Read it.

What you need is an Exhale bladeless ceiling fan.

I have four.

Read it.

Back in the days before the Great Awokening, when our rulers would at least put up a logical pretense for why they had to screw us over, we were told immigration was necessary to prop up our old age retirement programs because American citizens weren’t having enough kids to support them on their own. In a world where social programs turn children into financial liabilities for all but the poorest Americans, it almost seems like anti-natalism isn’t an unintended consequence but rather the intention.

Inside The Bayesian Priory

Massachusetts city to post climate change warning stickers at gas stations

EU Turns to Magic to Progress their Clean Energy Agenda

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President-elect Joe Biden has a pony problem. During the primary, Joe Biden bizarrely responded to a woman who asked why voters should believe that he could win a national election by saying “You’re a lying dog-faced pony soldier.” That encounter came to mind when Biden this week mocked Fox reporter Peter Doocy, who violated the virtual news blackout on the Hunter Biden story. by asking about the scandal. Biden immediately walked off stage and then stopped and said “Yes, yes, yes. God love you, man — you’re a one-horse pony, I tell you.”

Read it.

fau•ci
/?fowCH?/

Noun

A lie intended to protect the image or status of the issuer of the lie usually by express or implied reference to credentials.
“when questioned about the costly failure of his program, Gov. Walz tossed a Fauci at his questioners by calling them unqualified to judge.”

Verb

To lie in order to evade accountability for previous lies.
“Gov. Cuomo faucied us about his handling of nursing home COVID cases.”

Study suggests great earthquakes as cause of Arctic warming

The other side of sea level change

Study: Dangerous Global Warming Could Occur by 2027  President Trump will handle it.

Read it.

In the United States, anyway, it is generally understood, though seldom mentioned in polite society, that the less distinguished one’s academic institution, the more likely one will insist upon the honorific “Dr.” And that’s for Ph.D. degrees. The degree of Ed.D.—officially a “doctor of education”—is, let’s be candid, more a certificate than a degree. Yes, one is entitled to the title “Dr.” But it’s only a short step, or half step, up from those entertainers and purveyors of boutique soaps who style themselves “Dr.” or “Doc”: “Dr. Bronner,” for example, or “Doc Watson.”

In this country, in most situations, “Dr.” is an honorific properly reserved for medical doctors. We understand that there are notable exceptions—“Dr. Henry A. Kissinger” comes to mind—but exceptions do not make the rule.

New York can’t buy its way out of blackouts

Climate Scientists to Request Political Representation on the Arctic Council

CBS Frets Too Much E-MAILING Contributes to Global Warming

Sea-level rise from climate change could exceed the high-end projections, scientists warn  As they have for the last twenty years. Still waiting for land prices in Malibu to start dropping. Still waiting for NYC to be under water.

Victor Davis Hanson.

After Nov. 3, the meaning of some words and concepts abruptly changed. Have you noticed how new realities have replaced old ones?

Media cross-examination of the president is now an out-of-date idea. The time for gotcha questions has come and gone. Why ask a president whether he is a traitor or a crook when you can focus on his favorite flavor of milkshake or compliment him on his socks?

The old pre-election truth was that new vaccines take years to develop. The new postelection truth is that it’s no big deal to bring out new vaccines in nine months.

Impeaching a first-term president after his first midterm election—on a strictly partisan vote, for political reasons other than the Constitution’s “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors”—is now a terrible idea.

Read it.

4. “Where is the good knife?” If you’re looking for your good X, you have bad Xs. Throw those out.

…

8. When buying things, time and money trade-off against each other. If you’re low on money, take more time to find deals. If you’re low on time, stop looking for great deals and just buy things quickly online.

…

13. When googling a recipe, precede it with ‘best’. You’ll find better recipes.

…

27. Discipline is superior to motivation. The former can be trained, the latter is fleeting. You won’t be able to accomplish great things if you’re only relying on motivation.

…

30. If you listen to successful people talk about their methods, remember that all the people who used the same methods and failed did not make videos about it.

Severian looks around.

We’re seeing the intersection of “information velocity” and “fantasies of competence.” It won’t end well.

Read it.

Eventually I’m going to get around to thinking through and writing up my view that while misguided Millennials lean heavily progressive at the moment, the next generation of young people is going to swing sharply to the right out of rebellion against the stifling conformity of the progressive left that went into hyperdrive this year. In part I’m taking in the lessons of M. Stanton Evans’s first book in 1961, The Revolt on Campus, which argued a similar point. It is quite striking how well that old book holds up and applies today.

Jonah Goldberg.

Taken literally, I endorse the phrase “listen to science” wholeheartedly. Scientists have important things to say to policymakers and citizens alike — and let’s not forget that in a democracy, voters are policymakers, too. A well-informed electorate is a useful check on ill-informed politicians.

The problem, however, is that the people who say “listen to science” tend not to mean it literally but figuratively, and worse, intermittently.

China’s Green NGO Climate Propaganda Enablers

Biden Expected to Lean on States in Fight on Climate Change

Read it.

The chairman of China’s Yoozoo Group Lin Qi, an executive producer on Netflix’s upcoming high-profile sci-fi adaption “The Three-Body Problem,” is currently hospitalized in Shanghai after what a police report indicated Wednesday may be a deliberate poisoning carried out by a colleague involved in managing that IP.

Read it.

Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has been celebrated in American media as a socialist dreamboat, often compared in progressive sex appeal to our own Barack Obama. This broke out again (to conservative mockery on Twitter) when Politico reviewed the year in Canada with a reflection on how Trudeau’s beard was capital-S “Significant.

Claim: A groggy climate giant: subsea permafrost is still waking up after 12,000 years

Read it.

2020 has been a year-long series of grievances, and TV was no exception. Although COVID ended a lot of business, leftist Hollywood has been in full force shoving its agenda down our throats. In honor of Festivus on December 23, we’ve once again gathered a list of 2020 TV grievances to air as well as feats of strength and Festivus miracles.

Gather ’round the Festivus pole and enjoy a Festivus for the rest of us!

(Another) Climate Warrior Aiming to Bypass Democracy

How carbon bureaucrats lied to get the policies they wanted

Read it.

I wonder how well one would survive an RPG. Asking for a friend.

Read it.

Even before moving its headquarters, Hewlett-Packard had more employees in Houston than any other city. This reflects past trends where Silicon Valley companies kept their highest-paid workers in San Jose but built their factories in other cities where housing was more affordable. Apparently, California taxes and housing prices have now gotten too high even for Silicon Valley executives.

Study: “Venus was once more Earth-like, but climate change made it uninhabitable”  No doubt white people were to blame.

Reef Heresy? And the Importance of Asking Questions

Of Warm Poles and Cold Tropics

Here’s What You Need To Know About Biden’s Climate Team

Study Suggests ‘Brain-Eating’ Amoeba May Be Moving North Due To Climate Change  Maybe Joe Biden is on the vanguard after all.

Climate Change Is The New Fed Mandate

Veganuary: Go Vegan in January to Avoid Future Coronavirus Pandemics The technical term for vegans is ‘prey’.

Steve Sailer.

As we’ve been instructed for decades, the key to Republicans doing better among immigrant voters is to let in more immigrants. Thus, Donald Trump in 2020, while he may have done better among whites because of their innate xenophobic racism, was swept away by the righteous wrath of immigrants.

Except … the opposite happened.

Californians Can Now Pay A Premium To Power Their Homes With Manure

Sea-Surface Temperature Anomalies

Biden’s Energy Plans Are Expensive—and Dangerous

Forbes Climate Crisis: “Lock in lifestyle changes brought about by COVID-19”

NYT: “What happened to Global Warming?”

Read it.

Someone at a social media site, who I will not dignify with a link, wrote, “I think we need to find a way to stop the working class from voting altogether.”

This individual, who is in the UK and is obviously a furious anti-Brexiter, also wrote: “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.”

Actually, I think the country would be better off if everybody who had a college degree was barred from voting. The available evidence suggests that they are a major contingent of the ‘low information morons’ demographic, and include quite a number of idiots and racists (although not in the sense that the commenter intended).

Read it.

Perhaps you have had the experience of hiking in the woods, or navigating at sea or in a complex network of swamps and streams. It’s not good to have a map with you if you do not know how to use the map, and how to use a compass. And neither the map nor the compass will be of any use if you cannot determine where you even are on that map, or to gauge if you have the right map in the first place. And you had better know where you should be heading too or it’s all a hopeless endeavor. If someone has given you a false map and bad directions, and pointed you towards a swamp instead of the welcoming lodge that is your real goal, are you wise or experienced enough to avoid the deceptions?

Venkatesh Rao does a deep dive.

The Office is not a random series of cynical gags aimed at momentarily alleviating the existential despair of low-level grunts. It is a fully realized theory of management that falsifies 83.8% of the business section of the bookstore.  The theory begins with Hugh MacLeod’s well-known cartoon, Company Hierarchy (below), and its cornerstone is something I will call The Gervais Principle, which supersedes both the Peter Principle and its successor, The Dilbert Principle. Outside of the comic aisle, the only major and significant works consistent with the Gervais Principle are The Organization Man and Images of Organization.

Battery Basics for Climate Warriors

Will Rising Temperatures Make Superweeds Even Stronger?

Wildfire smoke is loaded with microbes

Chemicals in Plastic Waste Are Killing Us

President-Elect Biden Introduces Climate Team, EPA Nominee Promises To Combat ‘Environmental Justice’

Claim: Climate Change is Causing Skin Disease in Dolphins

Biden Introduces Climate Team, Calls Climate Change An ‘Existential Threat’  I don’t feel threatened. Do you feel threatened? (Maybe by the government….)

Wrong Again: 2020’s Failed Climate Doomsaying

Read it.

Ian Harris, a Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, wrote a book titled Surgery, The Ultimate Placebo. I haven’t read the book, but I watched his excellent YouTube video lecture on the subject. It is an eye-opening evaluation of commonly performed surgical operations that have been tested and shown to be no more effective (and arguably worse) than placebo, or that have never even been tested. He covers the history of sham surgery studies, talks about placebo effects, and explains why so many surgeons ignore the evidence and continue to do ineffective operations. In the process, he provides a valuable education in critical thinking.

Read it.

It’s hard to say the word “innovation” and not think of California. Technology has paced the state’s growth in everything from agriculture and oil to housing, entertainment, and aerospace. California has always been the harbinger of the American future, the promise of ever-greater economic and social progress.

Yet increasingly, many of today’s innovators are fleeing the state. This past week, one half of the company arguably most symbolic of tech development in the state—Hewlett Packard Enterprises—one part of the now broken-up old Hewlett Packard and focused on lucrative areas like cloud computing and IT infrastructure—decided to leave for Houston. Within a week Elon Musk, the latest in the line of truly transformative California tech entrepreneurs, also announced that he would move to Texas, along with Oracle, a Fortune 100 company and global leader in database management. Other recent departures also include more traditional firms as Charles Schwab, McKesson, Bechtel, Parsons Engineering, and CB Richard Ellis.

Read it.

For me, the single most interesting finding in Righteous Mind was his account of this particular test. Subjects were given a questionnaire to ascertain where they were located on the political spectrum. Then they were then given the same questionnaire and asked to answer as if somebody with the other point of view was filling it out. Conservatives were asked to answer as a liberal would and liberals as a conservative. Conservatives correctly mimicked the likely pattern of liberals but liberals had an absurdly wrong view of likely conservative answers, erring heavily on the side of bad motives and lack of compassion, empathy, etc.

If you get the impression that the left has a caricatured view of conservatives as hate-filled, bigoted, and uncaring you aren’t wrong. There is empirical evidence that they really do think that way. They almost have to.

I want one.

Greta Thunberg Slams New Zealand’s Unambitious Climate Emergency

Modern Iceland’s Climate Is Colder With More Ice Than Any Other Time In The Last 8000 Years Except The 1800s

Severian does some oversharing.

Fantasies of Competence: I want to say it was reader WOPR (please correct me if I’m wrong) who noted a while back that most 1990s entertainment would be impossible to “reboot” now, simply because so much of it presumes a baseline level of social and especially governmental competence. Take The X- Files, for instance. The “hot take” on the show back then was that it reflected our widespread social unease with an all-powerful government. The truth is out there!

Thirty years on, we can only dream of a government competent enough to cover up contact with extraterrestrials. As someone remarked at Z Man’s the other day, our government is now so retarded, Eric Swalwell — a high-ranking member of the House intelligence committee and putative presidential candidate — couldn’t successfully bone a hooker. Sorry, gang, the aliens won’t be stopping by; they only want to make contact with intelligent life.

I remember watching tons of secret-agent movies in which the CIA had all sorts of cutting-edge tech gear and rolling my eyes because I knew from six years of military service that government gear is always about twenty years behind what you can buy on the open market.

ZMan casts an eye backward.

Move backward through popular politics in America and you see one holy crusade after another driving the political debate. Today it is driven by Covidians. Before that it was driven by white liberals thinking Obama was Jesus. Before that it was driven by the war on terrorism. When the Baby Boomers had kids in school the crusade was to fix the schools so everyone could be educated. Go back further and we had a war on drugs and, of course, the great crusade against the evils of communism.

American history has been one crusade after another. The great battle between good whites and bad whites exists because it fills that need for a purpose. In the albescence of some external foe, the good whites keep their crusading skills sharp by going to war with the bad whites over some moral cause. This not only gives purpose to their lives, but it also reinforces those shared beliefs about who they are and why they exist. The reaction from the bad whites serves much the same purpose.

Steven Hayward at PowerLine.

I’m really thinking I should rename this series “Biden Agonistes,” because no sooner do the progressive identitarians take down Mary Nichols to be head of the EPA than Black Lives Matter comes along and oppose Mayor Pete to be Secretary of Transportation.

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“He was a little bit unusual because he kept many of his promises,” the cardinal continued. “He brought some of the troops home, he didn’t enter into any wars, the economy kept rolling along.”

You’re Paying for This! PBS’s Amanpour SLIMES U.S. as ‘AWOL’ on Climate Deal

Sea-Surface Temperatures: Hadley Centre v. NOAA

Read it.

The incoming First Lady has been noted for years for her penchant for wanting to be called “Dr. Biden” outside the professional context. She has an Ed.D., a doctorate of Education, from the University of Delaware, which she earned in 2007. As the Vice President’s wife (I refuse to use the term “Second Lady”), she went by “Dr. Biden” all the time, and the White House press releases used this as well. But her predecessor, Lynne Cheney, went by and was always referred to as “Mrs. Cheney,” although she earned a Ph.D. in English.

This difference was occasionally remarked upon over the years, but there was nothing like the uproar after the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Joseph Epstein in which he called on Mrs. Biden to drop the “Dr.” as she takes on the role of First Lady. In response, there were howls from academics, many of whom added “Dr.” before their Twitter names in solidarity.

The only people who insist on being called ‘Doctor’ are people who don’t deserve the respect they are trying to grab.

Read it.

Cue outrage from the woke. Hope they have an unlisted phone number.