In a warming world, New England’s trees are storing more carbon

Investors launch climate plan to get to net zero emissions by 2050

Why Progressive Activists Want to Silence the Truth About Climate Change

Read it.

It’s good to see a little pushback goin’ down.

Read it.

CNN’s Media Unit emails out a nightly newsletter titled “Reliable Sources.” It’s not always reliable, since they have a slippery grasp on what their own network is actually putting on television and online.

On August 3, Oliver Darcy led this newsletter with what he described as an “imaginary controversy” – the notion that Joe Biden might skip the presidential debates. Darcy was quoting Biden press secretary T.J. Ducklo’s spin: “Donald Trump and his allies at Fox News have decided an imaginary controversy about debates will be their latest attempt to distract Americans.” Under the header “Where it originated from,” Darcy added “Yes, there have been some NYT opinion pieces and brief chatter about why Biden should skip the debates. Personally, I’ve never taken the suggestions too seriously.”

On Twitter, Darcy’s colleague Brian Stelter agreed: “It is mostly a right-wing media tempest, fueled by hour after hour of Fox commentary (not reporting), far removed from campaign reality.”

Both these men seemed supremely oblivious to the fact that CNN.com published an opinion piece by CNN analyst Joe Lockhart arguing Biden should skip the debates….and CNN booked a subsequent Lockhart interview over the weekend on CNN’s Smerconish show. Michael Smerconish didn’t lecture his guest that he was in danger of fueling a right-wing media tempest.

Steve Sailer.

How Climate Change Panic Costs us Trillions

The Dirty Secrets of “Clean” Electric Vehicles

Ben Thompson is one of the sharpest technology analysts living.

The only thing more predictable than members of Congress using hearings to make statements instead of ask questions, and when they do ask questions, usually of the “gotcha” variety, refusing to allow witnesses to answer (even as those witnesses seek to run out the clock), is people watching said hearings and griping about how worthless the whole exercise is.

There was, needless to say, all of the above last Wednesday, when the House Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law held a hearing featuring Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, and Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook. Statements were made, gotcha questions were asked, answers were interrupted, clocks were run out, and there was a whole lot of griping about what a waste of time it all was.

To be sure, it does seem like there must be a better way to hold these hearings, particularly if the goal is to learn something new, but the reality is that genuine inquiry is much more likely to happen without the glare of the media spotlight that inevitably accompanies such a high profile hearing; what that glare will highlight is the politics of the topic in question: what do various politicians and parties actually care about, what do they think that their constituents care about, and how should those affected by said hearings respond.

In that regard last Wednesday’s hearing was a success: partisan priorities were made clear on the politician side, tech’s collective position and impact on society came into view, even as each of the companies at the hearing revealed different strengths and vulnerabilities. This article will examine all of these points, but first a caveat: this post, even more than most on Stratechery, is meant as an analysis of the politics of this hearing in particular, not a statement of values; unless I say so explicitly, I am not necessarily endorsing or condemning any particular line of argument, simply pointing it out.

Victor Davis Hanson.

In his latest incarnation as president emeritus and corporate multimillionaire community activist, we are reminded of the earlier Barack Obama of “get in their face,” “take a gun to a knife fight,” and “punish our enemies” vintage. From time to time, Obama ventures from his hilltop, seaside, $12 million “you didn’t build that” Martha’s Vineyard Estate or his tony Washington, D.C. $8 million “spread the wealth” mansion to lecture the nation on all of its racist sins, past and present.

In these outings, he seeks to advise lesser folk on how we can still find redemption (make Puerto Rico a state?), given that his own eight years as president apparently proved that the United States remains hopelessly captive to the spirit of Bull Connor and that a president such as himself—starting out with complete control of the Congress—had no power to change much.

His latest weaponization of the funeral of John Lewis revealed all the Obama signature characteristics.

Read it.

CNN’s New Day aired a segment this morning that included an interview by CNN reporter Miguel Marquez with an Arizona gun shop owner wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with “CNN” — except the ‘C’ had been replaced with . . . a hammer and sickle. His message was clear: the Communist News Network!

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #418

Pacific Islands must stop relying on foreign aid to adapt to climate change, because the money won’t last

Two Arctic ice caps have vanished as NASA reveals shock satellite images of global warming

Study Finds That ‘Chemical Recycling’ Is All Talk and No Recycling

Phys.org: “Climate change and COVID-19: The denial playbook is the same”

“An obstacle to electoral success”: Aussie Left Feuding Over Climate Policy

Climate change-fueled heatwaves could kill millions  Could.

Read it.

A drive in a European-market 2021 Porsche 911 Turbo S with matrix LEDs shows just how dumb our headlights are in the U.S.

Europe good, America bad.

Jim Goad speaks for all right-thinking people.

I’ve always been antisocial, and from my perspective, that’s society’s fault. When you see how people operate in groups, you’d realize that being antisocial is a virtue rather than a character flaw. Being antisocial merely means being wise to how people operate in groups. And it’s never pretty. That’s why I refuse to declare myself part of any movement, because it would involve being surrounded by people.

This is why I never needed government agents or social-media scolds to tell me to keep my distance. I don’t go anywhere I’m not wanted and I avoid most of the places where I actually am wanted.

Concur.

Steve Sailer.

Must be Youthful Exuberance.

Greenland Ice CO2 – Chemical Reactions or Natural Variability?

British Academics: Delay is the new Climate Denial

Satellite survey shows California’s sinking coastal hotspots

A favourite lie of the environmental movement takes another blow

Four held after British GP climate action protest

Blue crabs become scourge of fishermen in Adriatic as warming sea temperatures boost their numbers

Read it.

It may seem a stretch to compare page design with architecture, but the comparison really works, I think. Looking at the medieval page, it is not difficult to regard it as an engineered construction: a convoluted space defined by columns and corridors, with rooms inhabited by thoughts and ideas (Figure 1). Nothing encountered on the medieval page is a coincidence. Everything is there for a reason and serves a specific purpose; and so, too, is the manner in which the text was spread out over the page. Like other material features of the manuscript, page design is usually reflective of how the book would be used, but in their choices scribes also responded to the preferences – demands, even – of the individuals who would ultimately use the manuscript.

Readers, in turn, preferred their books – and the pages in them – to be formatted in certain ways because they planned to use them for performing particular tasks: to educate or be educated (teachers and students), to entertain or to be entertained (minstrels and courtiers), or to gather a body of information and consult it (scholars, preachers, physicians, lawyers). How and where words were placed on the page – their size and script, and their location – were important considerations in this process of turning the book into a tool that was up to the task. Indeed, it can be argued that a page’s design was (and is) key to a book’s success. What are some of the variables in play? And how did the choice for a certain design affect, positively and negatively, the manner in which the medieval book could be used effectively?

Page layout has ancient roots, and a considerable body of traditional knowledge. Today’s functional equivalent is web-page user interface design, and they still haven’t got it to the same degree of sophistication of those ancient scribes.

The Other McCain sniffs it out.

When President Trump first raised the accusation last month that Joe Biden is planning to destroy the “Suburban Dream Lifestyle,” I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, and half believed the media claim that Trump was just “stoking fear.” And then I investigated, and discovered that Democrats plan to abolish single-family home zoning.

Crazy? Yes, it sounds so crazy that you can’t imagine that anyone would seriously propose such a policy, but this goes back to something the Obama administration actually did (by executive order) in 2015, “tying federal community development grants to proactive efforts by communities to integrate neighborhoods,” as left-wing Mother Jonesdescribed it. This issue gets very deep very quickly, but the basic idea is that suburban communities that maintain single-family zoning thereby restrict the areas in which “affordable housing” can be built and — stay with me here — “affordable housing” is just code for homes for black people because, presumably, “black” is a synonym for poor.

‘Affordable housing’ is, almost by definition, housing that NAMs can pay for with their Federal housing assistance. You can look it up.

As a wise old Gunnery Sergeant once told me: The only good day was yesterday.

Steve Sailer.

My father’s insight in 1969 that Beverly Hills and Malibu liberals were all jumping on the environmentalist bandwagon to keep out the less privileged remains a head-slappingly rare idea in 2020. One should not underestimate liberals’ ability to vote for the smart thing locally: e.g., the Democrats lost 5 straight elections in New York City after the one term of the only black mayor, without New Yorkers adjusting their hectoring of the rest of the country at all.

Steve Sailer.

My guess is this will be adopted by the Science Proves Race Does Not Exist crowd. They are starting to wonder why they know that Race Is Only Skin Deep but everybody in 2020, including them, acts like it’s the most important thing in the world.

Surprise! Aussie Bushfire Climate Change Outrage Pivots into an Activist Demand for Cash

How to improve climate modeling and prediction

Biden’s false climate promises

Read it.

Thank God for the strict gun ban in Britain, or the place would look like Texas.

Read it.

On Friday’s New Day, CNN co-host Alisyn Camerota and reporter Kara Scannell committed random acts of journalism in discussing the newly released documents from a 2015 civil lawsuit brought by Virginia Giuffre against Jeffrey Epstein.

The documents detailed the alleged sexual abuses perpetrated upon Guiffre by Epstein and some his powerful friends, which may help to clarify the relationship between Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Shockingly, Camerota and Scannell acknowledged Giuffre’s claim that Bill Clinton visited Epstein’s Caribbean island where much of the sex trafficking purportedly occurred.

Job Interview:

“So tell me, what is your biggest weakness?”
“I’m too honest.”
“I don’t think that being too honest is really a weakness.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass what you think.”

Read it.

Darren Wilson is the former Ferguson, Missouri police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, who assaulted him. The shooting was a wholly justified act of self defense. Yet, it triggered the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s fitting that a phony justice movement originated with a phony claim of police misconduct.

Wilson has been cleared of any criminal conduct by a grand jury and by the Obama-Holder Justice Department. But the left never gives up. Thus, as Bill Otis notes, yet another prosecutor, Wesley Bell elected in 2018, reopened the investigation of Wilson.

Bell, who is African-American, gained office by attacking Robert McCulloch, the incumbent prosecutor. McCulloch led the grand jury proceeding that resulted in no indictment of Wilson. Yet, Bell reached the same conclusion as McCulloch: Darren Wilson is not guilty of any crime that could be proven to a jury under the same standards applied to everyone else.

Read it.

In the following interview, former CIA station chief Brad Johnson discusses the “Clinton body count” — the string of fatal incidents that have mysteriously befallen dozens of people who opposed, thwarted, or held damaging information on Bill and Hillary Clinton.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning….

Trump Recovers Taxpayer Cash On A $1 Billion Obama-Backed Solar Plant That Was Obsolete Before Ever Going Online

Study: Flooding Could Cost $14.2 Trillion In Asset Loss By 2100

Flooding from sea level rise could cost our planet $14.2 trillion, study says CNN.

Coastal flooding could hit nearly 20% of global GDP as climate change accelerates storms, sea level rise

The four types of climate denier, and why you should ignore them all  The Guardian. Burn the witch!

The Guardian: “The Four Types of Climate Denier…”

Wildfires, record warmth and rapidly melting ice: Arctic climate goes further off the rails this summer  Washington Post. Off the rails!

UK Academics Advocate Silencing Dissent On Climate Change & COVID-19

Increasing Arctic freshwater is driven by climate change

Severian adds it up.

There were two main reasons for the decline, both structural. The first, of course, is Communism itself. A totally ideologized society is a society totally committed to make-believe. You could fill a good-sized book listing the catastrophes make-believe caused the USSR. Just to take the most obvious: Hitler did everything but send the Goodyear Blimp over Moscow, towing a banner announcing his invasion plans. But since everyone who accurately reported the goings-on in Poland ended up in the Gulag, the Wehrmacht walked right on in.

The second has to do with the nature of totalitarian leadership. Obviously sharing power is out of the question, so every Boss who finally claws his way to the top ruthlessly purges everyone who could conceivably challenge him. The purged are replaced by yes-men and toadies, who immediately enact mini-purges of their own inside their new departments. It doesn’t take more than a few rounds of this for smarter functionaries to learn to dig themselves in very, very deep, disguising themselves in a kind of protective stupidity. A few more rounds, and “protective stupidity” drops the modifier, as anyone with anything on the ball has decamped for the safer — and, not coincidentally, very soon much more profitable — havens of technical management.

It doesn’t take long before your “leadership” is nothing but ideology-addled dimbulbs. Sound familiar?

Record number of environmental activists killed in 2019

How bad can deep sea mining be? Coronavirus is going to look like a picnic compared with what’s coming  The Guardian.

Unsolved Mysteries: Who Released The Toxic Plume Of Methane In Florida? 

New Study Predicts Global Population As Low As 6.29 Billion By 2100, Shattering Most Climate-Alarmist Models

ALERT: Warmist Eric Holthaus admits it: ‘The climate emergency isn’t about science, it’s about justice’  (Do polar bears have White Privilege?)

Anti-climate action statements get more visibility in news coverage, study finds

Read it.

The Pandemic Panic is having its intended effect. Orange Man Bad!

Freeberg sees a distinction.

Blue staters want everyone else to wear masks, so they can play alpha-dog. And so that they can see masks everywhere, because then maybe Biden will be elected. When blue staters wear their masks, they often leave them dangling around their chins, or letting their noses stick out Gavin-Newsom-style…they haven’t got a care in the world about what the masks actually do.

Read it.

And a truly superb target for Muslim terrorists. I can hardly wait.

Ann Coulter parses the taxonomy.

“Karen” and “Becky” are two neologisms with opposite meanings for the enjoyable life. Here’s your field guide.

Karen: a person, often a white woman, who feels entitled to lecture perfect strangers about their behavior.

Synonyms: “Co-op Board President”; “Hillary Clinton”; “Portland ‘Moms’”

Becky: a white woman who calls the police on a suspicious black male.

Synonyms: “Still alive”; “Breathing”

Karens used to be known as “bossy,” but then Sheryl Sandberg said “bossy” was patriarchal, misogynistic and sexist, so a new word had to be invented to describe the exact same conduct.

— A Karen will walk across the street to tell you you’re in a non-smoking area.

— She’s the person who harangues strangers (not customers) on mask-wearing — pro or con.

— She’s the Harvard Asian who made a TikTok video lecturing white people on their racism and threatening, “Ima stab you!”

The public has been crying out for a word like “Karen” ever since “bossy” was cruelly taken away from us.

Japanese Scientist Reveals When New Ice Age is Set to Begin on Earth

Philippines takes ‘major step’ toward using nuclear power

What Greta missed from skipping school: Presentation by Willie Soon

NYT: Climate Change Justifies Third World Moving North, by Steve Sailer

Six good years in a row for the polar bear subpopulation used to predict species demise

Read it.

Developer Felix Rieseberg has written a JavaScript virtual machine emulating Mac OS 8 running on a 1991 Macintosh Quadra. Wild. And because it’s an Electron app, it runs on pretty much any platform.

Gee, our old LaSalle ran great!
Those were the days!

Read it.

I guess being a RINO isn’t good enough for them.  Well, if you’re going to have a Democrat in the Senate, it might as well be an official Democrat rather than one pretending to be a Republican.

I wonder whether they do requests? There’s this guy in Utah….

New Material Can Generate Hydrogen From Fresh, Salt, or Polluted Water by Exposure to Sunlight

Checking in With the Latest Climate Change Estimates

Read it.

If you used a computer between 1997 and 2005, you probably burned valuable data to at least one recordable CD (CD-R) or DVD-R. Unfortunately, these have a limited lifespan, and many have already become unreadable. That’s why it’s important to back up your recordable discs before it’s too late—here’s how to do it.

ZMan is not optimistic.

This is a novel problem for Americans. If you are a white person in a place like Seattle, what are your options? If you abide by the law, you have your property destroyed and possibly your life threatened. People are being shot in their cars now as they try to go about their business. Gun sales are booming, but the people buying the guns imagine themselves defending their life and property within a system of laws. What happens when they realize there is no system of laws?

Read it.

The? Type Archive near Stockwell in London used to be a hospital for cab horses and circus animals, but since 1992 it has been home to every sort of mould, matrix, burin, bodkin and slug. The archive holds typographical apparatus from the last six hundred years, but its main collection relates to the technology of Monotype printing. That capital letter is important: this isn’t the single-print practice of fine artists (for ‘monotypes’, see Degas) but the huge and complex letterpress hot-metal printing system created by the Monotype Corporation in the late 1800s. Along with its competitor, Linotype, it bridged the gap – or formed the continuum – between manual letterpress printing (see Gutenberg), where a compositor arranges individual characters in rows for inking, and computerised printing. In the Monotype system, the text to be printed is freshly machine-cast from molten lead. Instead of having to assemble a book or newspaper line by line, letter by letter, the typesetter could type the text into a keyboard and a machine would issue forth its metal mirror.

I have always been fascinated by hot-type printing systems.

Read it.

Good article on the mechanism of coronavirus.

Read it.

To some American companies and Florida men, COVID-19 is apparently a war that will be won through antimicrobial blasting, to ensure that pathogens are banished from every square inch of America’s surface area.

But what if this is all just a huge waste of time?

Chemists Just Worked Out How to Recycle Some of Our Toughest Single-Use Plastics  What would we do without chemists?

Author Michael Shellenberger says climate change isn’t biggest environmental threat | TheHill

Democrats see climate change as ‘political weapon’ for picking off key Trump 2016 voters

FT: Big Fund Managers are Demanding Climate Action. But the USA is Leading a Pushback

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup # 417

Mediterranean Sea was 2 degrees hotter during Roman Empire  But that’s just so 2000 years ago….

Admission: Climate Litigation is Tool to Make Industry Bend a Knee

Read it.

Deep-pocketed and often anonymous donors are pouring over $100 million into an intensifying dispute about whether it should be easier to vote by mail, a fight that could determine President Donald Trump’s fate in the November election.

In the battleground of Wisconsin, cash-strapped cities have received $6.3 million from an organization with ties to left-wing philanthropy to help expand vote by mail. Meanwhile, a well-funded conservative group best known for its focus on judicial appointments is spending heavily to fight cases related to mail-in balloting procedures in court.

And that’s just a small slice of the overall spending, which is likely to swell far higher as the election nears.

Read it.

Congressman Jerry Nadler, D.-NY

Read it.

On Monday’s New Day, CNN co-hosts John Berman and Alisyn Camerota brought on national political reporter Maeve Reston and political director David Chalian to spout typical Democratic election-year talking points about President Trump and Republicans being “sexist.” Most appallingly, Chalian praised Joe Biden for his to plan to choose a woman as his running mate without mentioning that Biden has been credibly accused of sexual assault.

Severian does a deep dive.

If you’ll indulge me for a moment: “Identity,” variously defined, has been one of humanity’s most vexing problems from the get-go.

Is the world we perceive, the world as it actually is? How reliable are our perceptions? For that matter, how reliable is the perceiver? If we can’t trust our senses when it comes to external objects — and we all know how shaky our senses can be — then how can we trust them when they report to “us” (whatever that is) on our internal states? Ever had what the docs call “referred pain“? The pain, at least, is real, though it doesn’t necessarily hurt at the site of the injury. Ever felt mad when what you really are is scared? Nothing, it seems, is reliable. Nothing is stable.

Most people don’t interact with reality directly, but second-hand. They craft an artificial persona composed of the characteristics that they would like to have, or at least like people to think they have, and then deal with reality, not as themselves, but as if they were this fake person. This is why a lot of people get the stunned-cow look on their faces when something in real life happens to them that isn’t in the script that they are attempting to act out. This is why mass shooters have such an easy time — their victims didn’t include such a thing in their scripts, so they have no clue as to what to do and therefore panic.

This “I am the star of my own movie” attitude is essentially narcissistic, because most people are what Any Rand called “second-handers”; their opinion of themselves is determined by what other people think of them … which means they need to get other people to think of them, hence the popularity of tattoos, piercings,unnatural hair colors, and the other components of hipster fashion. If you look cool, then you are cool, by definition, regardless of the barren wasteland that constitutes your soul.

This is why “self-esteem” and “identity” is such a Big Thing among the second-handers. They have no worth except the worth assigned to them by others, so they need to be insulated from adverse inputs from the outside.

Read it.

Something strange seems to be going on with Newsweek. Although few are still aware it even exists and even fewer actually read it, they sometimes publish stories that diverge drastically from its usual liberal orthodoxy. Perhaps they are willing to sometimes commit such heresy simply to draw attention. And in the case of their op-ed column by a Yale professor of epidemiology on Thursday, they sure got the attention of anyone reading it since it utterly shattered the media taboo against hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19.