Steve goes shopping.

Okay, okay. My house was already stuffed with guns. But you always need another one. You don’t ask a woman why she has 200 pairs of shoes, and you don’t ask a man why he has a gun for every day of the year. It’s understood.

Read it.

Just a few days ago, a caravan aiming at the U.S. border to coincide with the election campaign was broken up in Guatemala in cooperation with the United States.

At the same time, Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott announced the completion of the construction of 350 miles of wall on U.S.-Mexico border and concluded the government was well on the way to completing the target of 450 miles by the end of the year.

Read it.

President Donald Trump continues to confound academics as they try to explain possible correlations between Google searches and electoral victory. The conclusion? It’s all up for grabs!

Psychology Today’s report concluded that Trump is once again the chaos candidate. The article’s main observation suggested: “The polls might be way off, again.” In past elections, there has been a correlation between a candidate’s popularity in Google search and his electoral victory. The study “Google Search Predicts Big Surprise in November Election,” clarified that “in 2016, search interest in Trump actually did accurately predict the election result.” Even so, the article mused that “Google search data may not have the same predictive power as in previous elections.”

ZMan notes a distinction.

Scan the biographies of the political class and the thing you will be hard pressed to find is anything resembling real world experience. Few have ever worked in the dreaded private sector. Those that have, worked in the law or maybe finance. These careers were just alternative paths to the place they wanted to be all along. There are no sons of the soil in Washington. The exception is President Trump, which is why he is hated by the entire political class. He is not one of them.

…

This great gap between the Cloud People and the Dirt People in the nature of human organization and hierarchy is the great source of friction. We see that with the response to the Covid virus. The petty tyrants in the lowest level of the petty aristocracy just assumed the rest of us would happily follow their orders. The striking feature of this pandemic is how the political class is resentful that the public has not celebrated them in song and story for their heroism during these times.

Read it.

So, Trump is on steroids. My first question is, how can you tell? Second, is not the phrase “Trump is on steroids” a liberal’s worst waking nightmare? I have every expectation that if he’s still on steroids at the next debate, the first time Biden pops off Trump will go all Incredible Hulk on him, and it will look something like this (which I still enjoy almost as much as those highlight reels of the media on election night in 2016), except on steroids!

Watching left-Twitter the last few days, coming up with a new conspiracy/deception theories about every 15 seconds, it occurs to me that they’ve never realized that of course a Manhattan real estate developer would know how to live rent-free in their heads for four years. Rent control won’t help them now! And the great thing is, even if Trump loses the election, he will continue to haunt liberals for the rest of their lives.

Melting Antarctic Snow Is Revealing The Preserved Remains of 800-Year-Old Penguins

A teachable moment on sustainability  The importance of government schools in indoctrinating children.

The Economist: Future Gasoline Automobile Bans are as Effective as a Carbon Tax

Go FERC yourself: Carbon Pricing Conference

To Save the Climate, Give Up the Demand for Constant Electricity  Have you noticed that all of the prescriptions for How To Save The Climate involve making your life suck?

Michael Mann Appeals to, Then Ignores Scientific Consensus on 60 Minutes

The Other McCain pulls it all together.

Teenagers seem to be doing a seminar lately on this topic. For example, carjacking people at gunpoint? What do you think the odds are that a teenage boy is going to get away with this crime? He’s not an experienced driver, whereas the cops have logged many hours of training in pursuit tactics, with radio communications to assist them. And when the cops catch you, knowing that you have just used a firearm to commit a felony, do you think they they’ll leave their pistols in their holsters?

No, boy, you’re going to be confronted by cops with guns drawn screaming: “Let me see your hands! Let me see your hands!”

How does this night differ from every other night?

It’s nice to have an opportunity to highlight white teenagers getting shot by the cops. No protest marches. No NBA players kneeling. No mention of these victims of “excessive force” on CNN. Cops can shoot as many white perps as they want, and nobody cares. Just a local crime story.

Read it.

The New York Times has just published a big investigation of President Donald Trump. It says the president used big tax losses in some years to avoid paying taxes in other years, that he invested some of his profits into money-losing businesses, that Trump paid his daughter as “a way to transfer assets to his children,” that his businesses are propped up by foreign revenue, and that Trump “has written off as business expenses costs — including fuel and meals — associated with his aircraft, used to shuttle him among his various homes and properties.”

The Times ought to know — because the New York Times Company and the Ochs-Sulzberger family that control it have done the same things.

Read it.

Presidential candidate Joe Biden has announced that, if elected, his goal will be to make major changes to tax rules, mostly by raising taxes on the wealthy as well as on corporations. In fact, the Penn Wharton model, prepared by the University of Pennsylvania, indicates that Mr. Biden’s plans would raise $3.375 trillion in additional tax revenue from 2021 to 2030.

And how much would it go up once they realize that it’s still not enough to pay for all that extra spending?

Restoring Scientific Debate on Climate

The Guardian: Americans Need to Accept Climate Migrants from California  No problem, as long as they repent and are baptized.

Greenland Melting Fastest Any Time in Last 12,000 Years  And they’ve been there to measure it for all 12,000 of those years.

Psilocybin Can Save the Environment

Claim: A Canadian Climate Lawsuit May Succeed Because of a Dutch Climate Activist Victory

Read it.

They don’t come out and say so, but the finger pretty plainly points to the regulatory burden imposed by the FDA and similar agencies.

And then when they do come up with a successful product, the pressure starts to sell it for less than it costs to make, or even to give it away for free.

Read it.

The next time you unlock your front door, it might be worth trying to insert your key as quietly as possible; researchers have discovered that the sound of your key being inserted into the lock gives attackers all they need to make a working copy of your front door key.

It sounds unlikely, but security researchers say they have proven that the series of audible, metallic clicks made as a key penetrates a lock can now be deciphered by signal processing software to reveal the precise shape of the sequence of ridges on the key’s shaft. Knowing this (the actual cut of your key), a working copy of it can then be three-dimensionally (3D) printed.

This discovery of a major vulnerability in the physical keys that millions of us use to secure domestic and workplace doors and lockers was made by cyberphysical systems researcher Soundarya Ramesh and her team at the National University of Singapore. At the 21st International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (HotMobile 2020) in Austin, TX, in early March, Ramesh revealed how their technique works.

@CNN ’s Fake Climate Propaganda Lies Exposed, Again

Michael Mann: “A second Trump term is game over for the climate – really!”

Cuba Shows a Sudden Interest in Carbon Trading

Australia’s Koalas Are ‘Sliding Towards Extinction’

Eco disaster at Kamchatka peninsula with mass death of sea animals

Zman looks under the covers.

People who work with large complex systems understand that you don’t always know what will result from even the smallest change in the system. Usually this lesson is learned the hard way, by making some small change that seems simple, only to find out it caused serious downstream problems. Large complex systems are often highly dependent on initial conditions. Those small changes to the initial state, after they branch through the system, can have a huge impact.

This was a point wiser heads made about the Covid panic. The American economy is a wildly complex nonlinear system. The people in charge of it, the Federal Reserve, have mastered just one small set of inputs. This is why they are so cautious about tinkering with the money supply. They understand that beyond small changes in interest rates, they really don’t know what will happen. Through necessity they have figured out how to buy up distressed assets to keep the asset bubble inflated.

Not even for a second.

Read it.

Trash cans are a ubiquitous, and malodorous, fact of urban life, but a few dozen cities around the world are experimenting with eliminating them.

In their place, local governments are installing chutes which connect to an underground system of pneumatic tubes that use high-pressure air to woosh garbage away to a handful of centralized collection points.

I have my doubts.

Dramatic changes in the Arctic suggest climate change could return Earth to Pliocene conditions of 3 million years ago

The Arctic hasn’t been this warm for 3 million years — that spells big changes for the Earth  No doubt women and minorities hardest hit.

Greenland Ice Sheet Doomed… Again  Academy Award for Best Lingering Death.

Is It Too Late to Stop Climate Change?  Depends on who you ask.

California’s Looming ‘Green New Car Wreck’

Read it.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the push for widespread mail-in voting and other alternatives to going to the polls ahead of the presidential election has increased the risk of vote fraud through “ballot harvesting,” and the elderly are particularly vulnerable, advocates warn.

To protect seniors, especially those with physical impairments, the American Constitutional Rights Union (ACRU) is stepping up its efforts to prevent what it calls “Stranger Danger” through its Protect Elderly Votes project. The ACRU is a Naples, Florida-based right-leaning nonprofit dedicated to what it says is safeguarding the liberties enshrined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Popular ‘Science’.

They forgot the most important one: Living in a Blue State.

Read it.

In a move that will surprise no one at all, Congress has extended federal funding for highways and public transit until September 30, 2021. Such federal funding was set to end on September 30, 2020, and rather than revise the law to take into account the latest trends and events, Congress simply extended the existing law for another year.

It’s not like there was any new information, such as a pandemic, widespread forest fires, or the acceleration of urban decentralization, that might lead Congress to change its funding priorities anyway. Or, to be more accurate, it’s not like any new information would actually persuade Congress to change its funding priorities, as those priorities are driven by ideology more than actual facts.

Read it.

Can we agree that there are two types of Covid-19?

The first type, is Covid-19 ,”The Virus”, which is a fairly mild infection that most people don’t even realize they’ve contracted. They remain either asymptomatic or have slight flu-like symptoms that go away after a week or so. A tiny sliver of the population– that are mainly-older, vulnerable people with underlying health conditions– can develop complications, become seriously ill and die. But, according to most analysis, the chances of dying from Covid are roughly between 1 in every 200 to 1 in every 1,000 people. (CDC-IFR- 0.26%) In other words, Covid is not the Spanish Flu, not the Black Plague and the Genocidal Planetary Killer Virus it was cracked up to be. It kills more people than the annual influenza, but not significantly more.

The second type of Covid-19, is Covid “The Political Contrivance” or, rather, CODENAME: Operation Virus Identification 20 19. This iteration of the Covid phenom relates to the manner in which a modestly-lethal respiratory pathogen has been inflated into a perennial public health crisis in order to implement economic and societal changes that would otherwise be impossible. This is the political side of Covid, which is much more difficult to define since it relates to the ambiguous agenda of powerful elites who are using the infection to conceal their real intentions. Many critics believe that Covid is a vehicle the Davos Crowd is using to launch their authoritarian New World Order. Others think it has more to do with Climate Change, that is, rather than build consensus among the world leaders for mandatory carbon reductions, global mandarins have simply imposed lockdowns that sharply reduce economic activity across-the-board. This, in fact, has lowered emissions significantly, but at great cost to most of humanity. Covid restrictions have triggered a sharp uptick in suicides, clinical depression, child abuse, domestic violence, alcoholism and drug abuse. The list goes on and on. Also, it has left economies everywhere in a shambles, increasing unemployment and homelessness exponentially, while setting the stage for massive famines in undeveloped countries around the world. Even so, key players in the Covid crisis– like mastermind Bill Gates– continue to marvel at impact these onerous restrictions have had on emissions.

Steve Sailer explores the future.

Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have documented that America appears to be undergoing a mental health crisis dating back to about the beginning of the Great Awokening around 2013: i.e., before Trump. My guess is that the tension generated by the increasingly crazy things you are supposed to believe in order to not get canceled by the Woke is taking its toll. Trump has driven people even crazier by seeming to be immune to the requirements of polite society to be politically correct.

But is Trump really just the Emmanuel Goldstein of the Great Awokening? Will the Two-Minutes Hates be retired when Trump is no longer President?

Steve Sailer draws a parallel.

ollowing up my review in Taki’s Magazine of the bestseller Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, I’m reminded that many of the practices of the Hindu caste system sound like our current Social Distancing festishes gone nuts.

Greenland’s ice melting faster than at any time in past 12,000 years (The Guardian)

The Ocean Is Becoming More Stable, And The Consequences May Be Dire, Scientists Warn  Dire!

The Unusual Connection Between Beavers, Permafrost and Climate Change

How affluent people can end their mindless overconsumption (Vox) Not just consumption, but overconsumption! Mindless overconsumption!

“Why have I not seen any sea level rise in 40 years?”  A very good question.

On noes! Antarctic sea ice may not cap carbon emissions as much as previously thought

Read it.

Aaaaand anyone whose labor wasn’t worth $25 per hour just lost his or her job.

I’m sure that robots and other automated systems (or at least those who design, build, and sell them) appreciate it.

By Jonathan Coulton.

Sing Hey Hidey Ho, where’d the Old Lobster go?
With its body so furry and broun?
Sing Ho Hidey Hey, have they all gone away?
‘Cause we haven’t seen any around…

One cannot mourn without music. (Well, you can, but it’s pretty lame.).

Jonathan Coulton is the only composer now living who accurately captures the life experience of some of us. I particularly recommend his works Code Monkey and Shop Vac and IKEA, which speak to the heart of modern life.

ZMan looks behind the curtain.

In modern times, the conspiracy theory has been formalized. The assassination of John Kennedy is probably when this formalization process began. For example, a conspiracy theory needs a series of hard to accept coincidences. In the case of Kennedy, we have the amazing marksmanship of the shooter and then his unlikely assassination at the hands of a Jewish gangster, while he was in police custody. The Jack Ruby part is what made the whole thing perfect for the conspiracy theorists.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

The best example right now is the Left’s obsession with white supremacy. They cannot accept that their vision of Utopia is not very popular. That’s the first step in a conspiracy theory, the rejection of the most plausible reason. That allows them to spin wild tales of secret Nazis and spectral supremacists. Rather than confront reality, which is frightening and disconcerting, they have created a series of conspiracy theories to explain why the world is not as they imagine it.

I’ve met a ton of Communists but nary a one of ‘white supramacists’. Which, then, is the greater threat to the nation?

Steve Sailer reviews the possibilities.

They should wear Nike Colin Kaepernick gear.

Now that I think about it, they could shake down big brands by threatening to wear their clothes.

Steve Sailer pokes into the hidden recesses of American racism.

Soon, the New York Times will be running op-eds by young women named Kim about how they deserve reparations for the times white people (such as their golf pro at the country club) asked them, “Where are you from?”

The horror!

Two Cities Just Pulled Out of the Tiny Reactor Nuclear Revolution

MIT Researchers Say Their Fusion Reactor Is “Very Likely to Work”

The Oceans Appear to Be Stabilizing. Here’s Why it’s Very Bad News

Is It Too Late To Stop Climate Change? Well, it’s Complicated.

Amazon Drama Promotes Overpopulation Myth, Bemoans ‘Endless, Global Assembly Line of Babies’  Mostly among black and brown people, although they aren’t allowed to Notice it.

Total Precipitable Water and the Greenhouse Effect

Wild Claim: ‘Someday, even wet forests could burn due to climate change’  With enough napalm, anything will burn.

Wildfires inhibiting solar power generation in California

UGLY: ‘Climate emergency’ soon to justify ‘house arrest’

An asteroid didn’t kill the dinosaurs by itself. Earth helped.

The Debate Was a Disaster. But Hey, Climate Change Came Up

Read it.

The attorney for Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old accused of killing two people in Kenosha, Wisconsin, threatened to sue Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on Wednesday after Biden released a video suggesting Rittenhouse is a “white supremacist.”

Biden’s video accused President Donald Trump of refusing to condemn white supremacists and included footage of Rittenhouse in Kenosha. There is no public evidence that Rittenhouse is a white supremacist.

Do it. That would be entertaining.

ZMan pulls the curtain back.

Depending upon when you mark the beginning, the world is anywhere between six and eight months into the Covid panic. While some parts of the world have slowly climbed back down from the ledge, other parts of the world seem committed to another round of lock downs and public hysteria. In fact, the great and the good are telling us that the public rituals may be a permanent condition. The question, though, is why has the world gone crazy over this particular pandemic?

Strangely forgotten in all of this is the fact that every generation or so has a nasty virus get loose that results in a very bad flu season. The last one was Swine flu, which was about a decade ago. There was a worldwide outbreak of H1N1 called the Soviet flu in the 1970’s and before that the Hong Kong flu. There are localized outbreaks of even scarier things like MERS and SARS. In other words, Covid is neither unusual or particular harmful compared to the regularly occurring pandemics.

Steve Sailer.

You might think that Isabel Wilkerson’s best-selling book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents might be timely because Kamala Harris is descended both from a high-caste Brahmin mother and a Jamaican father from that island’s “middle-class brown” caste.

Harris’ father, a retired Stanford economics professor, appears to be a product of the careful breeding regimen that author Malcolm Gladwell describes in his writings about how his Jamaican mother’s ancestors kept themselves distinct from the black masses. An affluent Jamaican once told me with bemusement: “Everybody calls me black in the United States and white in Jamaica.”

…

On the other hand, it could be argued that the only real system of caste in the world is found among the Hindus of South Asia, Bali, and Silicon Valley, with their thousands of endogamous groups and endless proliferation of rules. Everybody else’s caste system is just a weak-tea metaphor for the Indian straight stuff.

Brain-eating amoebae are very rare, but warming waters may change that  California is safe, they haven’t any brains to speak of.

Great Lakes Drying Up… No, Overflowing… Because Climate Change

Read it.

President Donald Trump has received a third nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, this time from a quartet of Australian law professors who lauded his reduction of American overseas military involvement, brokering Middle East peace agreements, and increasing energy independence to lessen the need for military intervention.

Read it.

“Dr. Scott Atlas is arming Trump with misleading data” about COVID-19, Centers for Disease Control Director Dr. Robert Redfield told a colleague Friday, according to a Monday report by NBC News political reporter Monica Alba.

Within hours, numerous outlets ideologically allied with NBC amplified the coverage. Here are some screenshots of the Google News results for the story just a short while later, but is Redfield’s assertion correct? The Federalist spoke to numerous epidemiologists to find out.

Read it.

Contribute if you can.

Read it.

Perhaps this is the start of a trend.

ZMan points out some inconvenient truth.

“Familiarity breeds contempt” is an old expression that like many others, remains true even though it is widely ignored. Proof of this is all round us, as Americans know more about one another than at any time in history. The more we know, the less we like about one another. The reason for this is we have never been one people or anything close to a nation. For most of our history, we have barely been a country. Now we get to see this reality every day on our media platforms.

Victor Davis Hanson.

There was once a tradition of Democratic liberalism. But that wing of the Democratic Party no longer exists and died sometime in the 1990s. Old-style liberalism has been absorbed by Progressivism at best and unapologetic socialism at worst—in a journey on the supposedly predetermined arc of history that bends toward 1984.

The new-old leftist aim is not to operate within either the existing parameters of the Constitution as written or the customs and traditions of America—a 150-year-long nine-justice Supreme Court, the Electoral College, a 50-state nation, a Senate filibuster, two senators per state, and a secure border. All are obstructions to the drive for power.

Given its redistributionist creed, socialism cannot afford to be patent and honest. If socialism were transparent, it never would gain majority support. Joe Biden cannot talk about the Electoral College or court packing, unequivocally condemn the violence in our urban centers, discuss the Green New Deal, name his likely Supreme Court appointments, be honest about his plans for fracking, or explain his views on the borders, because he is now owned lock, stock and barrel by the hard Left whose agendas were rejected even in his own Democratic primaries.

Read it.

If we were in a normal situation, and the disease hadn’t been politicized, we could rely on recorded statistics to tell us whether or not COVID-19 should be classified as a pandemic. Unfortunately, this is not a normal situation. Statistics on the infection have been gamed and manipulated to inflate both incidence and fatality rates. I have no confidence in any of the aggregate statistics put out by state and federal governments.

Therefore I am forced to focus on anecdotal evidence and utilize common sense. For the past three or four months, during my very limited social interactions (mostly involving family and close friends), I’ve made it my habit to quiz people about their personal experience with the coronavirus: Do you know anyone who has contracted COVID-19? If so, did any of them die of it?

For myself, I don’t even know anyone who has tested positive for the disease, much less died of it. And the overwhelming majority of the people I asked don’t know anyone who has had it. Out of all the people I have asked, only one person knows someone (a very elderly person) who died of the WuFlu.

If this were a real pandemic, we would all know multiple victims of it. Every family would have seen at least one fatality from it. Every person would be able to give a lengthy roster of friends and relatives who had contracted it, some of whom would have died.

John Hinderaker at PowerLine.

Steve beat me to this, I see, but here are a few additional comments on the New York Times’s felony du jour. Well, to be fair, they just aided and abetted the felony. Maybe someday that will be illegal.

First, I doubt whether anyone cares. Donald Trump has been president for four years, and if you think he has done a good job (as I do), you are hardly going to be deterred from voting for him by the fact that he hires good accountants. The people who are excited about the Times felony/scoop weren’t going to vote for him anyway.

Second, on its face the Times “expose” falls flat. I understand that someone at the IRS feloniously leaked Trump’s tax returns for more than 20 years, and it is true, as Trump has said, that he has been subject to one or more audits also extending over a period of years. So apparently the IRS has been unable to find anything wrong with Trump’s tax returns. Case closed.

Third, this retired tax accountant supplies a knowledgeable perspective, as opposed to anything you might read in the co-conspirator Times. [Quotes Larry Correia]