Read it.

FYI- Our Mandarin speaker confirmed the translation is accurate.

Claim: Climate Change Threatens Sharks

Guardian: Rein in Advertising to Save the World from Climate Change

Internal Multidecadal and Interdecadal Climate Oscillations: Absence of Evidence Is No Evidence of Absence

Scott Johnson at PowerLine.

Spectator USA has posted Patrick Basham’s column “Reasons why the 2020 presidential election is deeply puzzling.” Subhead: “If only cranks find the tabulations strange, put me down as a crank.” I’ve asked our friends at Spectator USA to make the column accessible, but at the moment it is behind their (semipermeable) paywall. Basham is not a crank. He is founding director of the Democracy Institute and was an adjunct scholar with Cato’s Center for Representative Government.

In his Spectator column Basham first spells out anomalies in the stated results of the 2020 presidential election. He observes, for example, “President Trump received more votes than any previous incumbent seeking reelection. He got 11 million more votes than in 2016, the third largest rise in support ever for an incumbent. By way of comparison, President Obama was comfortably reelected in 2012 with 3.5 million fewer votes than he received in 2008.”

The anomalies may be just that, but Basham then turns to nine peculiarities that “lack compelling explanations[.]”

Glenn Greenwald.

Whether or not one agrees with these two lawmakers on every issue, having members of Congress questioning and objecting to highly consequential foreign policies is inherently healthier than full-scale agreement or fear-driven acquiescence. Dissent strengthens all democracies. That is why I have relentlessly defended Congresswoman Omar, even in the face of less-than-ideally-phrased proclamations, from what I regard as bad faith accusations of bigotry and a lack of patriotism (just as I denounced moronic claims that Trump was a “traitor”): bad faith accusations of bigotry or treason are often designed to demonize attempts to question pieties and ostracize those who do it.

For that very reason, I was quite surprised to see that late Friday night, Congresswoman Omar, in response to something I wrote, defended not only former CIA Director John Brennan — who as Obama’s CIA Director presided over the bombing of numerous countries including Somalia — but also The Logan Act. The Logan Act is nothing more than an unconstitutional attempt to criminalize foreign policy dissidents, like her, and is so dangerous in the hands of the CIA, FBI and federal prosecutors precisely because it lacks any clear definition or meaning.

Despite this, Congresswoman Omar depicted that ancient statute not as what it is — an impossibly vague and overly broad attempt to criminalize the core Constitutional right to dissent — but instead as some kind of specific, precisely defined, and well-established precedent, the contours of which are clearly established and easily applied. None of that is true.

Books on the ‘Climate Emergency’ – Suggested Christmas Reading for Sceptics

Replacing A Coal Plant Takes An Infinite Number Of Wind Turbines

Ocean Temperature Update

The Guardian: Climate Activists Avoid or Regret Having Children  And I would encourage them to do so.

Read it.

In 1991, a children’s book called The Lovables in the Kingdom of Self-Esteem was published. Written by Diane Loomans and illustrated by Kim Howard, The Lovables imparts a simple, nurturing message: You, the tiny child reading this book or having this book read to you, are very special.

Read it.

The debate seems to pit two mutually exclusive sides against one another. In the red corner are the 70 employees of the company who have sent anonymous messages to their superiors begging that Peterson’s book not be released and denouncing him as a peddler of hateful bombast. And in the blue corner are Peterson and his publishers, who sold over three million copies of 12 Rules for Life worldwide. It would be politically expedient simply to throw in the towel and cancel publication of Beyond Order, but financially disastrous, not least because Penguin Random House know that another publishing house would pick up the book immediately and make a great deal of money out of it.

David Friedman.

Legally speaking, the victim of the crime is not the person who was beaten up, it is the state he lives in. If Mr. Smith assaults me and the case comes to trial, it will be not Friedman vs Smith but State of California vs Smith. Criminal prosecution is controlled by the state, so crimes the state does not want to prosecute don’t get prosecuted. If Mr. Smith happens to be a police officer, the state knows that prosecuting him, convicting him, and locking him up for a year will make it harder to hire police officers, as well as provoking conflict with the police union. So, most of the time, it doesn’t. A civil case is created and controlled by the actual victim, so in practice civil cases are usually the only way of punishing criminal acts by people the state approves of, such as its employees.

Doomsday climate study debunked by researchers

Read it.

A Venezuela judge convicted and immediately sentenced six U.S. oil executives who had been charged with corruption and have been detained for more than three years.

The judge sentenced each of the six executives to eight years imprisonment on Thursday evening, The Associated Press reported. The executives, who work for Houston-based and Venezuela state-owned oil company Citgo, had been lured to the South American country in November 2017 for a business meeting, but were jailed instead.

Read it.

Biden “pulled so many rabbits out of his hat” to potentially become the oldest elected president in American history, should Trump fail in his legal challenges to the election tallies of several key state.

Highly suspicious, to say the least. These are the sort of thing that UN poll watchers in Turd World countries usually use to conclude that a vote was rigged.

Study: Climate Change Increases the Risk of Global Pandemics

Read it.

“The media can talk all day long about Donald Trump and all day long about things that he’s doing wrong,” Brent Bozell, founder and president of the Media Research Center, said on a call Tuesday unveiling a poll the center commissioned, “Special Report: The Stealing of the Presidency, 2020.”

“It is absolutely unequivocal, the evidence that it was the national news movement that deliberately, and I underscore deliberately, made it a point not to tell the public about these stories that nobody can question,” Bozell said. “And now we’re showing the evidence that it cost Donald Trump the election.”

Read it.

Good luck with that.

(Um … They look African to me….)

German Think Tank: Climate Deniers are Holding Back Climate Action

Gutfeld Rips John Kerry: ‘Biden Made Him Climate Czar Because He Mistook Him For A Tree’

Strengthening the climate change scenario framework

Cultural motivations for wind and solar renewables deployment

Glenn Greenwald.

The most prolific activism demanding more Silicon Valley censorship is found in the nation’s largest news outlets: the media reporters of CNN, the “disinformation” unit of NBC News, and especially the tech reporters of The New York Times. That is where the most aggressive and sustained pro-internet-censorship campaigns are waged.

Paul Mirengoff at PowerLine.

Joe Biden has selected John Kerry — old foghorn himself — to be “climate czar”, as some accounts label the job, or “climate envoy”, as other accounts call it. I don’t think the climate will heed a czar. I’m not sure it will even accept an envoy.

John Kerry Would Return as Climate Czar in Biden Administration  Because of his vast experience with climate science?

The U.S. National Temperature Index, is it based on data? Or corrections?

Drilling the Arctic refuge doesn’t make sense—but Trump wants it to happen anyway (Popular ‘Science’)

WMO: “impact of the COVID-19 confinements [on CO2] cannot be distinguished from natural variability”

Read it.

Good to know he hasn’t anything more important to do.

Read it.

This is a really odd time to be having a “housing boom”. We are in the middle of the worst public health crisis in 100 years, endless civil unrest has been ravaging many of our largest cities, and we are experiencing the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s. But even though more than 70 million Americans have filed new claims for unemployment benefits this year, home sales are absolutely rocking. How in the world is this possible?

Preventing future forest infernos

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #430

Animals are finding surprising ways to adapt to rising temperatures

UN: Surge in Greenhouse Gases Sustained Despite COVID-19 Lockdowns

Columbia Faculty Calls To “Cancel” Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree

Ebenezer Scrooge, Environmentalist

The 10 countries most likely to survive the imminent threats of climate change

The Other McCain is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

What’s wrong with open borders? Or, to be more specific, what’s wrong with “conservatives” who don’t see what’s wrong with open borders?

For more than 20 years, I have been mystified by those on “our” side who seem oblivious to the consequences of our broken immigration policy which is, in fact, so broken that it’s not actually a coherent policy but a confusing accumulation of blunders that have been piling up since Ted Kennedy pushed the 1965 “reform” bill through the Senate.

I wish Ted Kennedy were still alive so that I could shoot him myself.

Read it.

Similar to the way a lithium-ion battery may catch fire and/or explode in an e-cigarette, cell phone, or laptop, the lithium-ion battery can do the same when it’s inside a vehicle, particularly if it’s exposed to extreme heat or is punctured or damaged in some way. Some of these types of fires have already occurred. In 2013, a Tesla Model S caught fire on a Seattle highway. A piece of metal fell off a tractor-trailer and punched a hole through the vehicle’s armor plating that protects the battery pack. There was a short-circuit, a thermal runaway, and finally, a fire. A Porsche Taycan also caught fire inside a garage in Florida in February 2020, and there have been other similar incidents.

Emergency responders are used to dealing with fires involving cars, trucks, and other highway vehicles, but those caused by lithium-ion batteries are different and pose new risks and variables.

A problem that has not gotten enough attention.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

ZMan counts it up.

An iron rule of the universe is that anything that has value will inevitably be forged or stolen, usually both. This is especially true of elections, because the election promises to bestow the most valuable thing of all to the ruling class. Elections give the ruling class legitimacy. As a result, every American election has had irregularities. Whether it is the Democrats calling out the dead vote or Democrats busing in illegal’s to vote in the suburbs, Democrats have been gaming elections since forever.

This most recent election may set a record for irregularities. It is hard to know if the claims being made by Trump are real. Trump’s track record on truth telling is not great, but even putting his claims aside, this election has more strange angles than any election in American history. Too many states have had ballots magically appear in the middle of the night or last minute rule changes that favor one side. When this happens in the third world, the West demands new election.

Read it.

Apparently that’s a thing. Of course, this is CNN so I’d want to check for corroboration.

Read it.

I recently heard of a statement made by Neil deGrasse Tyson that I thought must have been a misquote. I looked into it and, sure enough, that wise man who’s quoted on tee shirts and coffee mugs said, “The good thing about science is that it’s true, whether or not you believe in it.”

Whoa. The list of superseded scientific pronouncements is a long one, but I seem to recall a couple of real bloopers from his own field of expertise. It was once thought – as late as the early 20th century – that our own galaxy was the extent of the universe. Lo and behold, it is now accepted that there may be 100 billion galaxies comprising the universe – and counting. Now that’s a major whiff.

Not to mention the fact that luminaries such as Einstein, Shapley, Hoyle, and Gold believed that the universe was static, that is until Hubble peered through the Mt. Wilson telescope and verified the findings of that crazy Catholic priest George Lemaitre who had been trying to tell them the universe was expanding, and had been since the explosion of the primal atom (I won’t say creation).

Stay tuned for more alterations in “settled science.” It’s the nature of things.

‘Science’ means knowledge, and the problem with most ‘science’ is that it isn’t knowledge so much as it is merely opinion — educated opinion, granted, and perhaps highly reliable opinion, but opinion nevertheless. Witness how much ‘science’ needs to be revised and corrected every twenty years or so.

Some Amazon rainforest regions more resistant to climate change than previously thought

Amanpour Cues Guest to Blame Rupert Murdoch for ‘Monstrous’ Climate ‘Denial’

Tony Abbott Warns Britain Not to Mess Up Post Brexit Trade Deals with Climate Activism

Steven Hayward at PowerLine.

The left is all about class warfare, but you’d be mistaken if you think the class they want to make war on is the upper class. Quite the contrary: the left is the upper class now, and their longtime critique of “neoliberalism” as a mechanism to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich is ironically accurate, as that is exactly what the left intends to do.

Two pieces of evidence to consider. First, note this piece from the Brookings Institution (the lead author Mark Muro is an acquaintance from my Washington days), about how the small minority of counties Joe Biden won represent 70 percent of the nation’s economic output, while the majority of counties Trump won only account for 30 percent of our economic output.

Read it.

High family income, not SAT scores, is your real ticket to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

Well, that or being black (or ‘Black’) … preferably both, as with the Obamas. Having famous parents helps a lot, too, although famous parents are probably going to be rich anyway.

The picture is of Sterling Memorial Library at Yale, of which I have fond memories.

“Sinking” Maldives Clear Forests, Pave Beaches, To Construct Four New Airports For Future Tourism!

Climate Change Is Intensifying the Tsunami Threat in Alaska (Wired ‘Science’)

Victoria follows South Australia and imposes electric car road tax Because roads are paid for by gas taxes and electric cars don’t use enough gas to maintain the roads. So ‘sustainability’ isn’t all that sustainable.

Read it.

Law firm Kirkland & Ellis has requested withdrawal from representing Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar in a lawsuit brought forward by the Trump campaign, with Kramer Levin attorney Barry Berke stepping in as a substitute.

Read it.

On Friday, Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi explored the increasing snark in White House “pool reports,” which are supposed to be dry, fairly objective descriptions of presidential movements, but with today’s Trump-hating press corps, no one could possibly be restrained. The headline in the paper was “Waters are getting a bit nippy in White House pool.”

Farhi didn’t quite note that part of the problem is bomb-throwing leftist websites are being granted this supposedly dry task. Expecting objective reporting out of HuffPost is like expecting filet mignon at 7-Eleven.

New footage reveals Netflix faked walrus climate deaths

Climate change and ‘atmospheric thirst’ to increase fire danger and drought in NV and CA

Read it.

Think about the times you’ve been told to “trust the science.” Two occasions should come to mind immediately: when discussing climate change and when talking about the Wuhan coronavirus.

There’s a lot of science being done on the subject of climate change. There’s a lot of science being done on the subject of the coronavirus. Let’s assume, for the sake of discussion, that the vast bulk of this is “good” science — that it’s being conducted by competent people acting in accordance with the techniques and standards of science. That’s almost certainly a safe assumption.

You still shouldn’t “trust the science.”

That’s because when we’re talking about public policy — and that’s what we’re always talking about when people tell you to “trust the science” — we’re talking about a lot more than just science.

Take climate change policy. Science can make predictions about temperatures and sea levels 80 years from now (though how well it does that is open to debate), but science doesn’t make predictions about economics 80 years from now, or about national boundaries, or populations, or the pace of technological change, or human rights, or any of the myriad other things that have to be considered when creating public policy.

So when the politician tells you to “trust the science” about climate change, he’s also telling you to trust all the other “experts” who think they can predict the future 80 years from now, all the economists and sociologists and population experts and futurists, and to believe that they all know better than you how you should live your life.

Read it. And listen to the podcast.

Watching the election shenanigans roll on, it seems that the ruling class may have created an expensive problem while trying to solve the Trump problem. The wholesale election fraud has created a very expensive problem for them. They cannot sit back and let Trump’s lawyers find examples of fraud or use those examples to overturn one of the disputed states, as that creates a big problem for them. Joe Biden becomes the Pretender Biden for most of the country.

On the other hand, the only way to prevent any of this is to double down on the shenanigans in all of these states. That means threatening judges, lawyers and election officials. It means more midnight capers to alter the rules and results. In other words, the way to prevent Trump from establishing his claims is to prove another set of claims. They will convince a large number of people that the whole system is rigged and controlled by thugs and crooks.

Read it.

In many ways, slow-growing suburbs encased in regulatory amber function the way greenbelts or urban growth boundaries are supposed to.

James Somers.

I wish my high school biology teacher had asked the class how an embryo could possibly differentiate—and then paused to let us really think about it. The whole subject is in the answer to that question. A chemical gradient in the embryonic fluid is enough of a signal to slightly alter the gene expression program of some cells, not others; now the embryo knows “up” from “down”; cells at one end begin producing different proteins than cells at the other, and these, in turn, release more refined chemical signals; …; soon, you have brain cells and foot cells.

An amazing voyage. Read the whole thing.

“Take action” or face a grim future, warns climate scientist after a year locked in Arctic ice

An Enormous Iceberg Is Headed for South Georgia Island—Again (Wired ‘Science’) What happened to the last one?

Researchers found signs of human pollution in animals living six miles beneath the sea (Popular ‘Science’)

Stossel Column: The Climate Hustle