Read it.

So President Trump has decided to pet the unicorn. He has set himself up to act in the peoples’ best short-term interest and dared the opposition to sue and stop him (and thus them). He is bringing to life the meme that “They are not really after me. They are after You. I am just in their way.” And that is what voters will come to believe if the Democrats try to stop him.

For all of his alleged impulsiveness, ignorance, and stupidity, Trump keeps sinking those baskets.

Read it.

There is a number of online “alternative lifestyle” movements that have been gaining steam among millennials. They are appealing in their leanness: do more with less. At first, they seem cute and liberating. Scores of Instagram influencers and bloggers romanticize these lifestyles, and their subreddits are buzzing with zealots

…

Ultimately, these movements romanticize and hide the true generational poverty of millennials. This is a generation of people who will never retire, who may never even buy real estate of their own. In terms of intergenerational wealth, these people are screwed. And I would like to see that point raised and addressed, instead of making do with solutions of desperation.

Steve Sailer.

Has this Dunbar number theory ever been tested? It’s quite popular, but I mostly see it used in an “As everybody knows” sense.

…

A lot of people can’t deal well with criticism. They feel like they are about to be attacked by a mob and murdered when they get a few dozen tweets making fun of them. I think that’s a better application of this Dunbar Number: If people get 76 negative responses on social media, they worry, “Oh, no, the majority of my tribe of 150 has spoken out against me! I will be made an outcast and forced to wander along in the wilderness.”

Read it.

Cities—especially coastal cities in blue states—are the stronghold of Democratic political power. They’ve been the social base for radical left-wing ideas now breaking into the mainstream. Yet as Mr. Cuomo’s plea highlights, those same states and cities depend immensely on the affluent to fund their hugely expensive government programs.

Mr. Cuomo’s friends with Hamptons homes may donate to liberal causes and willingly pay higher taxes for New York’s amenities in normal times. But they probably don’t support confiscatory taxation, and they’re wary of the revolutionary mood on the left insofar as it is producing crime and disorder where they live. The pandemic may cause some to move permanently, leaving cities like New York with fewer resources to finance progressive policies.

If Democrats win the 2020 elections, they promise to raise taxes. Will they try to spare the liberal rich? If they don’t, progressive governance will come under more strain, and liberal high-earners may take a second look at a GOP offering lower rates all around.

Steve Sailer.

Egg and sperm banks like to open offices near famous colleges in order to conveniently harvest the gametes of students most in-demand by their customers. This may sound like the Pseudoscience of eugenics, but, well, you aren’t supposed to think about that.

Yes, Emissions Have Fallen. That Won’t Fix Climate Change  Wired ‘Science’.

How falling solar costs have renewed clean hydrogen hopes

This worst-case climate scenario might be the most realistic  Popular ‘Science’.

Rising Waters on Lake Michigan Are Threatening Luxury Homes

In Colombia, ‘climate-smart’ villages show how the future of farming could look

Shellenberger’s Optimistic, Viral Take on Climate Future Challenged by Scientists He Cites

Is the EU’s 30% climate budget greenwashing?

Revisiting the global hydrological cycle: is it intensifying?

Steve Sailer.

Homicide statistics in St. Louis, next door to Ferguson, MO, were perhaps the first fairly big city to reflect the Ferguson Effect of rising homicide numbers in the First BLM Era. If you stare closely at this graph of homicides in the city of St. Louis, you can that homicides were notably more frequent from late 2014 through spring of 2020 than in the half decade before BLM debuted at Ferguson (August 2014).

But in St. Louis, the Ferguson Effect is dwarfed by the Floyd Effect in June (33 homicides) and July (54) of 2020.

Read it.

President Trump conducted an impromptu press conference yesterday at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Those at the club were invited to watch the president meet the press. The American Thinker’s Andrea Widburg notes that one of the reporters opened, not with a question, but with an accusation: “You said that the pandemic is disappearing, but we lost 6,000 Americans this week, and just in this room, you have dozens of people that are not following guidelines in New Jersey, which say we should not have more than 25 people….”

Without cracking a smile, Trump put his preparation on display (video below). Andrea explicates Trump’s response with reference to Alinsky’s rules 4 (“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules”), 5 (“Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon”), and 6 (“A good tactic is one your people enjoy”).

You know that somebody is trans if ‘he’ watches the Three Stooges and doesn’t laugh.

You keep using that word….

Read it.

Ohhh, never thought of this hypothesis: that the act of getting drunk together might be a social technology that helps us verify the trustworthiness of others by inhibiting their higher cognitive functions and thus making it harder to consciously fake things. That would make sense.

I like it. It has texture, and scope.

To enhance our natural thin-slicing abilities, humans have therefore also developed various cultural practices that make these instant assessments more reliable. These techniques take advantage of the fact that deception is fundamentally a cold-cognition act and relies on cognitive control centers. This means that if we can impair the cognitive control abilities of people we’re trying to judge, we’ll do a better job of sussing them out: they will be less able to confuse our cheater-detection systems.

And it puts those of us who don’t drink in the driver’s seat. I like that a lot.

Steve Sailer.

The NYT won’t call them Antifa yet in the hopes that readers assume these are the terrifying white supremacist wreckers they’ve heard so much about and thus not be offended by this article by not getting the point.

Read it.

Guess there’s a limit to how ‘woke’ women are prepared to be.

Victor Davis Hanson.

We know where to watch in the next few weeks but have no real idea what we will be watching. Yet pundits, the media, and the Left seem giddy that their polls show a Trump slump, as if they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing from 2016. But in truth, the news cycle over the next three months may well favor Trump — a scenario his opponents no doubt deem preposterous in these dog days of August.

Read it.

Our efforts to understand the epidemic in one state are clouded by the efforts of the authorities to sustain one-man rule and the panic on which it is based. They are also clouded by the faithful alliance of the press with the authorities.

Over the past two days in Minnesota the authorities have attributed four (8/4) and 9 (8/5) new deaths to COVID-19. Seventy-six percent of all deaths attributed to the epidemic have occurred among residents of long-term care facilities. Hospitalizations continue at a level that would be indetectable under sane conditions.

“Science Made Stupid” – Carbon Dioxide & Bird Nest Edition“Science Made Stupid” – Carbon Dioxide & Bird Nest Edition

Why “Green” Energy Is Impossible

Read it.

You want paranoid/ We got yer paranoid, right here.

On the other hand, not making any preparations gives your heirs a challenge, like a Liam Neeson movie.

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!

ZMan looks at the sound track.

This connection between language and truth is useful, if we can step out of our own partisan sensibilities, in assessing the rationality of a society. North Korea is a good example of this. The gap between official truth and actual truth is so broad in many cases, it lurches into caricature. Iran is another example. Her leaders make claims that strike most people as deliberately ridiculous. This wild language is the result of a great gap between official truth and the actual truth.

Of course, this is turning up in our own society. We live in an increasingly unreasonable age, so the claims of partisans become increasingly unreasonable. The absurdity of calling Trump a dictator, for example, could be excused as fashionable exaggeration, but the people doing it are not exaggerating. Similarly, they are deadly serious when they claim he and his supported are racist, who want to bring back slavery. Their absurd language, reflects absurd beliefs by absurd people.

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