name service resolver which converts IP addresses into domain names.

ZMan deconstructs.

The expression “the big lie” gets tossed around a lot in modern times, usually defined as the means with which the Nazis fooled the people. In reality, the expression was coined by the most significant man in history to explain how the people who tried to prevent the catastrophe of the Great War ended up being blamed for it. The big lie is a falsehood so big that no one would think it possible to state such a lie. In other words, it is believed because it is so outlandish it must be true.

One of the many ironies of this age is that the people the most significant man in history accused of employing the “the big lie” have spent generations since that time redefining it to mean Nazi propaganda. In popular culture, the Left will apply the expression to some inconvenient facts pointed out by their many enemies. They claim a famous propaganda minister associated with the most significant man in history is the guy who coined the expression to describe his own efforts.

…

We see this in how the term “fascist” is used in this age. The Left in the West has always accused their enemies of being fascists, even when there were no actual fascists vying for political power. For a period, fascists and communist were locked in a bitter struggle for the soul of socialism, so it makes sense. In America is never made much sense, as we never had fascists or a communist party of note, but for the Left everywhere, it is always monkey see, monkey do.

Freeberg nails it.

What we’re seeing play out now is a conflict about how one achieves, not the authority that goes with being President of the United States, but the basic respect that we expect to come our way once we’ve reached full adulthood. And I mean, by that, real adulthood not legal adulthood. True maturity. Two sets of rules.

To people who’ve fully reached adulthood there are two simple rules:

1. I can’t make you respect me. I can only inspire respect by way of my words, my efforts and my achievements.
2. I can also inspire you, in the same way, to disrespect me. It’s your choice how to see me, my choice how to inspire you.

To people who haven’t reached adulthood the two rules are much simpler:

1. I get to tell you what to do.
2. You can’t tell me what to do.

Read it.

Right away a few observations come to mind. First, if you squint the right way, you can see that our leaders don’t really take BLM and Antifa protests very seriously, and hence the kid glove treatment they get. The property damage may be significant, but our government likely doesn’t think Antifa and BLM amount to a significant political threat. Hence the leniency of the government response at all levels to riot season last year. But if the government at all levels now tries to crack down on pro-Trump protestors, won’t they have to also tighten their rules of engagement with Antifa, or will there now be a political litmus test for rules of engagement? There is, this person said, a lot of hand-wringing going on about the fact that of the hundreds of people who invaded the capitol building, only about 50 arrests were made. (There may be more as law enforcement goes about identifying people.) But the point is: from the perspective of the Deep State, the mob largely got away with it.

Aussie ABC: Coral Islands are Growing Larger, Despite Climate Change

The Folly of Renewable Energy

“Clean” Energy Economy

John Hinderaker at PowerLine.

During our live podcast/VIP/whiskey hour Friday evening, Steve commented that the Republican Party is “reeling” following the D.C. demonstration and riot last week. Given what I know of the Republican Party establishment I expect he is right, but still I was taken aback. Why in the world should Republicans be reeling? Because a handful of demonstrators invaded (or, in some cases, were ushered into) the Capitol and some of them behaved badly? What do those people–not the hundreds of thousands who demonstrated peacefully, but the few who rioted–have to do with the Republican Party? Not much: I will hazard a guess that the total amount ever donated by the rioters to the party adds up to $0, and the number of times they have ever been called upon to be spokesmen for the party is also 0.

If anyone should be reeling on account of riots it is the Democrats, whose party members and allies have burned down and otherwise devastated major sections of American cities, including D. C., during the last year. Especially since the Democrats’ leadership has cheered them on, without any exception that I have noticed.

LA Times Demands a Fossil Fuel “Non Proliferation Treaty” to Combat Climate Change

Read it.

U.S.—Facing unprecedented efforts from Big Tech to silence their infallible reporting, The Babylon Bee has announced an innovative new format known as “print.” Fans of the newspaper can now receive their news written on an anonymous, untraceable format known as a “newspaper.”

The new technology will be printed with ink on paper and hand-delivered by kids riding bikes–directly to your mailbox.

“We’ve been working hard on this technology for a long time,” said Owner Seth Dillon. “After years of research, we have finally developed a technology and distribution method that Big Tech can’t touch.”

Sources say this new paper can be enjoyed and passed around without an internet connection. After it has been read, it can be used to line the floors of bird cages or to wrap fried fish and chips.

The Babylon Bee set a lofty goal to have 20 print subscribers by the end of the decade. Unfortunately, Mark Zuckerberg quickly bought all the paper companies and barred them from selling paper to The Babylon Bee.

The Bee is now researching stone tablet technology in order to avoid censorship.

Read it.

In the first two posts in this series — The Great Conservative Migration of 2021 and The Great Conservative Migration of 2021, Part 2 — I outlined our decision to leave California and our decision to move to East Tennessee. In this part I am describing our experience in making the move.

Read it.

I previously discussed Kentucky Route Zero (KR0 for short) in the context of the first Trump-Clinton debate. It’s relevant to that because it’s a tour through coal-country America, and it engages with the desolation there that’s fueling Trump’s support.

As a portrait of the region, it’s a Picasso or maybe a Goya, not a Velázquez. It has moments where it approaches documentary realism, but it mostly traverses an imaginary landscape reflecting its creators’ perceptions, inspired by their real-life travels in Kentucky.

Read it.

The Maricopa County Republican Committee voted to censure former Republican Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake on Saturday.

The resolution passed by a 1,190 to 291 vote at the meeting, which was held at Dream City Church in Glendale, the Arizona Republic reported.

Wikeleaks just dumped all of their files online.

Check ’em out.

Hillary’s e-mails are under /file/clinton-emails/.