Read it.

The Party of Billionaires is pissing its pants over losing the Supreme Court.

Severian plays hardball.

o Satan finally called in his marker. Soros must be shaking in his infant-skin slippers right now. The tab always comes due eventually, you bastards. Interesting times ahead:

The Sellout: It goes without saying that Reid, McConnell and Co. will sell us out; the only questions are “when” and “how.” My best guess is that they team up with their respected opponents across the aisle to announce that, to solemnly honor the memory of a great American, they’ll hold off on any confirmation hearings until after the election.

ZMan pulls no punches.

After years of false promises, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg has finally made the world a better place by exited from it. Her near-death experiences had reached a number where it was starting to look as if she was immortal. She was in the hospital more than the typical nurse, but somehow always managed to recover. It turns out that her deal with Old Scratch did have an expiry date and the world rejoices. They announced her death Friday night, but who knows when she really died.

As is custom when a Progressive goblin dies, the liberal media will carry on as if she was the most important person in history. They had already made movies about her that no one watched, so they will all be wearing black armbands this week. Whatever funeral services they have for her will be turned into another circus. Maybe in honor of George Floyd, peace be upon him, they will drop her corpse next to his. Then pilgrims can pay respects to both on the same trip.

Rather refeshing, really, what with all of the RINOS and NeverTrumper cucks lining up to bow to her coffin. Ginsburg was an ACLU hack until her dying day, and her only saving grace was that she wasn’t as ‘woke’ as she could have been.

Audacious Epigone.

Mitt Romney must be giddy at the prospect of being able to stab Republicans in the back but he’ll need a couple other turncoats besides Lisa Murkowski to go along with him.

Read it.

The tears of our enemies are sweet.

Read it.

This week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit heard argument in the case against Harvard University brought by Students for Fair Admissions. The plaintiffs allege that Harvard’s use of racial preferences results in discrimination against Asian-American applicants. The liberal district court judge who tried the case disagreed. She found for Harvard.

 

Fire Expert Bob Zybach Cites Liberal Policies As Contributing Factor For West Coast Wildfires

California’s Wildfires Have Burned Enough Carbon To Power Roughly 23 Coal Plants For One Year, Estimates Show

NASA-led ice melt study makes a terrifying prediction about rising sea levels  The latest in a long line of such ‘terrifying’ predictions that never come to pass. One wonders why they even bother.

Climate change: Earthquake ‘hack’ reveals scale of ocean warming  (BBC ‘News’)

These maps show you where to move once climate change makes parts of the U.S. unlivable  And while you’re there you can buy a saddle for your unicorn.

Coastal Zone Management Bill Becomes Law, Mitigating Erosion and Rising Sea Level Threats  Just passing a law has mitigated those threats! Isn’t that amazing?

Ice Age Temperatures Help Predict Future Warming  (‘Scientific’ American) But apparently not very well, otherwise those predictions would actually come to pass.

Climate Change’s Role in Wildfires Not as Clear-Cut as Some Argue

Rep. Liz Cheney Asks The DOJ To Investigate Whether China, Russia Are Infiltrating US Environmental Groups

UK: End sale of petrol, diesel and hybrid vehicles by 2030, Labour urges government  The Labour Party — making people miserable for over a century.

Wildfires offsetting California’s expensive cap-and-trade emissions cuts  When you’re burning up the state, cutting fossil fuel emissions doesn’t really help you.

Read it.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

They may have won all the battles / But we had all the good songs!

ZMan does his weekly podcast on a subject that most people avoid.

Failure analysis is one of those things that most people do every day, but they don’t think about it that way. Much of what passes for a work in a modern corporation is exception handling, which is just solving the problems that occur when the normal business processes fail in some way. No one calls customer service to tell them that they are happy with the product and have no complaints. Those departments and the people in them exist to figure out what went wrong and remedy it.

At a higher level, smart people making big salaries spend their days trying to understand why complex systems produce unacceptable results. There are people who spend every day studying plane crashes, looking for the cause of the failure. Pretty much every quality control program is just failure analysis. The idea is to measure success against some ambitious standard and then look for the causes as to why the standard is not currently being met.

Washington Post.

Just admitting what we all know? Sudden attack of honesty? (For those not in the know, Jennifer Rubin is one of those pseudo-conservative pets of DemLegHump Media organs — like the Washington Post — that they trot out from time to time to make themselves feel good about being proglodytes.)

UPDATE: Jennifer Rubin Needed Something to Write About

Newsom Vows to Fast Track Toward Germany’s Failed Climate Goals

Congress Investigates the Appointment of Legates to NOAA

It’s Not Climate Change, Stupid

Attenborough’s new attempt to scare people about polar bear extinction and walrus deaths

Pope Supports Classifying ‘Ecocide’ as an International Crime

The Planet’s Not Angry, But Stockman Warns The Pelosi/Newsom/Harris Climate-Howlers Are Truly Dangerous

Read it.

I remember slide rules.

A rebuttal to the Washington Post’s smear of David Legates appointment to NOAA

Scientific American Goes Full Anti-Science

The “Escalator to Extinction” Myth

Bad Policies, Not Climate Change, Main Driver of California Fires

Read it.

Somebody call the Biden campaign.

Check it out.

If, of course, that’s what you wan to do.

The resemblance isn’t all that close, but hey, it’s better than a toon-less life, innit?

Read it. 

For reference, lefties often put their pronouns in their social media bios so that other users can know whether they identify themselves as feminine, masculine, or non-binary, and address them as such, regardless of whether they’re biologically male or female. Some people even go by “they/them.” Putting pronouns in one’s bio is also seen as a show of solidarity for the trans community — not to mention a signal of woke virtue.

Carano tweeted that she hadn’t understood the meaning behind the pronouns included in woke people’s accounts until Pascal explained it to her. She wrote, “Yes, Pedro & I spoke & he helped me understand why people were putting them in their bios. I didn’t know before but I do now.” But to the chagrin of her activist fans, Carano explained that she wouldn’t include her pronouns in her bio, hence the subsequent “transphobe” condemnation.

…

Carano took it a step further however, by putting the words “beep/bop/boop” in her bio, a sarcastic play on the “he/him/his” or “they/theirs” pronouns in every woke bio that also functioned as an R2-D2 reference. That really set some people off, who accused her of and being “transphobic.”

I like it. It has texture, and scope.

ZMan pulls in some history.

Probably the only thing that everyone in modern America can agree upon is that we now live in a hyper-partisan age. The modifier is needed, as we used to lived in a mildly partisan age. Before that, American politics was about coalitions. The parties represented factions willing to compromise to some degree. Either this hyper-partisanship is a natural end point of liberal democracy, perhaps a prelude to civil war, or something happened in the last quarter century to get us here.

The first place to start is with Lenin, as he is the man credited with introducing both the term and concept into the West. The term was coined to counter objectivity in political economic analysis. Lenin rejected the idea that there is some objective good for all of society, because true objectivity is impossible when the interests of one class of society conflict with the interests of other classes. Therefore, the only rational politics is one in which you expressly advocate for the interests of your side.

Best laid plans….

Read it.

You may have heard that Joe Biden emerged from the basement to hold a staged event yesterday wooing six veterans — count ’em in the AP photo included with the FOX News story — in Tampa. The video below captures yet another of our Quotations from Dementia Joe: “Cause if you could take care, if you were a quartermaster, you can sure in hell take care runnin’ a, you know, a department store uh, thing, you know, where, in the second floor of the ladies department or whatever, you know what I mean?”

Steve Sailer runs the numbers.

Last week, The New York Times complained that whites now make up only three-fifths of the population but still hold four-fifths of the most powerful jobs in America.

…

Turnabout is fair play, so please note that the five staffers who undertook this race-counting project number one African-American and four Asian-Americans.

Read it.

CNN host Jake Tapper has exposed himself as an operative for the Democratic Party in pushing influence in a Pennsylvania congressional race, according to former Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell on Newsmax TV.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Charleston SC Junk Climate Lawsuit

Ice shelves propping up two major Antarctic glaciers are breaking up and it could have major consequences for sea level rise  Which is always promised but never actually arrives.

Smoke Has Caused Temperature Forecasts to Go Crazy

The Surface Energy Budget

Cooling The Hothouse

He’ll ‘GET US ALL KILLED.’ Mark Hamill, Bill Nye Demand Trump Panic Over Climate

No “Swamp” to See Here — EPA Quietly Hires ‘Climate RICO’ Ringleader

Severian goes Confucian.

One of my personal preoccupations is what Confucius called “the rectification of names.” There was a whole neo-Confucian movement in China as the Celestial Empire was being dragged into the community of nations in the early 18th century. One of their maxims, taken from the Master himself, was that imprecise or outright incorrect nomenclature was at the root of almost every problem. Get the words right, they argued, and the rest will follow.

Note that this is not an early iteration of Our Betters, the Liberals’, magic words. Whereas today’s half-assed Postmodernists seem to believe in the talismanic power of mere words — loudly proclaiming, with tears and suicide threats, that you’re really a woman means you are a woman, dangling whanger be damned — the neo-Confucians had a legit point. An example we’re all familiar with is the endless debate (on our side) over the meanings of the political terms “Left” and “Right.” If those were ever truly useful (except as cheers at pep rallies), they became useless once the collectivists started getting actual power.

ZMan draws a parallel.

A popular topic among those less optimistic about the American Experiment is to compare America to Rome, either the republic or empire. The former camp looks for the Sulla in the past and the Caesar in the future. The latter camp looks for evidence that the American Empire is in its final days, like fifth century Rome. The trouble with comparing America to Rome is it is not a republic. It has not been since Gettysburg and is now something closer to a radical democracy.

The more accurate historical analogy for modern America is ancient Athens. While America is not quite yet a radical democracy, that is the current path. Soon the electoral college will be circumvented, so that presidents are elected directly. The Senate was democratized a century ago. The franchise is universal and will soon extend to anyone currently standing on American soil. The last ragged bits of republic will soon be gone and America will be a radical democracy.

Emphasis on the ‘radical’.

Read it.

As protesters across the U.S. rage against policies and practices that target African Americans, Latinos and other minorities, some of the nation’s most prestigious universities are fighting a raft of legal challenges accusing them of unfairly weighting the admissions process against Asian-American and White applicants.

Yale and Harvard are set to respond this week to two of those challenges as two more make their way through the courts. The multiple efforts to defeat race-conscious admissions, including by President Donald Trump’s Justice Department, could spur an increasingly conservative Supreme Court to revisit the process, even as the U.S. is embroiled in its fiercest struggle over race and privilege since the 1960s.

Read it.

The Yan report.

Read it.

Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz (who once considered running for president as an independent), has decided to support (surprise!) Joe Biden in the upcoming election. That an extremely wealthy white man would vote Democrat is not terribly shocking. But the reasoning he gave was incredible: “What is at risk is democracy itself: Checks and balances. Rigorous debate. A free press. An acceptance of facts, not ‘alternate facts.’ Belief in science. Trust in the rule of law. A strong judicial system. Unity in preserving all of our rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Wow. Let’s go through those one at a time, shall we?

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #424

Climate change: Warmth shatters section of Greenland ice shelf  BBC.

How climate change is fueling record-breaking California wildfires, heat and smog  LA Times.

Joe Biden on the West Coast Fires: “climate change poses an imminent, existential threat to our way of life”

Countering the Left’s Climate Power Grab With Facts

Gavin Newsom’s Exceedingly Ignorant Climate Claim

Governor Newsom Orders All Trees To Wear Masks To Prevent Spread Of Wildfires  Babylon Bee.

Climate Grief Is Burning Across the American West  Wired ‘Science’.

Antarctic Glaciers Are Growing Unstable Above and Below Water  Shipping all the psychotherapists in New York City to Antarctica would solve more problems than I could count.

42-Square-Mile Ice Chunk Breaks Off From Greenland Ice Cap

Buzzfeed.

Facebook ignored or was slow to act on evidence that fake accounts on its platform have been undermining elections and political affairs around the world, according to an explosive memo sent by a recently fired Facebook employee and obtained by BuzzFeed News.

The 6,600-word memo, written by former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang, is filled with concrete examples of heads of government and political parties in Azerbaijan and Honduras using fake accounts or misrepresenting themselves to sway public opinion. In countries including India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador, she found evidence of coordinated campaigns of varying sizes to boost or hinder political candidates or outcomes, though she did not always conclude who was behind them.

If you don’t read XKCD every day, you are a poor excuse for a human being.

Read it.

Who immediately sold them on the street and reported them lost or stolen, as happened when LA School District tired the same thing.

Wait for it….

Read it

Great idea. Let’s name the first one “Gavin”.

Scott Johnson at PowerLine.

Is it possible for any of the four former Minneapolis police officers charged in the death of George Floyd to receive a fair trial? In Minneapolis? If not in Minneapolis, anywhere else in Minnesota? Is it possible that a Hennepin County jury won’t have the external effects of not guilty verdicts in mind when they retire to deliberate?

Nice city you got here. Be a shame if anything were to happen to it.

Read it.

It won’t ever happen. But I’d pay serious money to see it.

ZMan does some analysis.

One of the distinguishing features of politics in the American Empire is the phenomenon of white populism. This is something that emerged in the middle of the last century with the establishment of the American Empire after World War II. Every generation has experienced a wave of populist unrest, always in reaction to some reform movement initiated by the white elites. The elites act and the white working and middle classes react.

ZMan is sounding more and more like Mencius Moldbug.

They really do.

NYT: Secret Climate Change Oil Executive Voice Recording

Wildlife in ‘catastrophic decline’ due to human destruction, scientists warn

A Nuclear Solution to Climate Change?

Why the Left Coast is Still Burning

Fire Fanaticism

Read it.

The movement of demonstrators echoes the fluid collective responses of the animal world, as groups respond to threats and signal across large spaces.

Read it

The government’s determination to  pick your pocket produces all kinds of odd behavior on the part of people determined to resist.

Read it.

Imagine a presidential candidate taking an absurdly large number of days off right when the post-Labor Day campaign kicks off? Would that not be big news? Well, you don’t have to imagine this strange scenario very hard because it is actually happening.

The Joe Biden campaign announced that last Tuesday, the first day after Labor Day, would be a ‘lid” day meaning Biden would not only not be campaigning but he wouldn’t be taking any questions from reporters.

Scott Adams reports a delicious rumor that Biden is on dementia medication that makes him incontinent, so they have to limit his time in public. I don’t believe it, but I want it to be true.

Read it.

In his Boston Herald column today, Howie Carr gets the ball rolling for Dementia Joe, as he calls him. He collects quotable quotes from the past week. Each one is risible, not for its megalomania or falsity, but rather for its incoherence and confusion. As I have been saying, the man has half a mind to be president.

Howie observes: “Practically none of this Biden babbling ever makes the network newscasts, because the ‘reporters’ are all Democrat stenographers with press passes. The campaign seems to permit no questions except from those card-carrying comrades reliably in the satchel.”

Read it.

Truckee, Calif., is a mountain town just northwest of Lake Tahoe. It is sort of an outdoorsy paradise. It has great skiing, mountain biking and hiking opportunities, as well as a river and lakes. It also has some great restaurants and a budding art scene. And if you’re a Bay Area resident in the market for a house, it has another thing going for it: It has a median home price that’s roughly half that of San Francisco, about three hours away.

Like a lot of other vacation destinations — the Hamptons, Cape Cod, Aspen and so on — the Truckee housing market is booming during the coronavirus pandemic. It’s up over 23% since last year, according to data from Redfin, a real estate brokerage. Truckee is part of a trend that realtors and journalists are calling “Zoom towns,” places that are booming as remote work takes off.

Yeah, but you’re still in California, with California taxes and dysfunctional California politicians.