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.

ZMan looks at ch-ch-ch-changes.

Very bad people back in the cultural revolution of the 1960’s noticed that radicals were very good at the first phase of their project, but not the second. The radicals wanted to knock down the institutions of society and replace them with something better, but they never managed to pull off that last part. In fact, the thing they cooked up as the new and improved version of what they destroyed tended to create new problems, which required new solutions that created new problems and so on and so on.

An obvious example of this is family life. The nuclear family, with clear and natural roles for the sexes, worked pretty well. The radicals, on the other hand, could not understand why divorce laws and custody laws were as they were. They could not understand why those sex roles existed. They smashed them up and replaced them with family courts, liberal divorce and weird feminist ideas about sex roles. The result has been three generations of family and social dysfunction.

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’.

Read it.

There is good reason to believe that the 2020 election was a repudiation of far-left social and economic policy in the United States. This interpretation at the very least has been taken to heart by many Democrats who lost seats in the US House and who now fear—with good reason—greater losses during the midterm 2022 elections. Many blame the factions who represent the most far-left elements within the party. Moreover, when we look at the US’s center-right party—i.e., the GOP—we find it made gains nationwide when both federal and state level offices are considered.

What is less clear, however is whether or not the usual center-left elements of the American political scene have been repudiated at all. One would be very hard pressed to make the case that this election illustrated any widespread appetite among Americans to embrace an agenda of lower government spending, cuts to social welfare, or restrained monetary policy. Although the media likes to portray Trump as a right-wing troglodyte, the fact is that Trump in 2020 did not run on a platform of overturning to any significant extent any of the Left’s victories solidified during the Obama years, including new gay marriage provisions, Obamacare, or increased social spending. Indeed, Trump increased government spending to unprecedented levels, imposed new gun controls, and did little to rein in a CDC bent on destroying the economic well-being of countless American families.

Read it.

The Biden Cancer Initiative was founded in 2017 by the former vice president and his wife Jill Biden to “develop and drive implementation of solutions to accelerate progress in cancer prevention, detection, diagnosis, research and care and to reduce disparities in cancer outcomes,” according to its IRS mission statement. But it gave out no grants in its first two years, and spent millions on the salaries of former Washington DC aides it hired.

Environmental Groups Appeal Illinois Order Allowing Dakota Pipeline Expansion

Climate Sensitivity Estimates: Declining or Not?

Get an Intimate Look at How Tiny Nuclear Reactors Are Changing Energy

‘Past a point of no return’: Reducing greenhouse gas emissions to zero still won’t stop global warming, study says  (USA Today)

Building for a flooded future: Architects are designing for the new climate reality  (CNN) Still waiting for property prices to drop in Malibu and Palm Beach.

Modern Climate Change Science

MSNBC’s Tur Eager for Economy-Killing Climate Regulation

Friday Funny BONUS: Funniest Things Blamed on Climate Change?  Plus there are numerous Dilbert cartoons blaming unlikely outcomes on ‘climate change’.

Read it.

You’d think that would be obvious, but obviously not.

Theodore Dalrymple.

I would like to think that nothing human is alien to me (as the Roman playwright and former slave Terence put it), but it is not quite true. I draw the line, for example, at rap music, which always puts me in mind of experiments I witnessed during physiology classes fifty years ago, in which electrodes were placed in the amygdala of cats and stimulation of which caused a reaction of insensate and undirected rage (in the cat). To change the analogy slightly, rap music is the noise that hornets, if they could vociferate, would make when their nest was disturbed.

However, if some things human are alien to me, most are not, and talking to people who do jobs that one knows nothing of is a very good way of learning about the range of human nature.

Read it.

With the Left in control, who controls the Left?

Read it.

Antrim County, a traditionally Republican county that initially flipped blue this election flipped back to red after a manual recount of votes found thousands of votes meant for President Donald Trump accidentally went for Joe Biden. The county uses “Dominion Voting System,” which is also used in 64 counties across the state. Benson’s office said the skewed results were due to “county user error” and not the software itself.

Rolls-Royce plans 16 mini-nuclear plants for UK

Nuclear vs Solar The Race For Renewable Dominance

How Molten Salt Reactors Could Lead to the Next Energy Production Boom

AFR: Ignoring Climate Activist Campaigns is No Longer an Option for Australian Business

Claim: Climate change causes landfalling hurricanes to stay stronger for longer

How Biden Can Make Climate Progress With a Divided Congress  (Wired ‘Science’)

What President-elect Biden could do for the environment in his first 100 days  (Popular ‘Science’)

Read it.

A Pennsylvania judge sided with the Trump campaign Thursday, ruling that ballots that did not have proof of identity before November 9 would not be counted.

Under Pennsylvania state law, if a ballot is lacking proof of identification, voters have until six days after the election – November 9 – to fix it so that their ballot can be counted. Once the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that ballots could be accepted up to three days after election day, Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar issued guidance saying that a ballot lacking proof of identification could be fixed up to six days after the deadline to accept ballots, Fox News reported.

Severian continues his analysis.

The Sadists (see comments on the below post) have convinced themselves they’re living in a world where the KKK lurks around every corner. Whether they actually believe this is immaterial; they sure act like they do, and that’s what counts. The interesting thing, though, is that the proliferation of social media has made this a horror movie without a villain. Seriously, I ask you: Where are all these “white supremacists” to be found?

It’s not rhetorical. You know, and I know, and everyone with half a brain knows, that there are probably two or three honest-to-god White supremacist groups out there… that have about seventeen members each, nine of which are undercover Feds, and the other eight are informants. The funny thing is, every time they manage to find a real White guy killing an actual Black guy — the officers who arrested Floyd, Rittenhouse, the guys who dinged the original Jogger, George Zimmerman (“White Hispanics” count) — it soon becomes painfully apparent that the Jogger had it coming…

Severian continues his analysis.

People who look like us, and act like us, but are not us — that’s one of the most basic fears of any society with sufficient caloric surplus to take a day off.

Ideology, then, is a caste marker. In the absence of (unenforceable, even in the Middle Ages) sumputary laws, there has to be a different, reliable way to distinguish insiders from outsiders. Hence the Leftist mania for ID badges of all kinds (except when voting, of course), rituals, public performances of all kinds. How can you tell who really loves Dear Leader, without making everyone proclaim five (or ten, or fifty) hosannas a day to him?

Scott Adams complains that most of his Dilbert cartoons during the ‘mask era’ won’t make sense in the future so he can’t re-sell them in collection books.

Anne Coulter points out a few inconvenient truths

Here are the times Democrats have conceded a presidential election with grace and dignity:

OK, now on to my column.

I hope someone is recording the media’s demands that Trump supporters ACCEPT THE RESULTS OF THE ELECTION! inasmuch as the Democrats refuse to accept the results of any presidential election they lose, unless it’s a landslide, and sometimes even then.

Read it.

Oh, ya think?

Read it.

Tech entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale, who co-founded software company Palantir Technologies, told “Varney & Co.” on Wednesday that he moved his venture capital firm 8VC to Texas from California because of the state’s affordability and “dynamic economy.”

How ancient dust from the sea floor helps to explain climate history

Read it.

Liberals and Never Trump Conservatives must learn Donald Trump was a warning from the Working-Class.