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.”

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“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

Guardian: Could the Covid Lockdown have Helped Save Us from Climate Change?  They won’t be happy until people are stuck using horses again.

Greta Thunberg: “we are not listening to climate scientists”  We’re not listening to Greta Thunberg, either.

Thousands in Colorado without heat after vandals attack gas system

New Evidence That the Ancient Climate Was Warmer than Today’s

Britain’s new climate plan that could make millions of homes unsellable

Read it.

The Minneapolis Police Department released body camera footage of an incident where a felony suspect was fatally shot during a traffic stop Wednesday evening.

The officers repeatedly told the suspect to show his hands as he tried to drive away from officers before he was blocked in by police vehicles, video shows. The suspect was given another warning to put his hands up before he fired a gun through the driver’s side window at officers.

The Usual Suspects are protesting, of course.

Read it.

In recent years, San Francisco has seemed to be begging for companies to leave. In addition to familiar failures of governance — widespread homelessness, inadequate transit, soaring property crime — it has also imposed more idiosyncratic hindrances. Far from welcoming experimentation, it has sought to undermine or stamp out home-rental services, food-delivery apps, ride-hailing firms, electric-scooter companies, facial-recognition technology, delivery robots and more, even as the pioneers in each of those fields attempted to set up shop in the city. It tried to ban corporate cafeterias — a major tech-industry perk — on the not-so-sound theory that this would protect local restaurants. It created an “Office of Emerging Technology” that will only grant permission to test new products if they’re deemed, in a city bureaucrat’s view, to provide a “net common good.” Whatever the merits of such meddling, it’s hardly a formula for unbounded inventiveness.

Read it.

The shameless strategy feels counterintuitive, because our first instinct is to want to punish that sort of behavior. And historically, those sanctions have been effective. Punishing outlandish behavior is an important aspect of cooperative governance: it preserves social order by ensuring that we all play by the same rules.

Today, it seems like punishing shamelessness only increases social rewards to the transgressor. What’s changed?

Read it.

George Blake has just died in Moscow at the age of 98. Had he been of any other nationality than British, he would not have been allowed to die peacefully.

Read it.

Indonesian fishermen found an underwater drone on December 20th, local media reported. Analyzing photos of the drone, Naval News concludes that the drone is closely related to the Chinese Sea Wing family.

Wind and solar are losing ground to gas

Newly Discovered Greenland Plume Drives Thermal Activities in the Arctic

Read it.

I guess Bernie is working for Trump now.

Read it.

“Follow the science!”

“What is it this week?”

Read it.

Well, I like spam – slice it thin, fry it up, and you’re good to go.

(Have you noticed that nobody ever tries to make a fake vegetable out of meat?)

Read it.

John Paul Mac, who provided signature evidence that Hunter Biden dropped his laptop off at the Wilmington, Delaware repair shop – subsequently abandoning it, says Twitter’s actions forced him to shut down the ‘Mac Shop’ after Twitter said the New York Post‘s exposé on the laptop violated its “hacked materials” policy – which they initially disallowed from being shared across the network, according to Variety.

“Plaintiff is not a hacker and the information obtained from the computer does not [constitute] hacked materials because Plaintiff lawfully gained access to the computer,” reads Mac’s complaint, adding that thanks to Twitter citing its “hacked materials” policy, he is now “widely considered a hacker,” and has received negative online reviews along with threats against himself and his property – forcing him to ultimately shutter the Mac Shop.

Read it.

I guess metal is junk and wood is not…?

Read it.

Think of it as evolution in action.

LA Times: Children “literally organizing out of climate anxiety”

“Stimulus” Bill Includes Green Giveaways

A Social Conscience Is Nice, But Business Is Business!!

Autumn In United Kingdom, Ireland Has Not Warmed Since 1995 …Cooling Tendency

SCMP: China’s Power to “Marshal” Private Savings into Climate Mega Projects will Leave the West Behind

Newt Gingrich.

Having spent more than four years watching the left #Resist President Donald Trump and focus entirely on undoing and undermining the 2016 election, it took me several days to understand the depth of my own feelings.

As I thought about it, I realized my anger and fear were not narrowly focused on votes. My unwillingness to relax and accept that the election grew out of a level of outrage and alienation unlike anything I had experienced in more than 60 years involvement in public affairs.

Steve lets loose.

Statists aren’t interested in practicality. They’re interested in the messages products send. It’s okay if you smell. If it bothers you, it proves you’re bourgeois. The French don’t bathe much, and they’re better than us. They’re chic.

Statists love shoving half-baked technology down our throats to solve problems we don’t really have. They can never wait for the good technology. You have to have curly fluorescent bulbs that don’t work, NOW (rhymes with “Mao”). You have to have hybrid cars that only work because of subsidies NOW. You have to smell like a slice of green, furry bread NOW.

…

Maytag’s machine is a commercial-style washer, and thankfully, it has very few features. Remember how your old washer had about 5 settings, and it worked great? That’s how the Maytag is. You don’t need a fragile video display and special modes called “Power Fluf” and “Techno Steam” to get clean laundry. Do you think professional launderers buy machines with video displays and stupid features? Of course not. But they get clothes cleaner than you do.

Read it.

Hammer tech.

Read it.

What you need is an Exhale bladeless ceiling fan.

I have four.