Read it.

Daily Caller News Foundation reporters have been poring over the contents of Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop since former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani provided a copy of the computer’s hard drive on Wednesday.

Composer finds fertile ground for environmental change as a rancher

“Voting is Such a Blunt Instrument”: Britain’s Climate Assembly Report Gathers Momentum

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #429

Claim: Fracking will increase radon down wind

The Case Against More Ethanol: It’s Simply Bad for Environment

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One of the advantages of a Trump Presidency is that it flushes all of the RINOs out of the woodwork.

Read it.

No doubt Trump is to blame.

Read it.

We’ve seen the editorials by now: Certain columnists with National Review, Commentary, Dispatch, Bulwark, if you still think they have any morality, the Lincoln Project, Peggy Noonan, George Will, et al., telling you it’s not a binary choice. Vote Biden because he has…something that’s not Trump, which, seems like a binary choice. There’s the occasional “you don’t owe your vote to anyone” contrarian who is voting for someone who can’t win just to posture that he or she is an individual. Oh, that’s cute, you wrote in someone that’s getting as many Electoral Votes as I am, and I’m just as impressed with the person who doesn’t vote because they don’t really have a voice. If I vote for Mickey Mouse, is that a powerful statement or a waste of my responsibility? Why is it different if I write in Mitch Daniels who will probably get fewer votes?

The biggest failure of this election cycle are the people who are faced with a choice between the guy who accomplished what even Reagan wasn’t able to do and the guy who would be the second coming of Jimmy Carter, and would pick the latter merely because the former didn’t fit their idea of The Perfect President. These are the people who would rather lose with Romney than win with a middle-class guy from Queens.

Steve prepares for unwelcome guests.

oday I decided to take a small step toward preparing for post-election leftist terrorism. I looked into protective gear, and I ordered a red dot scope and a better laser for my rifles.

I have been through a number of elections, and I have been concerned about election outcomes before, but I can’t recall being concerned about the other side trying to harm me physically or take my home, my possessions, and my wealth. This is new, for the United States of America. I don’t think we’ve seen an atmosphere like this since Sherman marched through Georgia.

I’m not overreacting, either. Leftist terrorism started months ago, so no one can say I’m concerned about something that isn’t going to happen. It’s happening today. It happens every day. The only uncertainty concerns degree and duration. Will the terrorism decrease or increase? Will it go away quickly, or is it a permanent part of a new way of life?

…

Will terrorism decrease or increase after the election? I think it will ramp up until our cities and suburbs are Iraq-style “red zones,” at least where Democrats are in charge. Terrorists in such areas have no reason to quit, and they have ample incentive to continue. They get free stuff by looting. Many are paid by BLM, which is a multi-billion-dollar concern funded by insane Caucasians. The lowest people on earth, who would ordinarily be ignored, are now given bullhorns and the privilege of cursing at random citizens; they enjoy a certain type of local fame, so their already-swollen egos are pumped up. They don’t face prosecution. They don’t have to compensate their victims. What possible reason could they have for quitting? It’s not like they have productive careers they’re putting on hold.

Katerra is On a Roll With Catalyst Building Skyscraper made out of wood.

The Guardian: A Biden Victory would Push the World on Climate Change

US Vote to Shape How World Warms as Climate Pact Exit Looms

Read it.

n the search for the chemical origins of life, researchers have found a possible alternative path for the emergence of the characteristic DNA pattern: According to the experiments, the characteristic DNA base pairs can form by dry heating, without water or other solvents. The team led by Ivan Halasz from the Ru?er Boškovi? Institute and Ernest Meštrovi? from the pharmaceutical company Xellia presents its observations from DESY’s X-ray source PETRA III in the journal Chemical Communications.

“One of the most intriguing questions in the search for the origin of life is how the chemical selection occurred and how the first biomolecules formed,” says Tomislav Stolar from the Ru?er Boškovi? Institute in Zagreb, the first author on the paper. While living cells control the production of biomolecules with their sophisticated machinery, the first molecular and supramolecular building blocks of life were likely created by pure chemistry and without enzyme catalysis. For their study, the scientists investigated the formation of nucleobase pairs that act as molecular recognition units in the Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA).

Read it.

Oh, c’mon. Who hasn’t made that mistake?

Trump rolled back more than 125 environmental safeguards. Here’s how.  (Washington Post.)

9 Ways To Make Everything You Do in the Bathroom More Eco-Friendly, According to a Sustainability Expert  And we all want that – right?

“Where’s the sea ice?” Right where it’s been for most of the Holocene.

Religion of Green

Read it.

The 2016 presidential race permanently changed the jokes broadcast after the nightly news.

Late night comedians, fearing a Donald Trump victory, shifted their content aggressively to the Left. Jokes got massaged or simply nudged aside for talking points ripped out of a New York Times op-ed.

In short, they took sides in the Trump-Clinton steel cage match. The only thing missing? Blue pom poms. (Maybe they were just off camera…).

…

The need for nightly cyber-therapy will be all but gone for hardened liberals. Where does that leave late night comedy without its go-to bogeyman?

Read it.

Publication by the New York Post two weeks ago of emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop, relating to Vice President Joe Biden’s work in Ukraine, and subsequent articles from other outlets concerning the Biden family’s pursuit of business opportunities in China, provoked extraordinary efforts by a de facto union of media outlets, Silicon Valley giants and the intelligence community to suppress these stories.

One outcome is that the Biden campaign concluded, rationally, that there is no need for the front-running presidential candidate to address even the most basic and relevant questions raised by these materials. Rather than condemn Biden for ignoring these questions — the natural instinct of a healthy press when it comes to a presidential election — journalists have instead led the way in concocting excuses to justify his silence.

Read it.

Long but worth every minute.

The Intercept is the poster child for the maxim that every institution that isn’t explicitly right-wing eventually winds up left-wing.

Read it.

Not good news for the Democrat base Underclass.

ZMan discusses some inconvenient truth.

An old expression in the collectibles world is that anything that has value will eventually be faked or stolen. Art is faked so often that certain types of art have lost all value, because no one can tell the fakes from the genuine items. It’s not just crooks trying to beat the rules of the game. The people responsible for policing the fraud are often the people perpetrating the fraud. The truth is, anything that does not have objective value, but relies on insiders, will be subject to fraud and theft.

Read it.

Everything I’ve read suggests that people would prefer adopting DST year-round, which isn’t quite the same thing.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Read  it.

According to the legal news website, Project Veritas accused the Times of defaming it by describing it as ”deceptive.”

John Hinderaker at PowerLine.

In Minnesota, polls show a tight race between President Trump and Joe Biden. This has Democrats worried; in 2016, the last October poll showed Hillary Clinton with an 11-point lead, and she carried the state by a point and a half. That was remarkable, in view of the fact that in 2016, the Trump campaign allotted $50,000 to Minnesota, according to Mick Mulvaney. This year, the campaign is spending millions, most significantly on voter turnout efforts.

The most tangible evidence that Minnesota is in play is the fact that Joe Biden has added a stop in St. Paul to his schedule for Friday. He didn’t to that because his campaign is happy with their own polling here.

National Academy of Sciences Declares Global Warming Contributes Hot and Cold Severe Weather

Joe Biden Wants to Jail Oil Executives for Causing Climate Change  But not, of course, the ones who paid off his son Hunter in Ukraine.

New satellites can pinpoint methane leaks to help us beat climate change  Your tax dollars at work.

Read it.

On the evening of November 8, 2016, much of the country found itself transfixed by the vacillations of a tiny needle. It was the graphical representation of the New York Times’s presidential election forecast, which initially rated Hillary Clinton’s chances of victory at above 80 percent. Around 8 p.m. Eastern on election night, it began to lurch unsteadily toward her opponent. In the end, the needle correctly projected his victory a few hours before it was called. The needle’s jittery motions made it the object of collective outrage on the part of Clinton partisans, but it was fundamentally doing what it was designed to do: model the likelihood of outcomes based on available data.

Read it.

Sometimes called ‘The Australia Ballot’, we used this system in the Yale Political Union when I was an undergraduate, and it worked out very well.

Read it.

Did you enjoy World Pasta Day? It was last Sunday. Me, I made a big bowl of it and tucked in along with my mates Mark Arony and Al Dente.

“World Pasta Day” indeed. I have so many questions. Who invents this nonsense? How does one go about registering such a pivotal moment in human endeavour? Who approves it? Some bewigged official in Geneva? What does the stamp of approval look like?

Or can anyone claim a day for themselves? I dunno… World Leaf Blower Day, perhaps, or the International Day of the Shoelace.

I might also point out that I was born on Schicksalstag, the so-called Germanic “Day of Fate”. I was thinking that I might register it as a trademark and earn micropayments every time a TV channel runs footage of the Berlin Wall coming down. (That’s done it: all you need now is my mother’s maiden name and the name of my first pet, and you’re rolling.)

Severian continues his analysis.

That’s just the most glaring case of a general flaw: Leftism is, and always has been, an oppositional identity. “Rebelling” against “the Man” isn’t a bug, it’s a feature, and despite a half-century of practice, Liberals haven’t figured out how to handle the situation when they, themselves, are The Man. It doesn’t compute. Hence the strange spectacle of modern life, where Lefty controls everything but carries on like he’s a tiny, persecuted minority…

Exactly right. The fundamental characteristic of progressivism is that there is no endpoint. There is no time at which they can say ‘Okay, we’ve got enough Progress, we can stop now and enjoy it’, because Progress is not a state but a process, so they are obliged to Keep On Changing, no matter what the change might be. Nothing is ever good enough, no time is ever satisfactory, because there is always something More To Do. This is why ‘activist’ is the mark on their souls and the badge that they all carry.

Read it.

Graham Stewart visits Orkney and the Shetlands to find the islanders keen on independence — from Scotland.

If ‘white privilege’ is such a thing, why don’t we have any reports of ‘black’ people pretending to be white? Why is it always white people pretending to be black?

Read it.

An email Hunter Biden received in April 2015 from a Burisma executive discussing an introduction to then-Vice President Joe Biden, which lies at the heart of a New York Post investigation, is unquestionably authentic, a cybersecurity expert told the Daily Caller News Foundation on Thursday.

The DCNF obtained a full copy of Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop from former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani on Wednesday. The DCNF provided Robert Graham, the founder of the cybersecurity firm Errata Security, with a copy of the email and its metadata for forensic analysis.

Graham, who has been cited as a cybersecurity expert in The Washington Post, the Associated Press, Wired, Engadget and other news and technology outlets, told the DCNF that he used a cryptographic signature found in the email’s metadata to validate that Vadym Pozharsky, an advisor to Burisma’s board of directors, emailed Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015.

Deluged by floods, America’s ‘oldest city’ struggles to save landmarks from climate crisis

Mean and Unclean: Electric Cars Powered by Child Labor in Africa

ANZ Bank Demands Carbon Divestment as a Condition of Business Loans

Where’s the sea ice? 3 reasons the Arctic freeze is unseasonably late and why it matters

This election could decide the climate’s future (Popular ‘Science’)

The Laptev Sea hasn’t frozen

The Futility of “Renewable” Energy in Two Easy Charts

Pompeo Talks Climate Change in the Maldives

Read it.

Rare and valuable plants that naturally “mine” large quantities of nickel are thought to be hiding in Indonesia’s forests – but it is a race to discover them before they are wiped out.

This is from the BBC so there’s no guarantee it’s accurate.

Read it.

Well, that’s what happens when your city is run by Democrats.

Read it.

Call me arrogant, but I’d rather optimize my indoor environment than try to spend more time in the capricious outdoors. I think it’s defeatism to give up on improving our indoor spaces and resign ourselves to the fickle weather and seasons.

If I was going to create an ideal environment for a human, I think there are several things I would include that we routinely fail to include in our homes and offices.

I see some good ideas here.

One common piece of advice given by doctors to insomniacs is to only use your bed for sleeping and for sex, and it’s good advice. If you use your bed for reading, studying, and watching TV, then your mind will not form a strong association between the bed and sleep, and you will have a harder time falling asleep.

Many people make this mistake.

Read it.

By prioritising allocation of H-1B visas to highly paid workers, the administration hopes to stop businesses importing workers who are wiling to accept lower wages than American workers, and therefore raise wages for Americans.

Paul Mirengoff at PowerLine.

The Washington Post reports on “the racial undercurrents of city politics” that loom over the upcoming city council election in Washington, D.C. The city is no longer majority Black due to the influx of young Whites and, says the Post, this development threatens the hold of Black establishment politicians.

Read it. And watch the video.

Allie Stuckey makes the case for voting Democrat. Her ad is a parody, and a funny one, but what is scary is how accurately it represents today’s Democratic Party.

‘Sleeping giant’ Arctic methane deposits starting to release, scientists find

A beloved Jamaican beach is succumbing to climate change. It won’t be the last (The Guardian)

CNN Proposes Climate Friendly Battery Powered Military Vehicles

UN: Urgent Climate Action Required to PREVENT the Greening of the Sahara Desert

Aussie PM Defies Pressure to Set a Net Zero 2050 Climate Target

CBS Developing ‘Climate Change Drama’ ‘Antarctica’

Reusable grocery bags aren’t as environmentally friendly as you might think  A low bar….

Read it.

New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo has done it again. His continued hostility and contempt toward Second Amendment supporters and the lawful firearm industry means another storied New York-based company is taking steps out the door and heading to friendlier and sunnier skies. All this as the industry sees record sales of firearms and a growing diversity among gun owners.

In a move not surprising to industry watchers, Kimber Manufacturing, headquartered in Yonkers, N.Y., announced it will officially move its corporate headquarters to Troy, Ala., continuing its years-long shift away from Gov. Cuomo’s antigun atmosphere.

Gov. Cuomo is likely pleased with the news of these particular jobs leaving his state.

Read it.

In her essay “Stop Being Shocked” published October 14 on Tablet, Bari Weiss listed troubling anti-Semitic trends taking place in the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party. She brings up multiple true-life examples reinforcing her assertion. She then goes on to say that she, like the majority of American Jews, is “disgusted by Trump and Trumpism”; a movement which in her words “normalized bigotry and cruelty in ways that have crippled American society.”

In his book Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, published in 2009, Jonah Goldberg highlights penetrating methods and tools used by progressive Democrats to vilify their opponents. Nevertheless, today, Goldberg is a member of the #NeverTrumper community. He finds members of the American Left like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris less offensive than the intrepid, braggadocious, and proud American patriot Donald J. Trump.

I suppose mainstream media provide many Americans with necessary reasons to generate feelings of “disgust” toward Trump. “The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses,” wrote Vladimir Lenin 100 years ago. He continued: “He who now talks about the freedom of the press goes backward and halts our headlong course toward socialism.” Mainstream media omit Trump’s administration efforts to improve the lives of low and middle-income Americans with newly designed trade agreements; they don’t discuss policies that revived crippled economy. Nor do they highlight the tremendous success of the Trump administration in the Middle East.

ZMan looks at the changes.

An old Ronald Reagan joke from the 1980’s was that the closest thing to immortality was a government program. The first time he said it was in his 1964 speech, A Time for Choosing and it was not intended as a joke. By the 1980’s he had mellowed and the line was so obviously true it made a great punchline. In one of life’s great ironies, the conservative movement actually proved the maxim correct, by never cutting a single program in their time in control of government.

It is a good thing to keep in mind when thinking about the end game for the Covid-19 panic that is entering the ninth month, depending upon who is counting. The great and the good are telling us the prophesied second wave is upon us. Britain is back in lock down, even though all the evidence says it does not work. The Welsh are banned from buying clothes and snacks. The Scots saw their pubs closed. It’s all a big drama to prove that the prophesy was true.

Read it.

Before I became a parent, I didn’t have especially strong feelings about the time shifting by an hour twice a year. Like most people I was aware of the downsides — increased car accidents, schedule confusion, etc. — and I figured it would be better to knock it off. But I didn’t feel personally offended by having to mess with the handful of clocks in my life that don’t switch automatically. I’m not sure I even had an opinion as to whether, when we stopped changing, we should go with Standard Time or Daylight Savings.

With kids in the fall, it’s different. The days slowly get shorter, cutting deeper and deeper into the early-evening daylight hours where the young ones can play outside. And then, bam, the time change takes away another hour all at once, just because.

As if anybody spent time outdoors any more, with or without kids.

Read it.

Flippy also helps restaurants facilitate social distancing amidst the coronavirus pandemic, according to ZDNet. With Flippy in a kitchen, there is less crowding, a fact that Miso Robotics has repeated.

Thank you, minimum wage and pandemic panic lockdowns.

Arctic Sea Ice not freezing In October – first time since measurements began

CMIP6 Update

Map Shows Arctic Blast Sweeping Across The US   Gotta love that Global Warming.

Meet the Climate Scientists That Social Media Censors Don’t Want You to Know About

Michael Bloomberg Gives $20M to Down-Ballot Races Focused on Climate

Matt Taibbi weighs in on the latest fashionable fantasy.

How do you call something “Russian disinformation” when you don’t have evidence it is? Let’s count the ways.

We don’t know a whole lot about how the New York Post story about Hunter Biden got into print. There are some reasons to think the material is genuine (including its cache of graphic photos and some apparent limited confirmation from people on the email chains), but in terms of sourcing, anything is possible. This material could have been hacked by any number of actors, and shopped for millions (as Time has reported), and all sorts of insidious characters – including notorious Russian partisans like Andrei Derkach – could have been behind it.

None of these details are known, however, which hasn’t stopped media companies from saying otherwise. Most major outlets began denouncing the story as foreign propaganda right away and haven’t stopped. A quick list of the creative methods seen lately of saying, “We don’t know, but we know!”

Read it.

I love these fantasy maps.

Read it.

Former Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev apparently blamed “Dallas” for the fall of his country.

“Dallas” was a hit show on CBS that started in the late 1970s, and was one of the most successful television series ever made. Well, it turns out it might have been successful at a lot more things than just entertaining American audiences! It might have helped destroy communism!

Sometimes it is good to be the capitalist.