Read it. (CNN)

Proglodytes have this perennial fantasy that they’re on the verge of turning Texas into a Blue state.

Dream on, fellas.

Read it.

I guess it’s the season to hate on the rich, even rich Democrats.

Iconic Food Web Threatened by Climate Change

Michael Mann: Whether or not Trump gets re-elected … could determine the fate of our planet

What Will Northwest Weather and Climate Be Like in 2050?

Climate experts fly more often than other scientists  Just trying to help bring on the Apocalypse, I guess.

CNN: Climate Change is Driving Fatal Shark Attacks  Global Warming – Is there anything it can’t do?

Read it.

In 1973, Graham Greene wrote an introduction to a bookselling friend’s memoir. As Greene was one of the most respected writers of his day, this was no small gesture, but the author was also a committed bibliophile. The book dealer and biographer John Baxter’s memoir A Pound of Paper contains treasurable glimpses of Greene deliberately signing obscure copies of his works in far-off locations, in the certain knowledge that these items would become hugely sought-after rarities, and he remains one of the few serious literary figures who also understood the glamour and romance of the bookselling trade. In his introduction, he openly acknowledged this, writing ‘Secondhand booksellers are the most friendly and most eccentric of all the characters I have known. If I had not been a writer, theirs would have been the profession I would most happily have chosen.’

The author is using ‘demise’ in its slovenly modern usage as a synonym for ‘death’. It actually means ‘convey by death’, as in ‘demise of the crown’. I hate sloppy writers. Hate ’em hate ’em hate ’em.

But the article itself is interesting, though written by a nitwit.

John C. Wright.

Is it time to reconsider the 19th Amendment?

The argument for female suffrage is that women are not more prone to bouts of emotionalism than men, and hence is it equally worthwhile, as the whole, to consult with them over the conduct and control of public business.

Unfortunately, it is evident that there are but rare and few men in the current generation show any particular manly or masculine virtues which would entitle them to a say in the public business, if stoicism, reason, and virtue were preconditions for the franchise.

Read it.

The San Francisco Police Department arrested Adora Anderson, 35, Sunday and charged him with mayhem and a hate crime enhancement, according to the statement.

I actually thought that was impossible.

Steve has voted.

I voted at a public library. A northerner was standing out front with a Biden sign, yelling, “Thank you for voting.” I don’t know if he lives here or what. His accent and his sign made him stand out like a bar of soap at an Antifa rally.

We had one of those, too.

We hear a lot about Trump signs being stolen, but nothing about anyone stealing Biden signs.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds (Instapundit).

SO USA TODAY DIDN’T WANT TO RUN MY HUNTER BIDEN COLUMN THIS WEEK. My regular editor is on vacation, and I guess everyone else was afraid to touch it. So I’m sending them another column next week, and just publishing this one here. Enjoy! This is as filed, with no editing from USAT.

Paul Graham.

One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work is the fear of making something lame. And this fear is not an irrational one. Many great projects go through a stage early on where they don’t seem very impressive, even to their creators. You have to push through this stage to reach the great work that lies beyond. But many people don’t. Most people don’t even reach the stage of making something they’re embarrassed by, let alone continue past it. They’re too frightened even to start.

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The Other McCain is on the case.

Here’s some cold facts for you: Most black people live in communities (of which Atlanta is certainly one) where Democrats control local government. So the Democrat officials in charge of their local precincts are the ones responsible for the long voting lines. This is not a right-wing conspiracy, it’s just Democrat incompetence in operation.

Newsweek.

Which isn’t going to happen. What Democrats really want is to lock in their votes before the Hunter Biden debacle gets any traction.

CNN.

With Joe Biden holding his lead over President Trump in most battleground state polls, CNN’s John King breaks down the latest Electoral College projections and compares it to the 2016 election.

Human-driven climate change is changing the colors of fall foliage, scientists say (Washington Post)

Weekly Climate and Energy News Round Up #427

The Real Toll of Oregon Forest Losses.

Read it.

White House chief of staff Mark Meadows suggested Monday potential lawsuits against Twitter and Facebook were pending over the Internet media outlets’ blocking of distribution of a New York Post story claiming the son of Democratic nominee for president Joe Biden introduced a Ukrainian petroleum executive to his father.

In more a than 10-minute appearance on the Fox News’ “Fox & Friends,” Meadows claimed the two platforms used dubious and specious justifications for prohibiting the story last week being linked on users’ personal accounts, with Facebook saying the information needed to be fact-checked and Twitter saying it violated its policy on distributing “hacked” material.

Read it.

Dozens of protesters in New York City filled a casket outside a Brooklyn nursing home with 6,500 copies of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s new book cover to commemorate the 6,500 who have died in nursing homes from COVID-19 over the last nine months.

Unless they stole the covers, which I doubt, they actually bought 6,500 copies of his book — so Cuomo is smiling all the way to the bank.

Read it.

Have you ever noticed that nobody tries to grow meat that tastes like plants?

Read it.

Narco-subs have ferried cocaine from Colombia to Central America since the 1990s and recently proliferated. Rarely true submarines, they are generally semisubmersibles that float mostly but not completely below the waterline and are nearly undetectable. Most are built out of sight in South American jungles for around $1 million apiece.

Read it.

Reporter Adam Housley has evidently been talking with John Paul Isaac, the owner of the repair shop where Hunter Biden brought three devices in 2019, one of which is his now-infamous laptop. According to Housley, Biden’s lawyer called Isaac the day before the New York Post broke its first story.

Guess it’s all true, then.

How green hydrogen can become cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels

China as Climate Change Saviour: The Triumph of Hope Over Experience?

Solar is now ‘cheapest electricity in history’

Some surprises in polar bear sea ice habitat at mid-October 2020

Read it.

The person currently in charge of Facebook’s election integrity program is Anna Makanju. That name probably doesn’t mean a lot to you, but it should mean a lot – and in a comforting way — to Joe Biden.

Before ending up at Facebook, Makanju was a nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council. The Atlantic Council is an ostensibly non-partisan think tank that deals with international affairs. In fact, it’s a decidedly partisan organization.

In 2009, James L. Jones, the Atlantic Council’s chairman left the organization to be President Obama’s National Security Advisor. Susan Rice, Richard Holbrooke, Eric Shinseki, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Chuck Hagel, and Brent Scowcroft also were all affiliated with the Atlantic Council before they ended up in the Obama administration.

The Atlantic Council has received massive amounts of foreign funding over the years. Here’s one that should interest everyone: Burisma Holdings donated $300,000 dollars to the Atlantic Council, over the course of three consecutive years, beginning in 2016. The information below may explain why it began paying that money to the Council.

Read it.

Clarity allows you to see the distinct differences between things you may not have noticed before. Winemakers (before fine filtration) used to use clarifying agents to clear up their wine. Some homemade winemakers do so now.

In my lifetime I have been blessed to witness two spectacular Republican Presidents, Ronald Reagan (The Great Communicator) and Donald Trump (The Great Clarifier).

…

The news media, “we are not biased” and this past Thursday we have Savannah Guthrie doing a lion taming routine with President Trump while George Snuffelupagus acted as Joe Biden’s masseuse and nanny at the same time. George only forgot to give Joe a glass of warm milk and a blankie before he sent him home.

As President Trump says, “Fake news is the enemy of the people” – Clarity.

Read it.

Janine Benyus is co-founder of the Biomimicry Institute. “I think people are going to biomimicry for the ‘sustainability win’ but they stay because of the novelty, because what they’ve found is category-disrupting platform technologies,” she told CNBC’s Sustainable Energy.

Read it.

The Make It Right Foundation is a nonprofit that was created by Pitt to provide affordable housing for displaced residents after Hurricane Katrina hit the city in 2005. However, many of the houses built by the Make It Right Foundation experienced construction problems that later made them uninhabitable, including leaks and rotting wood.

Homebuyers in 2018 filed a class-action lawsuit against foundation, which has sued at least one of the construction companies and others for defective work. The nonprofit has since closed its New Orleans office and shuttered its website.

Early Human Species Likely Driven to Extinction by Climate Change  Likely!

Climate Change Likely Drove Our Ancestors to Extinction, Study Finds  Likely!

What’s causing climate change, in 10 charts

Naomi Oreskes: Exxon Misled the Public about Climate Change

Climate science and the Supreme Court

Read it.

Variety magazine was in a state of full gush on Wednesday over the “flood” of liberal movies that are being released in the weeks just before the election. Of course, no discussion about any profits that will be earned by these films since it is all too obvious that the main goal is not to earn money but to try to influence the outcome of the election.

That might be a threat if people were still allowed to go to movies.

Read it.

How historian Fred Siegel came to appreciate the president’s defense of ‘bourgeois values’ against the ‘clerisy.’

Canada invests in small modular nuclear technology, eyes net-zero future

The Hydrogen Boom Will Provide A $200B Boost To Wind And Solar Energy

James Murdoch Opens Up on The Family Rift Over Climate Change, Politics

Climate change likely drove early human species to extinction, modeling study suggests  Gotta love those doomsday models.

Japan to release Fukushima’s contaminated water into sea: reports OH NO WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE! Cue Godzilla.

Read it.

You’ve probably noticed things no longer work as well as they once did. For example, the store’s online inventory says something is in stock and when you get to the store, it’s not on the shelf. A small issue, but telling nonetheless.

Or you might call a local government agency to get an explanation of how a new fee is calculated, and nobody’s ever available to explain it–or sort out your punitive late fee even though you paid on time.

Read it.

On MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Wednesday, co-host Mika Brzezinski dug up a clip of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi strategizing her next move should President Trump refuse to acknowledge the loss she and her henchmen have planned for him on Election Day. The clip of Pelosi was from September 30th, but Brzezinski decided to revisit the idea and have some guests on the show to discuss their plan of attack.

Zman has … well, questions. (And a weekly podcast.)

A defect of the conventional Right is that is deeply believes they will one day find the combination of words that unlocks the secret of the Progressive mind, making it amenable to reason. One day, some bright conservative will say something so profound that the Left will stop, throw down their weapons and twirl their mustaches in astonishment. Then they will embrace their conservative brothers in a fellowship of reason and republican virtue.

The current year should put that to rest. Look around and it is hard to find any evidence of rational self-interest at work. We have a legitimate drug crisis in America and the people in charge refuse to even discuss it. It’s not because they have good reason to ignore it or they are afraid to address it. Trump mentioned the subject and they began to his like demons being shown a crucifix. It was if he violated some sacred taboo by pointing out the very obvious problems we have with drugs.

‘Scientific’ American, so take it with a grain of salt.

How would you feel about a new therapy for your chronic pain, which—although far more effective than any available alternative—might also change your religious beliefs? Or a treatment for lymphoma that brings one in three patients into remission, but also made them more likely to vote for your least preferred political party?

These seem like idle hypothetical questions about impossible side effects. After all, this is not how medicine works. But a new mental health treatment, set to be licensed next year, poses just this sort of problem. Psychotherapy assisted by psilocybin, the psychedelic compound in “magic mushrooms,” seems to be remarkably effective in treating a wide range of psychopathologies, but also causes a raft of unusual nonclinical changes not seen elsewhere in medicine.

Read it.

Between 2008 and 2019, total newsroom employment in the United States declined by 23 percent. At newspapers, the drop has been more than 50 percent. Journalists are hardly to blame for the underlying causes of this contraction (which include the long-term shift from physical to digital media, and the growing ad-market share controlled by Google and Facebook). But they can be blamed for the gratuitous acts of self-sabotage that are exacerbating the industry’s woes. Many journalists—and even their unions—now seem more preoccupied with denouncing heresies among colleagues than with maintaining their audience and livelihoods.

Canada’s last intact ice shelf broke off. It took our research station with it (The Guardian)

Within 20 years, rising sea levels will hit nearly every coastal county — and their bonds

Five things individuals can do to fight climate change  1. BELIEVE!

The great unravelling: ‘I never thought I’d live to see the horror of planetary collapse’ | Joelle Gergis (The Guardian)

Study: Renewable Energy does Nothing to Reduce CO2 Emissions

Claim: Climate change undermines the safety of buildings and infrastructure in Europe

Fifth Of Countries Worldwide At-Risk Of “Environmental Shocks” Collapsing Ecosystem 

How a government-linked foundation could speed the spread of new clean-energy technologies

Washington State Blows Away Wind Fantasies

I Am Amy Barrett: I Don’t Have an Opinion on Climate Change Either

NOAA: Winter outlook forecasts cooler North, warmer South with ongoing La Nina

You’ve heard of ‘fake news’? Now we have ‘fake weather’

“Proxies” Claim Half the GBR Corals Dead – But Not in Real Life

Read it.

I think it would help everybody if, we just acknowledged a few things.

1. Trump is an [redacted]. It’s fine, we have a proud American tradition of [redacted] presidents including LBJ and Harry Truman. Sometimes it also allows people to be necessary change agents. Just say it. “Trump is an [redacted].” It’s not a problem.

2. Trump isn’t a conservative. He is a center-left moderate who cut a deal. He gets to try some new foreign policy stuff and we get judges. There isn’t a single thing he ran on, outside of judges, that wasn’t the bipartisan consensus position before the left exited the American political spectrum, and the right collapsed into a grifter-led minarchist purity spiral. We have to honest with ourselves to be honest with others.

Thank you. That is all.

That pretty much matches my opinion on the subject.

ZMan tells us a story.

In 2020, it appears the official story tellers may have another problem on their hands with the Biden campaign. The story they are selling this time is the public is tired of the tyrant Trump and ready to lift-up world-weary old white man, and his super-smart diverse sidekick, and carry them to the White House. You see, world-weary old white man had a nice run, but now it is time for him to go. His last act will be to vanquish mean old white man and then hand the baton over to diverse sidekick.

It’s a familiar story, one that is the center of so many bad movies it is amazing that they keep trying to sell it. In this case, world-weary old white man is a vegetable that has been in hiding for most of the year, because he has shark eyes and says wacky things suggesting he is not all there. Super-smart diverse sidekick is pretty dumb and reminds everyone of getting their license renewed. It’s a bad story that no one wants to think about and the characters don’t work for the audience.

Compounding it is the world-weary old white man has a son that likes to smoke crack and film himself banging hookers. Fair or foul, people judge people by their children and Hunter Biden is a vulgar degenerate. He lies, cheats, steals and does not seem to have anything resembling a conscience. Worse yet, he seems to be an uncommonly stupid person, getting jammed up over stupid things like leaving his laptop with a repair shop, so the contents can be sold to the tabloids.

Forget silicon. This material could be a game-changer for solar power

New Design Molten Salt Reactor Is Cheaper To Run, Consumes Nuclear Waste

The Arctic is in a death spiral. How much longer will it exist? (The Guardian)

The Great Barrier Reef has lost half its corals within 3 decades (CNN)

Temperatures of deepest ocean rising quicker than previously thought (The Guardian)

Claim: The deep sea is slowly warming

25-Year Study of Nuclear vs Renewables Says One Is Clearly Better at Cutting Emissions

UN Warns Climate Disasters Doubled in the Last 20 Years  So we must give more money to the UN!

Where Do the Plastic Bottles Go?

Is wind power’s future in deep water?

Climate Reparations

The Arctic “Death Spiral”: Lamenting the Collapse of a 4000 Year Old Ice Shelf

The Automatic Climate Lawsuit Generator

Read it.

It ain’t necessarily so….

I often wish I were a shark.

ZMan does a deep dive.

A defining feature of the managerial state is that it creates problems that require it to then fashion complex solutions to solve. A group of experts from the managerial class made some reform, which then created unintended problems. The solution is to draft a new set of experts from the managerial class to solve this new problem. Inevitably, this creates new problems and the process continues into forever. A good current example of this is what to do with the tech monopolies.

The reason we have tech monopolies is Congress drafted laws that allowed the firms to turn into behemoths. In gratitude, these firms then showered their favorite politicians with cash, in order to avoid getting the Microsoft treatment. This allowed the firms to get bigger and turn the thank you cash into threats. It is not unrealistic to think these firms are now able and willing to blackmail politicians with information gleaned from their social media, e-mail and mobile devices.

‘God intended it as a disposable planet’: meet the US pastor preaching climate change denial

Revisiting the Simon-Ehrlich Wager 40 Years On

Climate ‘Weeds’ versus ‘High Altitude’ Survey

Greenland and the 1950s Climate Consensus

Solar Power Costs 2-3 Times As Much As Wind, Fossil Fuels and Nuclear

Our midcentury climate goals require radical change today

Read it.

We’re 10 months into 2020, and businesses are still making adjustments to the new realities of large-scale telework (which, if you’re not in the IT biz, is just a fancy term for “working from not in the office”). In the Before Times, telework was an interesting idea that tech companies were just starting to seriously flirt with as a normal way of doing business—whereas now, most businesses large or small have a hefty fraction of their workforce staying home to work.

Unfortunately, making such a sweeping change to office workflow doesn’t just disrupt policies and expectations—it requires important changes to the technical infrastructure as well. Six months ago, we talked about the changes the people who work from home frequently need to make to accommodate telework; today, we’re going to look at the ongoing changes the businesses themselves need to make.

Read it.

Essentially, Massachusetts voters are deciding on whether or not to add “mechanical” vehicle telematics data—realtime updates from a car’s sundry sensors transmitted to an automaker’s private servers—to the list of things OEMs have to share with independent mechanics. Telematics data was purposefully excluded from the original 2013 law, but as cars have gotten more computerized over the last decade, that gap in coverage has grown more pronounced.

The ‘right to repair’ fight is typically framed in terms of farm equipment but it really extends across the hi-tech universe.

The Other McCain lays in out.

Politics is not about debate. Politics isn’t about compromise. It is not about “image.” Ultimately, politics is about power.

This is something Republicans have a habit of forgetting. Because the Republican Party represents the respectable middle class, its leaders tend to be concerned with bourgeois respectability, an encumbrance which does not inhibit Democrats. Having assembled a coalition of the aggrieved and impoverished — including criminals, drug addicts, perverts and decadent intellectuals — Democrats unapologetically advocate the selfish interests of their constituent groups, whereas Republicans seem almost embarrassed by their own middle-class supporters.