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]

Larry Correia.

I posted that last night on Facebook, and sure enough, this morning my feed is filled with people who don’t know shit about taxes retweeting the stupid opinions of other morons who also don’t know shit about taxes. This is just as annoying as last week when these same idiots all suddenly became Constitutional Scholars. Or the month before that when they were all experts on use of force laws and police tactics. Or the month before that when they suddenly got their epidemiology degrees from the University of Internet and turned into infectious disease experts.

Holy shit, you Dunning-Krugerands are annoying. Of course the comments are all about the “morality” of paying your “fair share”. Which isn’t how any of this works in real life. Just stop it with your vapid hot takes already. You clearly have a child-like grasp of a complex topic, and your words are making America dumber.

As a former accountant, please allow me to explain why all of today’s newly formed tax experts are fucking morons, and we should metaphorically put a brick in a sock and beat them over the head with it until they shut up.

I love the term ‘wokesplaining’ and will be using it henceforth.

I highly recommend Larry’s ‘Saga of the Forgotten Warrior’ series.

Study: Global Warming Hiatus (aka “The Pause”) Was Real

Morning Consult Poll: 1/4 Won’t Have Kids Due to Climate Change  And they are precisely the sort of people whom we ought to encourage not to reproduce. Win-win!

Read it.

Simon Leys was perhaps the pre-eminent Western chronicler of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and it is worth returning to his work for its vivid first-hand accounts of life in Beijing during this period. But Leys was also interested in the process by which, under the right conditions and with the right ideology, a society can collapse into insanity and murder. His description of the Cultural Revolution showed how political hysteria and the legitimization of violence and hatred combined to ravage a nation.

These developments, however, are by no means unique to communism in general or China in particular, and Leys explored similar themes in his retelling of the harrowing true story of a ship wrecked off the coast of Australia in 1629. His book on the topic, The Wreck of the Batavia, is a short masterpiece about how the small society that the ship’s survivors tried to construct in the wake of the disaster was plunged into apocalyptic madness and murder by a psychopathic leader operating according to his own deranged totalitarian ideology. The parallels to Maoism—although Leys was too elegant a writer to belabour them—are obvious.

No one would live as a knight and role-play as a marketing consultant.

— Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug)

Not to mention the free long-distance phone calls.

Audacious Epigone deals with some inconvenient truth.

If Trump were a tyrannical dictator, nobody would be able to get away with calling him one. If so-called white privilege was beneficial, non-whites would be trying to pass as white to cash in on that privilege. Instead they run from the liability, pretending to be non-white because of how lucrative it is. Hell, if it were okay to be white it would be okay to say it’s okay to be white, but it’s not okay to be white so it’s not okay to say it’s okay to be white.

Supreme Court case on carbon price is about climate change, not the Constitution

Cement is the source of 8% of the world’s CO2 emissions (2018)  BBC. They say that like it was a bad thing.

Claim: Gujarat Solar Park is Failing to Fulfil Mandatory UN Renewable Energy Gender Empowerment Requirements  It’s not enough to save the planet, it must incorporate the Crust’s entire proglodyte agenda.

How Humanity Came to Contemplate Its Possible Extinction

Ponds, Beaver Ponds, Arctic & Antarctic Ponds, and Walden Pond

Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?  I think so.

New study to uncover how climate change and tectonics drove evolution in East Africa  Women and minorities hardest hit.

Severian discusses the Supreme Court nominations in a global context.

There’s some pretty stiff competition at the top, I’ll grant you, but if I had to pick the Top Five Stupidest Things the Human Race Has Ever Done, I’d go with, in ascending order:

• Proclaim “peace in our time.”
• Hand Austria-Hungary a blank check for war
• Invade Russia in the winter
• Start a land war in Asia
• Listen to Karl Marx.

That was prior to this week, though. When you consider that we’ve got our ongoing COVID response, a Presidential debate with Pedo Joe Biden, and now a Supreme Court nomination fight on the schedule, we might be edging into “Chamberlain at Munich” territory, idiocy-wise. It’s gonna be a wowzer.

…

Think of it like an iPad. “Abortion” doesn’t make sense as a political issue, because BCGs don’t have politics, or issues. They do have lifestyle accessories, though, the latest and greatest ones. That’s how they compete with each other — the cutest shoes, the trendiest Starbucks drink, the #wokest attitude. Threatening to take away Muh Abortion! is, to them, like threatening to take away their iCrap Mini Pro 7.2, the one with the cute heart stickers and the unlimited data plan. It’s an identity thing, and they’re about to turn into screaming fucking banshees over it.

If it works, don’t knock it.

Zombie storms are rising from the dead thanks to climate change

Global Warming Drives Wildfires Study–Ignores Pre 1979 Data  If you don’t like the evidence you find, find some evidence you like.

Claim: Marine heatwaves are human made

Wind turbines generate mountains of waste

Climate Litigators are Riding a Dead Horse

Eric S. Raymond has some ideas.

The two most intriguing developments in the recent evolution of the Microsoft Windows operating system are Windows System for Linux (WSL) and the porting of their Microsoft Edge browser to Ubuntu.

For those of you not keeping up, WSL allows unmodified Linux binaries to run under Windows 10. No emulation, no shim layer, they just load and go.

Read it.

Oh, the irony!

For further details read ALBION’S SEED.

Freeberg shares it with us.

I have an unpopular opinion that this “rules solve everything” mindset is not only in error, but may in fact be a serious mental illness. It would have been officially diagnosed as such if we lived back in the days where your continuing survival was fastened to your ability to think clearly. My opinion is that it’s not being officially diagnosed because, and only because, this is not the case. Everybody’s continuing survival is everybody else’s responsibility, and this has driven us crackers. I think there are people out there who simply cannot recognize that these useful technological innovations we enjoy, are the products of independent thinking. Chaotic, ramshackle roughshod thinking, in some kind of “Frankenstein’s Lab” — some cloister in which rules did not apply. We have new things we didn’t have before because someone had to say “I’ll do this because I’m not seeing any rules telling me I can’t do it”; maybe they even broke a rule to do it! And there are people who can’t even consider the possibility of that. They are so far gone that they think we have electric light because someone made a rule that we should have it. They think we put men on the moon because JFK expressed the desire that we should do it. They think we’re going to hit “climate change” targets in 2050 or 2100 because of these unelected, unappointed, unaccountable busybodies on commissions and panels make their “accords” and other rules saying we should hit them, and once we hit them the credit should go to the busybodies…who’ve never produced a thing someone else would want to buy, or helped to so produce, ever, for a single moment in their entire lives. I think there are people who don’t acknowledge the ones who sweat out the details, who go through the trial & error to see if something works, because they’re simply unaware of the necessity. They think forming the “vision” is all of the hard work that has to be done. I think they’re that far gone, because we’re in the Idiocracy now, not chased by any natural predators or threatened by any natural threats. I think the entire human race, at least that part of it that manages to make some noise, is a failure-to-launch kid who doesn’t know what a farm is, doesn’t know how food is grown, slaughtered, processed, and thinks the process of acquiring it consists solely of yelling at your mama that it’s time for her to bring a Hot Pocket to your bedroom.

Periscope podcast. About 8 minutes in.

1. If Biden ‘has a lid on it’ until Tuesday, he won’t participate in the debates for whatever reason.
2. If Biden survives one debate in reasonable fashion, they will find some excuse to cancel the rest.

The Pure Evil of Hydrogen Hyping

Polar bear researchers try very hard to make good news in Kane Basin sound trivial

Climate School Strikes: Greta Kids Threaten to Hurt their Own Prospects Until You Care

“Climate Change” is greening the Arctic – and this is bad?

Read it.

Hammer tech.

Bethany Mandel.

The last six months have proved a few things: Americans are not as strong as we once were and our national past-time isn’t baseball, it’s complaining. I’ve been extremely disheartened to watch how we’ve responded to the COVID crisis; with little critical thinking and questioning of the narrative we’ve been fed on everything from masks (from they’re completely unnecessary all the way to you have to wear one outside alone in the woods) to the logic of a nationwide, indefinite lockdown.

Read it.

The state Supreme Court unanimously agreed with the Broward County School Board that the Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School — which killed 17 students and staff members and injured 17 others — should be viewed as a single incident, the Miami Herald reported.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs argued each gunshot from alleged gunman Nikolas Cruz were separate incidents and that their clients should each receive $200,000. The justices disagreed, saying mass shootings should be viewed as one incident, thereby placing a limit on how much government agencies can be forced to pay under an under a state sovereign-immunity law, according to the newspaper.

The daring plan to save the Arctic ice with glass

Rising Temperatures Are Pushing Antarctica Past Point of No Return, Scientists Warn  As they’ve been doing for the last sixty years.

Melting Antarctic ice will raise sea level by 2.5 metres – even if Paris climate goals are met, study finds I’m still waiting.

How sea level rise could make it harder to buy a home  I’m still waiting.

Claim: Svalbard glaciers lost their protective buffer in the mid-1980s and have been melting ever since

Most partisan polling group ever assembled says climate change not a partisan issue!

Climate Apocalypse Claim: “We’re talking about the collapse of civilization, and I think it’s really important for people to hear that.”  Perhaps if any of these hair-on-fire predictions ever came true, people might be inclined to listen.

Read it.

The boyfriend of Breonna Taylor, the Black woman who was shot during a police raid on her apartment, got his girlfriend killed when he shot at Louisville police detectives, Joe diGenova, former US Attorney for the District of Columbia, told Newsmax TV.

Exactly so.

Facebook Vowed to Stop Climate Change Misinformation – Then Suspended Greenpeace  Sounds about right.

Climate Hustle 2 premieres this Thursday

Watts Available

Global change ecologist leads NASA satellite study of rapid greening across Arctic tundra

Remote Work Exacerbating Data Sprawl  Okay, there’s the Newest Climate Disaster Smear: Data Sprawl!

Read it.

I would be fascinated to learn what rationale Twitter uses to decide which messages are acceptable and which are not. Twitter explains that its rules “prohibit the glorification of violence” and that its users “may not threaten or promote terrorism or violent extremism.” On these grounds, Twitter recently appended a notice to a Donald Trump tweet about Minneapolis. The site has also suspended users for making claims about the coronavirus of which it does not approve, on the grounds that such claims “could place people at a higher risk of transmitting COVID-19.”

#MeToo.

Read it.

During the September 23 edition of Mornings with Maria on Fox Business, anchor Maria Bartiromo addressed Bloomberg raising $16 million in donations to pay the court fines and fees of Black and Hispanic convicted felons in Florida so they could vote in the November elections. Bartiromo told Gaetz, who also happens to be an attorney: “You’re calling for a probe into bribery for Michael Bloomberg to spend all that money in Florida alone. Tell us about it.”

Gaetz responded: “I’m the former criminal justice chairman of the Florida House of Representatives. I know this area of law well. I spoke to the Florida attorney general last night, and a criminal probe may already be underway in Florida.” He continued: “Chapter 104, Florida statute says that it is a felony for someone to either directly or indirectly offer something of value to impact whether or not someone votes.”

Don’t think of it as buying votes — think of it as renting them for a bit.

Are there any Democrats that are bothered by the fact that apparently felons can be assumed to vote Democrat?

Read it.

Because he isn’t Fully Woke, and therefore must be cancelled.

Steve Sailer.

Center-left Vox pundit Matthew Yglesias’ new book One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger is actually two contradictory polemics. The book is both a sensible call for making family formation more affordable for younger Americans, and a demented demand for tripling the population of the United States (currently one-third of a billion) via immigration, thus ruining the chances of tens of millions of actual Americans to afford marriage and children.

There’s really no way to reconcile Yglesias’ two requests….

A Tale of Two Renewable Energy Blackouts: California vs Texas

Sink Or Swim? Asia’s Sinking Villages Engulfed By Rising Seas

A missing piece in Charleston’s sea level rise puzzle is what’s happening on land

Prince Charles Calls for a Climate Action Marshall Plan  For those who don’t recall, the Marslall Plan was where American taxpayers gave Europeans lots and lots of money so they wouldn’t turn Communist.

Corona-induced CO2 emission reductions are not yet detectable in the atmosphere

Did Global Warming Play A Significant Role in the Recent Northwest Wildfires?

MSNBC Pushes Voting Democratic ‘to Fight Climate Change’

Read it.

The liberal media love to pose as the Defenders of Science, and part of the game they play is by turning to medical experts with left-wing political backgrounds that they hide. CNN hides the losing Democrat political campaigns of its doctors Rob Davidson and Abdul el-Sayed. NBC and MSNBC have hidden that their “global health policy expert” Vin Gupta is an adviser to the Biden campaign.

In ten NBC News appearances and 31 MSNBC appearances found in Nexis from July 15 to September 15, these networks never, ever mentioned a Biden link.

Read it.

New Jersey finally passed a tax on millionaires fulfilling a long-running dream of governor Phil Murphy and Democratic leaders.

Facing a fiscal crisis of epic proportions, Murphy finally convinced holdout lawmakers to raise the tax rate on earnings over $1 million to 10.75%, up from 8.97%. As we noted last week, it remains unclear how quickly this decision will prompt an exodus of the state’s richest residents. What was clear, however, is that it was only a matter of time before other Democrat-run, fiscally-irresponsible states would follow NJ’s lead now that the seal has been broken. After all, progressives in Albany have already been pushing governor Cuomo to consider a variety of bills, including one to raise the tax rate on those earning more than $100 million to almost 12%.

Plenty of room in Texas. Nicer people, too.( Except in Austin, of course, but you can avoid there.)

He’s got a  point.

Read it.

Over 90% of Indian techies in the US are upper-caste Indians and many of them are allegedly making life a living hell for Dalits, those who are classified as the lowest of the low in India, whose horrifying historical persecution has continued in the cradle of tech.

David Cole (who is Jewish) has an adventure.

There are certain “firsts” we all remember from youth. Our first kiss. Our first car. Our first time being chased off a college campus by an angry mob of Jews shouting, “Never again!”

Okay, that last one may be unique to me.

Geoengineering Is the Only Solution to Our Climate Calamities’  Except for all of the other ones.

What are the challenges in saving the planet?

Energy Innovation Desperately Needed To Meet Climate Change Goals

‘Climate arson’ and other wildfire nonsense

Discovery of a New Mass Extinction

How environmentalists destroyed California’s forests

Climate or Environment?

Potential impact of the second-lowest sea ice minimum since 1979 on polar bear survival

Stylish composting bins that improve your impact on the planet  Be the first on your black to own a stylish compost bin.

Read it.

The COVID recession has caused tax revenues to plummet, forcing cities and states to make painful budget cuts. But as they struggle to fund schools, parks, public safety, and other essential services, there’s one simple and painless way for governments to save money: Rethink recycling. The goal should be to transform the practice from a virtuous-seeming exercise that drains funds from core public services, to one by which price signals assure taxpayers that diverted materials are actually recycled.

When recycling programs became common three decades ago, they were sold to taxpayers as a win-win, financially and environmentally: Cities expected to reap budget savings through the sale of recyclable materials, and conscientious taxpayers expected to reduce ecological destruction. Instead, the painful reality for enthusiastic, dutiful recyclers is that most recycling programs don’t make much environmental sense. Often, they don’t make economic sense, either.

Read it.

Barrett has some experience of the storm. She was on Trump’s list of possible nominees in 2018, when he was considering who would replace Anthony Kennedy, a justice who retired. But the president had other plans for Barrett.

“I’m saving her for Ginsburg,” Trump said, according to an Axios report last year.

He could do a lot worse.

Joel Kotkin.

The long-rising blue tide that has colored American politics and values may have crested, but it could still have enough momentum to make it through the election year. Even if Trump is somehow reelected, the wielders of power and influence — academia, media, Wall Street, Hollywood, the big-tech oligarchs, the dominant nonprofits, and the governmental apparat — will remain deep blue for the foreseeable future.

The prospect of untrammeled progressive power, particularly with a malleable Joe Biden in the White House, may seem depressing for conservatives or even old-style liberals, who are concerned by the Left’s increasingly censorious and authoritarian bent. But there is also a silver lining of sorts. Everywhere blue policies — generally now referred to as “progressive” — have prevailed, they have failed miserably, particularly for those parts of the population, such as the working class and minorities, that they purport to serve.

Over time, these failures will open up an opportunity perhaps not for a resurgence of traditional conservatism but for a reshuffling of political loyalties away from those whose policies don’t work. Many core constituencies associated with blue politics may become aware that their interests, prominent on the progressive menu, will never in reality be served. Ultimately, results, not memes, matter most. Progressives have demonstrated monumental incompetence in addressing everything from social equity to education, culture, and energy policy. Even in postmodern America, failure cannot forever be sold as success.

Pope Hypes Alarmism On Melting Glaciers  They don’t make Popes like they used to.

Guardian Scratching for Climate Tipping Points

Undersea earthquakes shake up climate science

MSM Welcomes “Whistleblowers” Reporting Partying College Students Breaking COVID Rules

BBC: “How the oil industry made us doubt climate change”

Read it.

One can almost understand the “we’re all gonna die’ reaction in the Spring of this year as it became apparent that this new virus was a killer. However, as more information became available, it also became apparent that the public reaction and hysteria were misplaced, and that whilst certain groups were vulnerable, healthy people under 60 had little to fear.

Then came the vested interests.

The MSM fanned the flames, and the COVID bubble got bigger and bigger as the whole thing got more and more political rather than medical, and rational science had left the building.

The medical profession, backed by big pharma, have virtually created the religion of ‘Science’ where the ‘deniers’ are deemed delusional idiots who need to be shut out and deplatformed, and where free speech should only be allowed to supporters and co-religionists. Criticism is banned and books should be burned. Sieg Heil!

The new social crime of Scientific sedition has now been created.

CNN: “The pandemic didn’t solve climate change. This week’s disasters are proof”

The Climate Alarms Are Blaring — Are People Not Hearing Them?  No, the climate alarmists are blaring — not the same thing.

A New Cold Record set at International Falls: Should we be surprised?

Sea Ice Caused the Little Ice Age… Cart Pulls Horse… Film at 11

British FT Admits China is Using Calls for Climate Justice to Advance Their Economy

Review: Climate Hustle 2 Movie coming on Sept 24th

Read it.

Seems like.

Steve gives us an update.

First, I made biscuits with White Lily flour, and they were no good. Second, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, taking us one step closer to civil war.