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.

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.

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

Read it.

Google made waves recently by announcing its new program, “Google Career Certificates,” a collection of courses designed to help participants get qualifications in high-paying, high-growth job fields without attending university.

The courses should take about six months to complete, and will cost a fraction of a traditional college education.

Glenn Greenwald.

The Trump era has engendered numerous fractures, one might say realignments, in the political order. Long-time ideological allies are now adversaries, and long-time political enemies are now in full-fledged coalitions. These shifts are not temporary or Trump-dependent but enduring, because they are grounded in shared core beliefs about the defining debates shaping our new politics and how to consolidate real power: call it the Lincoln Project Syndrome.

The Other McCain is fed up.

Nothing annoys me quite so much as people who presume me to be so ignorant of political philosophy that they must tutor me. Sometimes this happens in the comments (you know who you are) whenever I use the word “liberal” to mean, roughly, whatever Democrats believe this week.

I know how he feels.

Read it.

Keith Rabois, a former exec at Square and PayPal, has lived in the Bay Area for two decades.

Read it.

Researchers have found that note-taking associated with keyboarding involves taking notes verbatim in a way that does not involve processing information, and so have called this “non-generative” note-taking. By contrast, taking notes by hand involves cognitive engagement in summarising, paraphrasing, organising, concept and vocabulary mapping — in short, manipulating and transforming information that leads to deeper understanding.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

As postelection litigation rages in multiple battleground states, lawyers representing President Donald Trump include big and small names.

Several lawyers withdrew after reporting pressure from anti-Trump activists that included posting the lawyers’ names and contact information on social media. Twitter removed such information posted on its platform.

Of the lawyers who remain, some are litigating in court while others largely play a media role. Here are eight of them.

Report Claim: In retrospect, the burning of wood in district heating plants has resulted in climate saving  Sometimes the old ways are best.

Progressives Slam Biden For “Corporate Friendly” Admin After First Climate Appointment Is “Fossil Fuel Industry Ally” Welcome to The Swamp, kids.

We still Have a Chance? Norwegian Climate Doomsday Authors Issue a “Clarification”

Read it.

Initial claims that a military-grade crowd control sonic pulse weapon capable of causing severe bodily discomfort, including dizziness and nausea, was used by China’s PLA military on Indian soldiers along the Line of Actual Control, were recently made by a notable professor at a Beijing university.

It would mark the first known instance in history such a controversial weapon was deployed in battle.

Read it.

Brant Frost V, second vice chairman of Georgia’s Republican Party, joins the show to explain the state’s recount process and why he is suspicious of the recount in Fulton County, which includes the city of Atlanta. Frost also describes his own experience as a poll watcher and why Georgia appears to be turning a little more blue with each election.

Millions in Africa Being Sacrificed to Extreme Poverty, Premature Death on Altar of ‘Green Energy’  When the only tool you’ve got is a Prius, I guess everything looks like California.

‘Gas Chamber’: Environmental Activist Compares Pipeline To Auschwitz

Saving historical landmarks from climate change could mean altering them  We may have to destroy the village to save it.

Read it.

Members of two rural Oregon counties voted to push their lawmakers towards moving their communities to Idaho because they feel the neighboring state is more reflective of their political views.

This is measure is part of a larger movement to create Greater Idaho, a group mainly composed of citizens from Southern and Eastern Oregon, Northern California, and Idaho who wish to be better represented by their state, according to their webpage.

Read it.

Funny how nobody ever has to resign after an anti-Trump post, even though he’s the President and Biden isn’t.

Read it.

The first generation of Tea Party protests were, unlike media depictions, filled with happy warriors pushing the country towards more fiscal responsibility. It involved crowds of flag-waving Americans who cleaned up every bit of garbage they may have created in the process of protesting across the country. The next round of protests by conservatives will look nothing like the last; they will be angry, deeply angry, and you won’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out why.

Read it.

It seems that much of the media hivemind now insists that voter fraud never happens, that it’s equally impossible for an election to be stolen or tainted in any way, and that going a few weeks with two rival candidates both declaring victory (including one they really don’t like) means we are witnessing the end of America as a free country.

It’s amazing that this is the case after countless Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, insisted that Trump colluded with Russians to steal the 2016 election, a story that most major media outlets ran with for years without providing any hard evidence.

It’s also amusing to see so many in the media praising former Georgia state Rep. Stacey Abrams for her work to flip the Peach State into the Democrat column in 2020.

Abrams lost the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election to Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, in a race Kemp won by almost 55,000 votes.

Abrams insists that voter suppression is the only reason Republicans came out ahead and never conceded defeat. Yet she has received, literally, glowing profiles in The Washington Post and countless other media outlets.

Whatever the results of Trump’s legal challenges, the situation hardly portends a slip into dictatorship.

Read it.

“It is a felony to vote in Georgia if you are not a resident of Georgia with no intention of leaving and is punishable by up to 10 years in jail and a $100,000 fine,” Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Friday. He also vowed to prosecute those who do so and said it constitutes voter fraud.

“If you illegally participate in our elections, you might be spending a lot more time in Georgia than you planned,” Raffensperger added, according to local Georgia outlet

Yeah, but you gotta catch ’em first. Democrats have more experience committing vote fraud than Raffensperger has at catching it, I’m thinking.

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #431

Uncertain Certainty: Germany’s Potsdam Climate Institute Humiliated After One-Year El Nino Forecast Model Flops

Why Scientists Are So Worried About Antarctica’s Doomsday Glacier

Democracy Dies on Climate: PBS, NPR Stick to Chatting Up Obama Alums, No Time for GOP

The Conversation: How do we Protect Venice from Flooding and Sea Level Rise?

After COVID-19: The Next Crackdown, or at Least a ‘Reset’ (Spoiler: Climate Change)

Read it.

Even though the votes are still being counted, Joe Biden declared that he is the President-Elect, a shadow government office invented by Obama and invested with a pseudo-government seal, and he has been holding fake briefings and taking phone calls with foreign leaders.

The United States only has one president at a time. Maintaining a fake shadow presidency undermines the sitting administration to the American people and to foreign governments.

It’s illegal and inappropriate. So the Democrats are doing it anyway.

Read it.

President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign restructured their Pennsylvania lawsuit Sunday to narrowly tailor their arguments in a bid to prevent the state from certifying the election results.

Originally, the lawsuit sought to invalidate nearly 700,000 mail-in ballots because the campaign alleged they were counted without poll watchers present, according to the Associated Press (AP).

While the campaign is still arguing that those ballots were improperly processed, lawyers have restructured their lawsuit, arguing Republican voters were not given the chance to cure their ballots while Democratic voters were.

“We are still arguing that 682,479 ballots were counted illegally, in secret,” Trump 2020 communications director Tim Murtaugh said in a statement. “Our poll watchers were denied meaningful access to watch the vote counting and we still incorporate that claim in our complaint.”

Paragraph 4 of the amended filing still seeks to have those ballots from Allegheny and Philadelphia Counties invalidated for allegedly not allowing poll watchers to observe.

Joel Kotkin.

In the aftermath of Trump’s narrow defeat, the media will likely push “respectable” anti-Trump front groups, like the Democratic funded AstroTurf Lincoln Project and others who backed President-elect Joe Biden. But given Trump’s extraordinary support among Republicans, these onetime GOP media and political operatives have a stronger affinity with today’s Democrats who, increasingly, resemble the old Republicans, with lockstep support from the upper class, notably on Wall Street and Silicon Valley, as well as law and professional service firms.

Certainly, the “party of the people” is where the money is: Overall Democratic campaign spending has more than tripled since 2008, running this year about two times that for Republicans. The upcoming cataclysmic battle to win the Georgia Senate seats already started with a big Silicon Valley fundraiser. As the Democrats have gathered in the .01 percent, Trump won three-quarters of the white working-class vote, down slightly from 2016, but made significant gains with racial minorities.

Read it.

Wood stoves equipped with thermoelectric generators can produce electricity that is more sustainable, more reliable, and less costly than power from solar PV panels.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

According to Paul Murphy in his article “Medieval Rabbit Farming and Bannow Island” in Medieval Wexford: Essays in Memory of Billy Colfer, rabbits were brought to Britain by the Normans following their conquest, with rabbit farming becoming established in Ireland by the late twelfth century. Rabbit fur, being soft, durable, and warm, was a desirable material for lining clothing, and their meat was elite eating, as well.

The Paper that Blew it Up

Atmospheric rivers help create massive holes in Antarctic sea ice

UK to ban sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030: FT

The Government Corruption of Science

Paul Mirengoff at PowerLine.

Broadly speaking, there are three ways an administration that’s on its way out can treat an incoming administration. It can cooperate, it can largely decline to cooperate, or it can subvert.

In 2016, the Obama administration, of which Joe Biden was a part, chose to subvert Team Trump. Therefore, Team Biden should not be heard to complain if the Trump administration chooses the less malignant approach of not cooperating.

The Clinton people did the same to the incoming George W. Bush team, even going so far as to remove the ‘W’ keys from the computer keyboards.

Steve Sailer.

Since the 1990s, “stereotype threat” — the assertion that the reason politically privileged groups score worse on high stakes tests is because they perversely make themselves live down to pernicious stereotypes — has been far more popular than vindicated by evidence from low stakes tests. It’s easy to get papers upholding stereotype threat published, while the many failed replications tend to be tossed into the circular file.

Black people could ace the SATs but doing so would be ‘acting white’.