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.

Read it.

Members of President-elect Joe Biden’s team are reportedly worried that his inauguration could end up looking like a massive MAGA rally.

Wouldn’t that be amusing? We’ve already seen that Trump can turn out massive crowds of people and Biden can’t. What would happen if massive numbers of people wearing MAGA hats attended the inauguration and started chanting ‘CHEATER! CHEATER! CHEATER!’ during the inaugural address, perhaps even drowning it out?

John C. Wright is unfazed.

Let not your hearts be troubled. Let us review what has been discovered the last few days of the election debacle, which shall be known to history as the Great American Gaslighting.

Trump did win in a landslide.

They are gaslighting you. You saw the size of the Trump rallies in the sunbelt and rustbelt states. You saw Biden could not fill up a school gymnasium.

As for voting irregularities, fraud, and miscounts, there is abundant evidence, shockingly so, almost as if the malefactors are rubbing our noses in it when they claiming there is no evidence.

This is gaslighting you again.

You’re welcome.

Read it.

I have always suspected it.

John Hinderaker at PowerLine.

Yesterday the Trump campaign and two Pennsylvania residents sued Pennsylvania’s scofflaw Secretary of the Commonwealth and seven county election boards in federal court. The lawsuit is premised primarily on equal protection; it alleges that some Pennsylvania counties, which were uniformly favorable to Joe Biden, systematically violated Pennsylvania’s election laws, at times with the encouragement of the Secretary of the Commonwealth, while Republican-leaning counties followed the law. The result was systemic voter fraud that diluted the votes of Pennsylvanians in the law-abiding counties, and also the votes of those who voted in person rather than by mail.

I guess they’ve got nothing to hide … oh, wait….

Read it.

On Tuesday evening, the Washington Post wrote that USPS whistleblower Richard Hopkins ‘admitted to fabricating’ allegations of voter fraud, when he claimed in a Project Veritas video that he overheard a postmaster in Erie, Pennsylvania instructing postal workers to collect and backdate ballots received after election day.

Citing “people who spoke on the condition of anonymity,” the Post now says that Hopkins – a Marine combat veteran – “signed an affidavit recanting his claims.”

Hopkins, however, says he did not recant.

Takes a lotta lies to build the New Narrative.

Read it.

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee revealed that there were up to 25,000 cases that are being looked at as Pennsylvania remains a state President Trump’s team hopes to turn its way after major media outlets called it for his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, giving him enough electoral votes to secure the presidency.

“I’ve got more information. We’re now finding potentially that 25,000 nursing home residents in different nursing homes requested mail-in ballots at the exact same time,” the South Carolina Republican said on Fox News.

“You can’t ballot harvest in Pennsylvania,” Graham added. “What are the odds that 25,000 people in different locations of the same age group requested at the same time a ballot? Somebody is up to no good in these nursing homes.”

Climate ‘Experts’ Demand Tax-On-Meat To Fight Global Warming  How about a tax on meat-heads?

Read it.

I guess it was too vile even for Twitter.

Oren Cass.

The wags are having their fun with an election result that’s hinged upon whether Joe Biden garnered sufficient support from white voters to negate an apparent surge toward Donald Trump among minority groups. The president owes much of his margin in Florida to strong gains in Miami’s Cuban-American community, while in Texas he won largely-Hispanic Zapata County along the Mexican border, which Hillary Clinton won by more than 30 points four years ago. Not everyone is amused.

…

Turn the binoculars around, and it is easy to see a realignment of working-class voters, regardless of race, toward the party that expresses an interest in their economic concerns. The Democratic Party has become the party of college-educated professionals, focused on forgiving student debt and a “transition” from uncouth industries, ensuring the unfettered flow of unskilled immigrant workers, and framing education policy around the interests of teachers rather than students. Yes, they will raise taxes, but they will fight tooth-and-nail for the “SALT” deduction that gives a discount to owners of expensive homes in high-tax states. They will expand government programs, but their idea of “pro-family” policy is free childcare so both parents can work full-time. What they’d really like to talk to you about, if you have a minute, is climate change and racial justice.

Read it.

What if they reopened the office and nobody came? This scenario is not as far-fetched as many believe. The office may not be dead, but its post-COVID future, particularly in big cities, may look more like a medieval-style arrangement than the buzzing, super dense science fiction vision from The Jetsons.

• Arizona — 11 Electoral Votes at stake. As of the time of this writing, less than 20,000 separate the candidates. Plus, allegations of widespread voter fraud.
• Georgia — 16 votes. Close enough to trigger an automatic recount.
• Michigan — 16 votes. Biden allegedly ahead by 150,000  votes, of which 130,000 appeared suddenly in the wee hours. Also, voter machine irregularities alleged.
• Nevada — 6 votes. There are massive numbers of out of state voters voting illegally here, and many more ballots opened without two observers, which renders them invalid.
• North Carolina — 15 votes. As of the time of this writing, with 99% of countries reporting, it is mathematically impossible for Trump to lose.
• Pennsylvania — 20 votes. One of the five ongoing legal challenges in this state is whether the State Supreme Court’s overstepping their authority to rewrite the ballot laws at the last minute is constitutional. This is an open and shut case, and only blatant corruption on the part of the US Supreme Court will not find for Trump. Numberwise, removing the illegal ballots, Biden loses Pennsylvania.
• Wisconsin — 10 votes. Biden is apparently ahead by 20,000 votes. However, more ballots were counted in this state than the number of registered voters. Also, Wisconsin election clerks illegally modified thousands of ballots, which renders them invalid. Also, this is the state where, after calling an end to vote counting for the evening, some tens of thousands of ballots, 100% in favor of Biden, were somehow found at 4.00 AM.

Read it.

Amid litigation and recounts in the presidential election, significant attention is focused on a Denver-based company with strong political ties.

Dominion Voting Systems, a voting machine manufacturer founded in Canada, made equipment that is used in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.

All those states have seen razor-thin margins in returns from the presidential election, which is officially undecided.

The company controls more than one-third of the voting machine market in the United States, according to multiple news reports.

Read it.

The Associated Press exit poll showed that 48% of Georgia Jews voted for President Trump and 49% for Joe Biden: a near split. While Trump’s strong record on Israel and fighting antisemitism abroad and at home no doubt helped, it’s hard to dismiss the Warnock factor.

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #430

Climate Change May Have Driven Ancient Human Species to Extinction  May have!

The Guardian: Joe Biden’s $1.7 Trillion Investment Could Reduce Global Warming by 0.1C

Put More Money into Renewable Energy or We’ll Report You to Joe Biden?  Will he even remember?

Read it.

Who didn’t see that coming?

Severian is really on a roll today. Good stuff.

Continuing from below, it seems one of ideology’s most important functions is making the private public. Conservatism has often been defined as “the negation of ideology,” and when you think about ideology as the forced publication of private behavior, this makes a lot more sense. Everyone from Pickup Artists to Aristotle knows that people try hard to avoid hypocrisy. The “Game” concepts of “commitment and consistency” and “social proof” are just the old Aristotelian notions that one becomes virtuous by practicing virtue. You want to actually be what you say you are (“commitment and consistency”), and since everyone else is doing it, too (“social proof”), pretty soon the practice, whatever it is, becomes common currency.

…

Ideology flips all that, and it’s a striking fact of intellectual history that you can pinpoint the exact date of the first true ideology, almost down to the day: 1536, with the publication of The Institutes of the Christian Religion. You can check out Michael Walzer’s excellent study The Revolution of the Saints if you want the details (and know a LOT about the period already), but the basic point is simple: Unlike all previous theologies or political “philosophies” (which didn’t really exist before then), Calvinism attempts to remake society, ALL of it, through politics.

…

The Puritans, as English Calvinists were called, wrote difficult prose, but in translation it sounds shockingly modern. The Puritans were the SJWs of their day, obsessed with their own pwecious widdle selves. They didn’t get around to making up xzheyr own pronouns, but they did give themselves self-righteous new names — when Ben Johnson called his caricature Puritan Zeal-of-the-Land Busy he got big laughs, but he wasn’t really joking, they really did stuff like that. To be a Puritan requires two things: An obsessive focus on the tiniest micro-movements of your own soul….

….and an equally obsessive focus on forcing other people to disclose the tiniest micro-movements of their souls. There’s nothing anyone could ever do, so trivial that a Puritan could in good conscience overlook it. Calvin’s Geneva was the closest thing to a police state 16th century technology allowed, and when their turn came, Oliver Cromwell and the boys gave importing it to England the old college try. And, of course, Plymouth Bay Colony started as a Puritan police state…

The Other McCain is on the case.

Benford’s Law is a principle of statistics relating to the frequency with which various digits occur in random samples. It has been used in accounting as a means of detecting fraudulent bookkeeping, because people will enter fake numbers in a non-random pattern. Benford’s Law has also been used to detect vote fraud, where false tallies in precincts will follow the same principle. An article at the site GNews alleges that Benford’s Law proves cheating occurred in urban areas that went heavily for Biden. Is this true? I don’t know.

There are several reasons to suspect shenanigans in this election, but you’re supposedly a fringe kook for noticing anomalies, and social media sites are reportedly censoring mention of Benford’s Law.

Washington Post: “A Biden victory positions America for a 180-degree turn on climate change”

The future of nuclear: power stations could make hydrogen, heat homes and decarbonise industry

The Other McCain.

. . . Jonah Goldberg, for example.

Most days now, I don’t even realize he exists, unless Ace goes off on him, and then I’m like, “Oh, he’s still around?”

One of the things we have gained from the Trump era is the knowledge that some people were never really on our side. They were conservatism’s fair-weather friends, and when the going got tough, they jumped over to the other side. Because “principles”! Well, damn you, sir, and damn your “principles,” whatever they may be. We don’t really care.

Wally is my hero.

Rivers melt Arctic ice, warming air and ocean

Florida County Passes ‘Rights of Nature’ Charter Amendment You can’t make this stuff up.

MIT Technology Review Discusses Bypassing the US Senate on Climate Policy

John Hinderaker at PowerLine.

Reports of voter fraud, and of barring Republicans from polling places so as to enable voter fraud, continue to pile up. In Detroit, Republican poll watchers were prevented from carrying out their duties, presumably so they would not be able to observe and document the fraud that was taking place.

I believe that the library director’s name is Karen.

Steve Sailer.

The New York Times Opinion section explains that vote fraud is practically impossible because it would require a large number of people working together to win elections with machine-like coordination: a “political machine” if you can imagine such a thing.

But, of course, political machines don’t exist.

IDMC: International Climate Refugees are a Myth

Perhaps the dumbest article title ever: “The Arctic hasn’t been this warm for 3 million years”… AEUHHH???

Comparing USCRN and nClimDiv to USCHN