Read it.

Get a Mac.

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.

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/.

Read it.

Having now reviewed everything I can find on what the President actually said at the protest in D.C., I can state with confidence that he did not cross a line into legally actionable speech. The bar set for classifying speech as criminal is pretty high, and the President did not even come close to meeting it.

Try to set aside what you think about President Trump. That’s a stretch goal for a lot of us, but let’s stretch: consider, for just a moment, that there might be an issue here that’s bigger than the President himself, and that could have repercussions that go far beyond January of 2021.

Those who call for the President’s removal from office are asking that punitive action be taken — in fact, that the most punitive action which can be taken, in the case of the Chief Executive, be taken — for his exercise of constitutionally protected speech.

Read it.

The rat-tat-tat of takedowns was a striking display of the tech industry’s power to shape the fate of even the president of the United States. And it comes after years of efforts by both Democrats and Republicans in Washington to cut Silicon Valley down to size — including lawsuits that Trump’s antitrust enforcers have filed in recent months against Facebook and Google, plus efforts on both the right and left to challenge Section 230, the provision in communications law that limits online platforms’ liability for what users post to them.

Those lawsuits, legislative efforts and a potential antitrust investigation of Apple’s App Store echo the complaint that, remarkably, Trump supporters, civil libertarians and some prominent Democrats are airing this weekend: No handful of companies should have this much unilateral authority.

What Would It Take to Run a City on 100 Percent Clean Energy?  (Wired ‘Science’)

FLASHBACK: DiCaprio Panicked It Was ‘Too Late’ to Save Earth From Climate Horror

Read it.

Liberal journalist Glenn Greenwald scorched the left-wing establishment and Big Tech for taking totalitarian measures against conservatives.

Greenwald condemned Big Tech after multiple platforms purged sitting President Donald Trump. “A handful of Silicon Valley oligarchs decide who can and cannot be heard, including the President of the United States. They exert this power unilaterally, with no standards, accountability or appeal,” Greenwald lamented in a Jan. 7 tweet. He warned followers on Jan. 8: “The centralized power over US democracy (and other democracies) concentrated in the hands of a tiny number of unaccountable Silicon Valley oligarchs is stunning, unprecedented and unsustainable.”

I know the feeling.

Read it.

Unschoolers, who have long occupied an obscure corner of the home-schooling community, have suddenly become intriguing, less like alien life-forms and more like your cool neighbor who managed to stay relaxed through the monthslong shortages of toilet paper and child care. Unschooling is a pedagogy premised on letting your kid sleep in, read whatever they like (or not) and learn math (or not) through baking, elaborate Lego creations or wandering the internet rather than working through a textbook.

This approach is unlikely to work for most families. Even some who believe wholeheartedly in the idea of unschooling struggle with it in practice. But unschoolers’ choice to take on that struggle should compel the rest of us to face big questions about motivation, coercion and the purpose of education during this unusual school year and beyond.

More food for Polar Bears: Arctic report card 2020 highlights the huge benefit of less summer sea ice

Study Predicts the Amazon Rainforest Will Collapse by 2064  Sufficiently far in the future that nobody will be held accountable for flubbing it.

The Conversation: Pikas are NOT Dying Out from Global Warming

Read it.

Between Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning, as all the broadcast evening and morning news casts informed viewers of the news that the Kenosha police officer who shot Jacob Blake in August would not be charged in the incident, most shows ignored one of the most critical details given for why his actions were considered justifiable self-defense.

ABC’s Good Morning America was the only show on the broadcast networks that explained that the officer in the case, Rusten Shevskey, was trying to prevent Blake from kidnapping his three children who were in the vehicle that Blake himself had allegedly admitted that he intended to steal from his ex-girlfriend.

Making tracks for Florida solves a lot of problems.

John Hinderaker at PowerLine.

Until yesterday, one might have thought that liberals consider rioting and other forms of political violence to be as American as apple pie.

You could write a book in support of that proposition, but for now let’s cite just a few examples. Do you remember when President Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017? Leftist Democrats rioted in Washington that day. That riot was arguably worse, more violent and more destructive, than what happened in D.C. yesterday. The liberal rioters destroyed stores, set vehicles on fire and battled with the police. Six police officers were wounded.

I don’t recall a single Democratic office-holder denouncing the Democrats’ Inauguration Day riot, and the Associated Press came perilously close to praising the rioters.

Green Matters: Humans are Responsible for 110% of Global Warming

Pontifical Academy of Science Emails Document Vatican Hostility to Climate Change Skepticism

Climate Change Is Turning Cities Into Ovens  (Wired ‘Science’) Cities have always been ovens.

Scientists Warn of an ‘Imminent’ Stratospheric Warming Event Around The North Pole

The Long, Troubling Decline of Arctic Sea Ice

Read it.

Financial institutions are pushing back against a proposed rule change that would force them to work with the firearms industry, citing concerns over the legality of the measure.

Introduced by the Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) in November, the measure would block financial institutions from refusing to do business with companies the banks believe may hurt their image. The rule requires that banks base decisions on financial risk assessment: As long as the numbers are financially sound, banks will be unable to deny services to a lawful business.

Read it.

n fact, more than 1 in 10 people that grew up with English as their first language are said to have dyslexia, with wide consensus pointing towards a person’s genetic history as the leading cause. One, it would appear, is either born dyslexic or not.

So, how then have we ended up with the phenomenon that some people who speak both English and another language can be dyslexic in one, but not the other?

The answer, it seems, is hidden in the characteristics of a language and its writing system.

Read it.

According to Ryan Field, a nurse from the Erie County Medical Center is getting his ticket, and he won’t be going to because he has to focus on his State of the State speech. His speech is scheduled to take place January 11.

Read it.

That article is not about today in Washington, that’s about 9 years ago in Madison, from the Wisconsin State Journal…

These kind of mob actions in Madison went on for months in 2011. But they’ve disappeared down the memoryhole because the mob was Democratic. So, therefore, they were the Good Guys, not the Bad Guys. It’s hard to remember facts that contradict The Narrative.

Financial Review: Companies, Directors face a Wave of Climate Lawfare in 2021

Climate change caused mangrove collapse in Oman

Changing Climate Debate History