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.

I am not making this up.,

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.

ZMan’s weekly podcast.

The storming of the Capitol opened a lot of eyes. The people in the media demanding mass executions of Trump supporters were just six months ago gloating over left-wing mobs burning cities. Six months ago, official Washington was telling us the cops were a problem and now they are demanding they open fire on protestors. When a black criminal died in police custody, they demanded vengeance. When a white veteran is murdered by a cop on video, they think it great fun.

Highly recommended.

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

The Other McCain.

Mail-in voting has proven to be an unbeatable trick for Democrats, who captured both U.S. Senate seats in Georgia in Tuesday’s runoff, thus making Chuck Schumer the de facto Senate Majority Leader.

It happened almost exactly as predicted last night. At 11 p.m., Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler held small but significant leads. Then the metro Atlanta counties of Fulton and DeKalb suddenly reported gigantic batches of ballots, which gave Democrats the victory — Jon Osoff by about 16,000 votes, Raphael Warnock by about 50,000.
The machine-like precision of this operation was wondrous to behold. Give Democrats unlimited mail-in ballots, and they’ll do it every time.

Future Zero-Emissions Power Plants: Scientists Collaborate on Development of Commercial Fusion Energy

Claim: AI Will Help Solve Climate Change

Surprising News: Drylands Are Not Getting Drier As Predicted by Climate Scientists  Can you think of ANY prediction by ‘climate scientists’ that has actually happened?

Huge Database Of Studies Documenting Meters-Higher Mid-Holocene Sea Levels Swells Again In 2020

Climate Activist Greta Thunberg Turns 18, Can Be Tried as Adult

World Medical Association Wants Worldwide ‘Climate Emergency’ Declared

Eleven Years Ago Today Al Gore Predicted the Pole Completely ICE Free in 5 Years

Study: “Baked In” Global Warming of 2.3C Means International Climate Goals have Already Failed

Read it.

During their first day back in session, Pennsylvania Senate Republicans refused to acknowledge and seat a Democratic state senator who is facing a contested election over his small margin of victory.

Republicans and Democrats began to have a yelling match Tuesday after Republicans refused to allow Democratic Pennsylvania State Sen. Jim Brewster from Allegheny County after his win was certified by the state but is being contested by his opponent, CBS Pittsburgh reported.

Finally, Republican elected officials are getting their thumbs out of their asses and starting to play hardball.

Steven Hayward at PowerLine.

“Respectable opinion” holds that gridlock in Washington is a terrible thing, because it means Washington “can’t get anything done.” To the contrary, gridlock is the next best thing to having constitutional government! Put a little more seriously, gridlock has replaced the separation of powers as a chief constraint on the impetuosity of central government, and it is precisely the separation of powers embedded in the logic of the Constitution that Progressivism openly set out to destroy more than a century ago.

Progressives have been largely successful in this object through the gradual and insidious concentration of power in the administrative state, but funny thing—the voters don’t seem to like it too much, and continue to vote for “divided government,” when they aren’t in fact voting for Republican presidents—starting with Nixon—who promised to challenge this state of affairs, but who then usually fell short of mounting an effective challenge once in office. (More on this point some other time.)

Read it.

Totalitarian movements throughout history have long understood the criticality of conscripting the general population into participating in a myriad of small fictions, or lies. That’s probably because a powerful tool for controlling entire societies is the moral humiliation of the individual. Over the longer term, such participation in lies can even have the effect of bringing the individual’s actual perception of reality into conformance with the requirements of the state.

Read it.

A new congresswoman from Colorado, Rep. Lauren Boebert, has rallied 83 other representatives to counter an effort by Democratic legislators to prohibit politicians from carrying firearms in and around the Capitol.

Boebert, a vocal supporter of gun rights, rallied lawmakers to oppose a measure by Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., to prohibit carrying a gun throughout the Capitol grounds. Huffman garnered support from 19 other House members and said in a mid-December letter that “current regulations,” which allow concealed firearms for politicians, “create needless risk.”

Read it.

“What is happening is these people from the blue states — much like Texas and much like the other red states that have controlled their taxes and have maintained the high quality of life and that have created jobs — people are moving in from the blue states and then bringing their politics with them,” he continued. “It is not hard to understand at all what’s happening in the state of Georgia.”

ZMan sees some progress.

As the Trump story arc reaches a conclusion over the next few weeks, there will be a lot of writing and talking about the meaning of the last four years. The racketeers of the conservative movement have already concluded that the last four years were just an anomaly and they can go back to the same old rackets. Like career criminals, they learn nothing from the past. Others appear to have been chastened by the experience and are coming out of the other end questioning their old ways.

…

This is not the first time the First Things crew has struggled to maintain their position as friendly critic of conservatism. Back in 1992, they found themselves in a similar spot when Bill Buckley was purging the paleocons. Most of what First Things claims to support fall on the paleo side, but the money and good living were on the neocon side, so they threw in with Buckley. As George Washington once said, no man is so virtuous as to refuse the highest bidder.

Read it.

As the year has progressed, companies and executives have continued to leave places like California and New York (and their liberal political leaders) in favor of lower taxes and less regulation in places like Texas and Florida. Companies like Elliot Management and Goldman Sachs have also moved some offices to Florida.

Virtu is the latest to follow suit, according to Bloomberg. It’ll be moving about 30 people to Palm Beach Gardens and is closing in on signing a 10 year lease. By the end of this year the firm expects total employees in Florida to rise to 50 people, about 10% of their workforce. The Palm Beach location is set to become a “full-fledged base” for the company, the report says. Employees who transfer will effectively get an 11% bump in pay due to Florida having no income tax.

Time to leave.

Read it.

California had the nation’s worst migration growth ranking last year, with the largest net loss of one-way U-Haul trucks crossing its border in 2020, the rental company reported Monday.

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #437

Dr Fauci, Covid, weather, and climate

Causation Of Climate Change: Was The Medieval Warm Period “Regional”?

Climate Change Legislation Won’t Need A Price Tag Thanks To Democrats’ House Rules  They don’t want to scare people.

Read it.

Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is leading a group of twelve Republican senators who are objecting to the certification of electoral votes Jan. 6 that would solidify President-elect Joe Biden’s win. While something similar hasn’t happened in recent years, Congress has been involved in a hotly contested election once before.

In a joint statement, Cruz and other senators said in light of recent allegations of voter fraud, there should be a ten day audit to ease any concerns about election integrity.

“Congress should immediately appoint an Electoral Commission, with full investigatory and fact-finding authority, to conduct an emergency 10-day audit of the election returns in the disputed states. Once completed, individual states would evaluate the Commission’s findings and could convene a special legislative session to certify a change in their vote, if needed.”

Read it.

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos appealed to lawmakers to focus funding on students, instead of just schools, in a Monday letter that anticipated the end of her time as education secretary.

DeVos reminded leaders in the Senate and the House that “education must be re-oriented around students and their families,” urging the lawmakers to zero in on what students need over the needs of schools.

Freeberg lays it out.

Stop and take notice that every now and then, a liberal will pop off with some kind of remark that Trump wants to keep being President to keep from going to jail. Now notice that no one is accusing him of anything that would send him there, and that it’s a defining trait of liberalism that they’re saying their enemies are doing whatever they themselves are doing.

The democrats impeached Trump for investigating a crime. Now they think they managed to elect the guy who committed the crime.

How many other crimes are out there?

If the whole point of the election — for somebody — is to keep from going to jail, and they have the connections to stuff ballot boxes, they will stuff ballot boxes. It wouldn’t make any sense for them not to do it, right? We don’t have established penal codes for this and we don’t have established procedures to actually put someone in the graybar hotel over that stuff. It doesn’t happen. If they have the connections to stuff the ballot boxes, they have the connections to keep from getting caught.

Read it.

As you’ve probably noticed, when someone dies who has tested positive for the Wuhan Coronavirus, the cause of death is always listed as COVID-19, even if they die of a gunshot wound or a snakebite

Mechanical Tree Researcher Seeks Taxpayer Climate Funding

Inconvenient Truth: Climate-related death risk down 99.6% over 100 years

Michael Mann gives himself a tongue bath

No Warming in UK since 2006

Read it.

To boldly go where no wierdos have gone before….

A taste:

A professor at Virginia Tech claims the phrase “the American people”—and beer—are racist, in his new book titled Beer and Racism: How Beer Became White, Why It Matters, and the Movements to Change It.

Read it.

Democracy dies in darkness … except when reporting could upend the fortunes of a prominent Democrat.

To Promote Climate Alarm, Good News Is Regularly Portrayed as a Disaster

AGW Skeptic Marc Morano Receives DEATH THREAT From Sorbonne University Professor’s Email Account

10 Failed Predictions

Read it.

Modern farming tries as hard as it can to make food production into an ‘outdoor factory floor’, but is critically dependent on uncontrollable outside factors such as how much sunshine, rainfall, and organic material are available. Putting everything together into an actual factory — stacking them deep and (hopefully) selling them cheap — has obvious attractions, but providing the sunshine, water, and organic material that God gives you for free raises costs, in most cases sufficiently to make the process not cost-effective. If these guys can solve those problems, then this just might work.

Read it.

The Canadian company Bone Structure can produce zero net energy homes months faster than a traditional builder. But its challenges highlight the difficulty of disrupting the entrenched construction industry.

Audacious Epigone peeks behind the curtain.

The corporate media permitting Joe Biden to use a teleprompter for interviews. The most common reaction to these revelations was, well, yuk yuk, there’s even more evidence Biden is a senescent, doddering old codger!

What they actually revealed is that the putatively independent media was working directly for a presidential candidate. Think about what this entails. The campaign writes a script for Biden and the interviewer. The media professionally produces the result.

That sounds like a campaign ad because it is a campaign ad, except campaign ads cost political campaigns donor money to produce and put on the airwaves, and they come with disclaimers about who paid for the ads (“I’m Joe Biden and I approve this message”).

At least they are supposed to. This degree of collusion makes whatever Russia was accused of doing look like child’s play. The media is not a watch dog, it’s a lapdog, staffed with bootlickers and ring-kissers whose sole purpose is to speak power to truth. That includes the bogus fact checking sites that claim everything is on the up and up because Biden was looking at something innocuous that we always use that is always there for everyone that no one has ever noticed before and no one has seen since. Right, of course.

Read it.

Massachusetts to Ban Sale of New Gas-Powered Cars by 2035

Preventing Ecosystem Collapse 3: Seagrass

MIT Technology Review: Pandemic Denial Shows Rising Climate Deaths Might Not Lead to Action

ZMan gives it a shot.

Despite the uncertainty of the age, it is worth the time to think about what monsters are waiting for us in the new year. With The Pretender being installed in the White House, there will be new challenges on the political front. The people in charge will have a new bag of tricks to distract people from what they are doing. The media will now have to transform from their Trump hating to making Biden sound good. The world will look a lot different in just a few months.