The Other McCain sums it up.

This is the only political principle you need to guide your election choices. Never vote for a Democrat, nor support any policy endorsed by Democrats. Insofar as it is possible, avoid residing in any community where Democrats are a majority, but if it happens that you find yourself living in a “blue state” (e.g., California) try to find a place to live in that state that is “red” (e.g., Kern County). Apply the same principle to your choices in terms of education and employment. Where should you go to college? Someplace where students care more about football than “social justice.” Where should you work? A private sector company that actually produces goods and services for profit, and not one of these gigantic “woke” conglomerates that embraces “progressive” values.

Democrats always ruin everything. Communities that were once peaceful and prosperous can rapidly be converted into dangerous hellholes, if the people start electing Democrats. Once upon a time — up until the 1960s — Detroit was one of America’s great cities. Then Democrats got in charge of the place and turned it into a desolation, where many acres of residential property were bulldozed into vacant lots. Every law-abiding resident who could afford to get out of Detroit fled the Democrat-controlled city, and a similar process can now be observed in many other places that Democrats have turned into hellholes.

The Joe Biden campaign is about doing to America what Democrats have done to Detroit (and Baltimore, and Chicago, and every other crime-plagued hellhole city in America). If you want the entire country to become violent and dangerous, populated by criminals, drug addicts and sex offenders, then by all means, you should elect Joe Biden president.

And that’s really all you need to know.

Read it.

Of course. Follow the money. If Trump wins, they’re all going to be looking for jobs anyway; and if he doesn’t, they’ll be crowding into Washington with their hands out.

Read it.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., wants the College Board to detail its partnership with a Chinese government backed group that has allowed Beijing to try to influence American students.

ZMan does some anthropology.

A similar sort of detective work can be used in this age to try and understand the beliefs of our ruling class. At first blush, the things they say and do run counter to the normal explanations for political behavior. Often, what they say runs counter to their own interests, suggesting some unknown motivation. Of course, many of the popular fads with the great and good are best described as superstitions. They have no justification other than a primitive fear of the unknown.

The Left is turning into a collection of secular Dispensationalists. They are waiting for the Tribulation and (I suppose) expecting Obama to arise and lead them into the Millenium.

Read it.

Very impressive woodwork.

Weekly Energy and Climate News Roundup #428

Joe Biden: Climate Change will “actually bake this planet”  Well, I should hope so.

Major Hedge Fund Manager Demands Big Funds Force Companies to Act on Climate Change

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: In 20-40 Years, Global Warming will Make Louisiana Uninhabitable  Have you ever been to Louisiana? It’s already uninhabitable.

Read it.

So U.S. maker of military equipment won’t be able to sell stuff to Communist China?

I’m good with that.

Read it.

A “real estate frenzy” has been noted in Connecticut, New Jersey, Westchester County and Long Island, as City residents seek to move to where there is more space and less danger of infection. These areas could become prime attractors of Manhattan employees who want to avoid the crowded offices, crowded transit, crowded elevators and generally overcrowded situations that naturally accompany super-high population and employment densities.

Read it.

It has been long known and increasingly suspect that American colleges and universities accept vast sums from foreign donors, and then, some argue, merrily do their governments’ bidding. Before you say, “There ought to be a law!,” the US Department of Education has reminded us that there is a law. Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965 explicitly requires American institutions of higher education to declare foreign gifts or contracts exceeding a total of $250,000 per year. In Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s words, “transparency in foreign funding of higher education is not just something I think is a good thing; it’s the law. For too long, enforcement of that law was lax, but not anymore.”

Investigating California’s Rising and Sinking Coast Still waiting for NYC to be under water.

The Plastic Myth and the Misunderstood Triangle

Polar bear research on hold in Western Hudson Bay due to COVID-19 restrictions

How come, as we approach the date of the election, the BLM-AntiFa marches and riots … which were supposedly Bad For Biden … have just – stopped? There used to be reports every day, especially in Portland, of riots Every Fargin Night. And then they just – stopped.

Hmmmm.

Victor Davis Hanson.

What instead counts most are the days after. The debate take-aways, the news clips, the post facto fact checks, and the soundbites to be used in ads over the next ten days all favor Trump. In this regard, Biden did poorly and will suffer continual bleeding in the swing states.

We will know that because by the weekend Biden will be out of his basement and trying to reboot his campaign and actually be forced to campaign.

Nobody Cares about Climate Change. (And Few Care about the Economy, Either.)

Climate Campaigners Horrified Global Shipping Will be Allowed to Grow

“Over My Dead Body”: Louisiana Senator Responds to Joe Biden’s Proposed Climate Shutdown of the US Fossil Fuel Industry

Victorious New Zealand PM Urged to Apply Covid-19 Lessons to the Climate Crisis

The world needs nuclear power and we shouldn’t be afraid of it

Russia’s Laptev Sea Should Have Started to Freeze by Now  (Wired ‘Science’) OHNOWE’REALLGONNADIE!!!

Read it.

The Japanese have been doing this sort of thing by hand for centuries.

Read it.

The choir of panic in the background singing, “Russian disinformation! Disinformation! Disinformation!” is trying to drown out what Rob Long should be developing as a new sitcom, “All in the Biden Family.”

Read it.

This generation’s Paula Jones.

Read it.

The University of Glasgow’s Historical Thesaurus of English is a unique resource charting the development of meaning in the huge and varied vocabulary of English. It consists of almost every recorded word in English from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day, all arranged into detailed hierarchies of meaning.

 

ZMan looks at recent history.

One obvious problem is the demand side. The media has always liked polling because it is cheap content. It allows them to discuss the results of an event, like a presidential election, for months before it actually happens. Polling stories are just a way to pretend the election already happened. Then as the polls change, and they always do, the media can talk about those changes. That also opens the door for so-called experts, who can provide “expert” commentary on the polls.

Of course, supply naturally follows demand, so Gallup was followed by other polling outfits supplying opinion surveys to the media. The explosion of media over the last thirty years has caused an explosion in demand for polling. One reason we have so much bad polling now is the same reason we have fake news. There is only so much good quality material, so the void is filled with low-quality material. Fake news has replaced real news and fake polling is crowding out good polling.

Read it.

In virtually every charity shop across the country, there are an increasing number of sad-looking plastic cases, with a variety of films both beloved and forgotten inside. Once, they would have sold for around £20 apiece, but now most retail for no more than a pound or two. Yet, for the adventurous, there are treasures to be had, at a time when the convenience of streaming services is threatening to kill off home video for good.

It is no exaggeration to say that my cinematic education was immeasurably helped by the rise of the DVD format. Before, I was a keen but undiscerning cinema goer; afterwards, I considered myself a film aficionado. Some would have said fanatic. I bought my first DVD player in 1999, when the format was still in its infancy, but already I had heard excited whispers that this was a proper game-changer for the industry. After years of only being able to watch films at home either on overpriced, poor-quality VHS video tapes or expensive, hard-to-find Laserdiscs, this was a true boon. Not only were the films presented in their proper aspect ratios, rather than the hacked pan-and-scan format on video, and in pristine audio and visual condition, but, most excitingly of all, they came with a cornucopia of extra features.

Paul Mirengoff at PowerLine.

Kimberley Strassel of the Wall Street Journal provides a summary of what Tony Bobulinski, backed up by documents, has to say about the business dealings of Joe and Hunter Biden. Bobulinski, a former Navy officer and past supporter of Democrats, was Hunter Biden’s business partner.

Strassel’s entire article is well worth reading. I want to focus on the portions of it that pertain directly to Joe Biden — aka “the big guy.”

It’s Official: Solar Is the Cheapest Electricity in History (Popular Mechanics)

Exploring The New Vernacular That Will Emerge as a Response to Climate Change

Wrong Again: 50 Years of Failed Eco-Pocalyptic Predictions

CNN’s Bill Weir Endorses: Election an ‘Obvious Choice’ for ‘Anyone That Cares About Land and Water’

Read it.

I’m astonished that anyone is actually willing to discuss this in public.

It’s from a site in the U.K., so that may have something to do with it.

John C Wright

Mmmmmmm… pizza….

Read it.

On Epstein’s island, perhaps?

Popular ‘Science’.

Our very own Arbeitdienst! Where is Baldur von Schirach when you really need him?

Read it.

From 1993, so there’s no guarantee that it’s still available.

The book is well worth reading, though. (Also check out Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky.)

Shit, just read anything by Vinge. You won’t regret it.

Read it.

Pay no attention to the nondescript woman waving at you from the sidebar. Whatever she wants, it can’t be good.

The excessive supply of PhDs is a result of the conjunction of a number of trends:

1. Everybody has a right to go to college.
2. You can get a doctorate in anything you want to study, no matter how vacuous.
3. Grading standards have sunk so low that all it takes is the willingness to kiss ass for seven years.

This faculty ‘pinch’ is a reminder to those who so desperately need it that markets work even when you don’t want them to.

Trump Gives Tiny Nuclear Reactors a Billion-Dollar Boost

MidAmerican Energy takes 46 wind turbines offline after blades fall in rural Iowa

Green Privilege, by Audacious Epigone

What cold lizards in Miami can tell us about climate change resilience

Read it.

And the hits just keep on  comin’.

Read it.

HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif., Sept. 25, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Newlight Technologies, Inc., a biotechnology company based in Southern California dedicated to making materials that improve the environment, has worked with the Carbon Trust, an independent organization with a mission to accelerate the move to a sustainable, low carbon economy, to calculate and certify the cradle-to-gate carbon footprint of Newlight’s AirCarbon product. The footprint analysis reveals that AirCarbon has a carbon negative cradle-to-gate product carbon footprint.

 

Read it.

And the hits just keep on comin’.

I’m getting the impression that Hunter Biden was a one-stop shop for bribing Democrats in the Obama administration.

Read it.

I bought a pulse oximeter when the Pandemic Panic first started trending on Twitter arrived in the news, since a decrease in blood oxygen level is a good indicator of possible coronavirus infection, and I check it every day with my weight and blood pressure. If they keep adding useful medical stuff to the Apple Watch, I may need to get one.

Read it.

During the speech, a group of protesters can be heard and seen making noise to overpower Schumer’s voice, many screaming at him and Senate Democrats for allowing Barrett to make it this far in the confirmation process. Air horns can be heard along with chants of “no KKK, no fascist USA”.

Woker-than-thou is the name of the game.

ZMan points out some inconvenient truth.

It makes for an interesting contrast to the modern day. The most popular movies in this age feature adults dressing up as children’s comic book heroes. They engage in the sorts of fantasy stories featured in comic books. These movies are not made for children, but for adults. The median age of the American comic book consumer is 34. The point of the movies is for the adults to escape anything resembling adulthood and engage in the sorts of flights of fancy normally associated with children.

…

Just look at the absurdity of the Covid panic. All over we see adult children cast in the role of political leader, playing a real-life action fantasy game where they are heroically fighting the Covid monster. Mario’s Cuomo’s oldest, currently staring as Governor, commissioned a book about himself fighting the Covid. It’s a wonder he did not have it titled My Struggle. Like so many other reckless idiots holding high office in this country, he lives in a fantasy land where he is always the hero.

Read it.

Time to panic?

Read it.

And the hits just keep on comin’….

Sea-Level Rise Takes Business Toll in North Carolina’s Outer Banks  (EcoWatch) Still waiting for NYC to be under water.

King tides, boosted by sea-level rise, are flooding communities along the East Coast (Washington Post) Still waiting for NYC to be under water.

Crisis looms in alarmist climate science  What, another one?

Measuring Climate Intentions, Not Results

It’s about time adults start rising up against climate change (Popular ‘Science’) Or climate change hysteria….

UN Climate Disaster Doubling Revisited

Steve Sailer.

Utra-wealthy, ultra-liberal San Francisco has strikingly bad public schools. I don’t mean “bad” in the usual sense of “infelicitous demographics” but in the sense of poor scores for most ethnic groups relative to their national norms. Now, its one good public high school, exam-using Lowell (the SF equivalent of NYC’s Stuyvesant and suburban DC’s Thomas Jefferson), is going to lottery admissions, perhaps permanently.

Paul Mirengoff at PowerLine.

In November 2011, an elite group of Chinese Communist Party members and cronies of the Chinese regime secured a meeting in the White House thanks to the efforts of Hunter Biden’s associates. The meeting is said to have been with Vice President Biden and other Obama administration officials.

Reports of the meeting come from Peter Schweizer and Seamus Bruner. Andy McCarthy summarizes their findings here.

Schweizer and Bruner were able to break this story thanks to the cooperation of Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Bevan Cooney, who is serving a federal prison sentence for a fraud scheme. Cooney gave them access to his email account, which contains years of correspondence with Hunter Biden and his former associates.

Read it.

Purists love to talk about what is and is not a science. Clearly, for example, physics is a science, because it allows us to offer theories, and test them against data. And we learn from the results.

By way of contrast, economics or sociology or psychology are not sciences. Of course not! Those soft squishy subjects have no real predictive power after all, right?

Not so fast. Sure, physics will tell you, with impressive accuracy, what happens when a billiard ball hits another one. But if you replace the target billiard ball with a kitten, physics is not so helpful. And if we replace the kitten with a person, then physics has nothing at all useful to tell us.

On the other hand, some of those squishier subjects, albeit with large error bars, do have some predictive powers when it comes to people. When we scare people in a pandemic, we know some of the likely outcomes. We know how people tend to react to scarcity and plenty, how they change as a result of marriage or divorce. We don’t learn these things from physics, but we can learn them from the study of mankind through these softer “sciences.”

Severian surveys the field.

The Z Man’s latest echoes what I’ve been saying around here for a while now: Whatever happens in the election’s wake, it won’t be a civil war. Not yet, anyway. The key word in “organized violence” is organized, and the organization just isn’t there.

Yeah yeah, I know, Soros etc. And his non-intersectional, genderfluid peeps can organize a riot like nobody’s business. But there’s a vast difference between organizing a riot and even something as low-level as an insurrection, to say nothing of an actual alternative government.

Read it.

Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook were widely condemned for putting up a warning and attempting to limit access to several New York Post articles written about the subject. Twitter claimed the articles violated policy regarding “hacked” material — even though there is no evidence that the material was hacked. At the time of this writing, the New York Post’s Twitter account remains locked.

Democrat politicians and pundits have also rushed to the Biden team’s defense, stating that the material is obvious Russian disinformation. Several federal sources with direct knowledge of the situation, however, have confirmed that the photos and texts printed by the New York Post are in fact genuine and corroborated. They have also confirmed the existence of federal investigations into a number of subjects related to the reports.

Additionally, the Director of National Intelligence has now revealed that there is no evidence or intelligence that Hunter Biden’s laptop or its contents are part of a Russian disinformation campaign. It should also be noted that neither Joe nor Hunter Biden have thus far issued an explicit denial of the reported contents of the laptop.

Scott Johnson at PowerLine creates a useful new word.

Lee Smith places the disgrace of Jeffrey Toobin into the context of the New Yorker’s political project in the Spectator USA column “Jeffrey Toobin’s stroke of misfortune” (“He is not the first journalist to get overexcited about ‘coup porn’”). Lee painted the big media picture out of which it emerged in the Tablet column “Don’t Believe Your Lying Eyes—or Joe Biden’s Big Mouth.”

Lee’s Spectator column made me think back to the New Yorker’s role in promoting the Steele Dossier back in 2018. I devoted five posts to what I called “Jane Mayer’s Dossiad” (all of them and more related items accessible at the link). Mayer is the star New Yorker staff writer who gave Christopher Steele the Tiger Beat treatment.

As Lee suggests, Jeffrey Toobin represents a larger phenomenon. I would describe the phenomenon as repetitive conduct performed disgracefully in public with a compulsive element. Let us give make it a verb and call it Toobin in his honor. Used in a sentence, for example, we may ask: Is the New Yorker Toobin again?

Freeberg lays it out.

Let’s discuss this with honesty: #MAGA stands for Make America Great Again. This is offensive to many.

They are not offended because they think America was already great, although many of them have said so. They are not offended because America has never been great; many have said that. These would be two irreconcilable factions, fighting with each other, if they meant what they had been saying. They never did. We never saw them fight with each other and there’s a resaon for that. These were dishonest cosmetic statements lacking any matching underlying sentiment.

It’s offensive because greatness is decision-based. If you’re some slacker living in your mom’s basement with no job, and you wake up this morning and say “This stops now” and you mean it, you’re already great. The resulting education, job, saving, marriage, house etc. are merely following through on the awakening, like the position of a boat following a new bearing. If the boat is following a bearing of greatness, the boat is great already. That’s how people are. That’s how communities are. That’s how societies are.