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.

ZMan looks at intelligence.

When trying to understand what has gone so terribly wrong with the Occident, observers often point to intelligence as the main driver. The populations of the West are getting dumber, so they are less capable than in the past. This is not to say there are no geniuses today or that there are fewer of them. It’s that their proportion of society is smaller than in the past. It is the smart fraction that is getting smaller. As a result, the progress of the West has slowed and may be in reverse.

High intelligence doesn’t mean that someone is a better thinker than another, but merely that he thinks faster than someone of low intelligence. Sometimes this speed differential is so great that what a low-intelligence person would have to puzzle through (and get right) appears (wrongly) to the high-intelligence person as Obvious – which is why high-intelligence people can be such dicks about stuff. ‘Why can’t you see this? It’s OBVIOUS!’ Well, no, you merely reached a wrong conclusion very rapidly.

So don’t attach too much value to a person’s intelligence. It can be a snare and a delusion (see Paul Krugman for a good example).

Now, one reason for this decline in intelligence, is the mass invasion from outside the Occident over the last fifty years. Minneapolis is now a dysfunctional city because of the importation of sub-Saharan Africans. The sorts of people who think Ilhan Omar is a great leader will struggle with modernity. The reason these people are trapped in the Neolithic age is they lack the cognitive ability to go much further. California looks like Mexico because it is now full of Mexicans.

To be fair, much of that is an additional problem of culture. People from Turd World countries are used to the kind of government that Turd World countries get. Mexicans expect America to work the way Mexico does, which is why we get narcoterrorist gangs in cities where there is a large Mexican population. Ilhan Omar is the sort of corrupt demagogic politician you would expect to see in Somalia, which is why she popped up in Minnesota.

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.

ZMan does a review.

An old bit of wisdom is that you should never try to con a con man. This advice is not aimed at con men, of course, but at honest people. Grifters are intuitively dishonest, which means they instinctively work every angle to some advantage. Normal people are simply unable to think like this, even when they are trying to do it. Their scruples get in the way of their scheming. This is something that Trump should have had in mind when he took office four years ago. It was his first mistake.

Trump came to Washington thinking he was smarter, more clever and more resilient than the people he had mocked for so long from his couch. There’s no question that most people in politics are stupid. Without a government grift, they would end up peddling replacement windows door-to-door. But politics in a liberal democracy does not select for smart people. It selects for clever and ruthless people. Washington is the major leagues for the most clever and ruthless.

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

Read it.

With so many votes cast for Trump in US election, some researchers conclude that they must work harder to communicate the importance of facts, science and truth.

Not the Babylon Bee. (I am not making this up.)

Read it.

When I read that the United Arab Emirate’s Minister of Tolerance had been accused of sexual assault, I could not help but smile. The account of the assault itself, if true, was not at all funny, quite the reverse, but what caused me to smile was the very idea of a government minister of tolerance, presumably with a whole ministry to himself, complete with deputy ministers, senior and junior bureaucrats, secretaries, office cleaners, etc. No satirist could have invented anything better.

Read it.

The first thing to notice about the young, ahh, lady arrested in Manhattan Wednesday for spitting in a cop’s face is that she was back on the street before they had time to test the cop for rabies.

Think of that as cause and effect.

The second, as Joe Biden inches slowly toward his magic number, is that a goodly number of 2016’s sore losers intend fully to become 2020’s sore winners, should it come to that, so nobody reasonably can expect peace and quiet. Preening self-righteousness is like crack; once you’re hooked, it’s hard to give it up.

Read it.

Not the Babylon Bee.

Several U.S. utilities back out of deal to build novel nuclear power plant

Sea level rise and Antarctica

Global Cooling will kill us all!

Biden Vows to Rejoin Paris Climate Agreement on His First Day in WH

Read it.

The smell of lemon is the smell of cleanliness.

Read it.

That would be entertaining.

Read it.

At a minimum, the lackluster performance of Democratic Senate candidates would hamstring a President Biden from Day One.

Politico, not exactly a Trump supporter.

Corrosion-resistant desalination device can handle super-salty water

Sustainable Bioenergy Production Unlocked by New Protein Nanobioreactor

A68 iceberg on collision path with South Georgia

Treat artificial light like other forms of pollution  Yeah, let’s all just sit around in the dark.

CLINTEL challenges McKinsey’s climate alarmism

The USA is Officially No Longer a Party to the Paris Agreement

Read it.

The train steamrolled right through the pair of stop blocks that are designed as a safety precaution to keep the front carriage from falling off the edge of a piece of track, according to The Associated Press. An investigation is underway to determine what caused the stop block failure, and a team of engineers is working to stabilize the train cars until a crew can safely remove the train from the tracks with a massive crane.

Severian lays them out.

Since the last few posts and their comments have been discussing the heretofore all-but-unthinkable, let’s move all of that up here. I’ll put my cards on the table. Trying to predict the exact course of events is a mug’s game, ditto the likely outcome of general trends… but the general trends are clear enough: Last night was America’s last even kinda sorta arguably “open” election (n.b. not “free,” let alone “fair”), and might be our last election, period.

No matter what happens, nobody, anywhere, will consider this election legitimate. Even if Trump wins — which is possible, perhaps even likely — all that will mean is that his lawyers were smart enough to catch the Democrats in obvious voter fraud, and the Democrats were dumb enough to get caught, this time.

These people are criminal sociopaths. I mean that quite literally. As any cop will tell you, some criminals are born, others are made, but there’s really no such thing as an ex-criminal. “Crime” is a way of life. Whether you’re a bank robber or a drug dealer or a tax cheat is epiphenomenal — that’s the type of law that it was most convenient for you to break, given your situation. But once you start bending the rules, it’s inevitable that you’ll break them… and once broken, keep on breaking them. There’s no way the people who tried to steal the election for Biden are going to straighten up and fly right, because they can’t. And again as any cop will tell you, crimes aren’t stopped by the vigilance of the security forces and the brilliance of detectives. It’s an equal combination of criminal stupidity and luck — sheer, dumb, stupid fucking luck. Maybe they won’t succeed in stealing this election, but they’ll steal one sooner than later.

Read it.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

Read it.

The pre-election edition of the New York Times Sunday Review was a peculiar 14-page beast featuring all 15 of the paper’s columnists weighing in on Trump (12 liberals, two slightly right-of-center voices, and David Brooks) under the rubric “What Have We Lost.” In the Times‘ case, news judgement and emotional maturity would top the list.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer group of people.

Read it.

Scott Adams is a big fan of ‘let’s try something in a limited way somewhere and see whether it works’, and this will be a test of whether that approach is useful.

I suspect that it will not end well, but we’ll see.

There is still the problem of coordinating drug policy between the state and Federal levels.

Deloitte: Australia to Lose Trillions Unless We Act on Climate Change

Recent USHCN Final v Raw Temperature differences

ZMan is not optimistic.

The truth of democracy is it makes everything political. Even the smallest act becomes a moral signifier, indicating which side you are on. This is because politics forces everyone to be a partisan. In order for democracy to work, everyone must participate, which means everyone picks a side. Partisanship turns everyone into the enemy of someone, often people they do not know. A country full of enemies is not a country, but a forest full of dry underbrush waiting for a match.

This is an election where one side will ultimately conclude that the system itself is no longer worth respecting or defending. The Biden camp is much closer to that point, maybe even resolved to it, but still pretending. The Trump side is not there yet, but inching closer. There is no result that can leave both sides satisfied that the system worked as intended. Like the period after the Great War, we are entering a crisis of legitimacy, which begins with the election results.