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

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

Read it.

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