ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

I was in the diner picking up my lunch and they had ESPN playing on the television in the main seating area. They used to have CNN playing during the panic, but that was when they were not allowed to seat customers. I’m pretty sure when they were allowed to seat people again, those people complained about CNN, so they changed it to something they thought was neutral. The lunch crowd at most places, especially old-fashioned diners, is going to be old and white.

Of course, ESPN is now hate-whitey all the time. I have not watched the channel in so long I no longer recall when I last watched it. Probably a sporting event of some sort back in the before times. While I was there, they had a parade of famous blacks on to complain about white people. The absurdity of rich blacks moaning about racism is lost on the blacks, but I suspect it is not lost on whites. There were more than a few angry faces looking at the television while they chatted at lunch.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

I remember that my father habitually wore a hat until some time in the early 1960s, and then never did again. Nowadays it is very jarring to see e.g. Roger Stone wearing a hat in public; makes you wonder what he’s up to.

It seems that the only people who wear hats these days are the goobers who wear ball caps in restaurants. I hate those guys.

Steve Sailer lays out the brackets.

Facebook Accused of Allowing Climate Deniers to Promote Their Views

House “Climate Crisis Committee” issues massive meaningless wish list

2020: A Rough Year For Greta?

10 fallacies about Arctic sea ice & polar bear survival refute misleading ‘facts’

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While the old adage says that money can’t buy happiness, several studies have determined that the more your income increases, the happier you are, up until US$75,000 a year. After hitting that threshold, more income doesn’t make a difference.

But in a new analysis of more than 40,000 U.S. adults aged 30 and over, my colleague and I found an even deeper relationship between money and happiness.

Because the survey data spanned five decades, from 1972 to 2016, we were also able to see if the link between money and happiness changed over the years. That’s where things got interesting: Today, money and happiness are more strongly related than they were in the past. It seems money buys more happiness than it used to.

The toys have gotten a lot nicer.

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She’s still looking for the perfect Clinton Crustian no-show job.

Steve takes the long view.

A .17 HMR varmint round is pretty gross. It goes into an animal and blows up immediately. It’s not great for going deeply into a big creature like a human being. Most experts claim deep penetration is crucial for incapacitation, but anything that goes in a couple of inches and then wrecks a baseball-sized region of flesh is likely to discourage a 20-year-old racist snowflake who thought it would be easy to enter your home, cleanse it of scary genocidal pancake syrup, kill or enslave you and your family, and set up housekeeping.

Life is so much easier if you just RTFM.

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Hey, he forgot, alright? It could happen to anybody.

ZMan looks behind the curtain.

In ideological societies, truth is a very dangerous thing, not because it gives the doubters ammunition. Truth is dangerous because it undermines the zeal of the believers. That’s the real motivation behind this race war unleashed by the ruling class. They needed to inspire the faithful.

…

It is tempting to conclude that they cannot keep up this pace for long and will at some point exhaust themselves. That is probably true, but that point may be well beyond where we stand now. Look at the way they have reacted to the rioter in Seattle being run over and killed. Instead of sobering them up, it is becoming something of a blood sacrifice. The new religion has no limiting principle, so the limit of their fanatical zeal may turn out to be physical reality.

Steve Sailer deals with some pretty blatant cultural appropriation.

Before I finally watched Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s colossally popular Broadway musical depicting the Founding Fathers as rapping Men of Color, I had never heard that it’s so childish. I don’t know how to judge hip-hop, but after a while the endless rhymes about the Constitutional Convention started sounding less like Eminem and more like Dr. Seuss. Hamilton is like if The Butter Battle Book took two hours and 45 minutes to recite.

Steve Sailer has an idea.

What America needs is an annual Homicide Awards show where cities compete over their Achievement in the Field of Homicide. Winning mayors would receive from celebrity presenters like O.J., Phil Spector, and Ramzan Kadyrov 2-foot-tall figurines of a criminal firing a Hi-Point held sideways, the Homie.

The Arctic Is On Fire, and We Should all Be Terrified  Terrified!

A heat wave thawed Siberia’s tundra. Now, it’s on fire.  On fire!

The law that could make climate change illegal  BBC.

Bushfire Royal Commission: Climate Change has “Gone Nuclear”

*False Alarm*, the new book by Bjorn Lomborg

Litigation Against Fossil Fuel Producers Is An Obnoxious Money Chase

Arctic Siberia saw exceptionally high temperatures as global warmth matched last year’s record levels for June

Activists have shut down two major fossil fuel pipelines—at least for now

It’s time to grieve the world we’ve lost to climate change—and start to move on  And for God’s sake shut up about it already.

Read it.

Why subject yourself to a Democrat dystopia if you can escape?

Check it out.

We publish very short science fiction as broadly defined: sf, fantasy, slipstream, etc. Please read today’s short story below. Browse topics in the sidebar, and read what intrigues; subscribe via email to receive each story in your inbox for free; and consider becoming a paying member to ensure we can keep paying authors and providing stories to all.

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Harvard will be teaching solely on-line this fall (with some students in residence), yet charging full tuition rates. Many commentators are thus suggesting this supplies evidence for the signaling theory of education.

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Not just ‘rich’, not just ‘super-rich’, but MEGA-RICH! So if you’re one of the merely rich, you can forget about it.

(Journalism 101: It’s never ‘the right’ but always ‘the ultra-right’; it’s never ‘the rich’ but always ‘the mega-rich’.)

The Guardian: “Stop making sense: why it’s time to get emotional about climate change”

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #415

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Within the past few years, the US Food and Drug Administration has approved Farydak for treating multiple myeloma, Avycaz for abdominal infections, Vraylar for schizophrenia, Idelvion for hemophilia, Luzu for athlete’s foot and Byvalson for high blood pressure.

Saying these names aloud, some may hear a strange and lovely music, while others may imagine aliens arriving from distant planets. Similarly, naming a drug is a complicated process.

Claim: Global Warming Could Stress Tropical Plants  Quick! To the therapists, Batman!

Michael E. Mann – wrong again

Weaknesses of solar and wind, Myths and Questions that require an answer

Claim: 60% of Fish Can’t Cope with Worst Case Global Warming

Read it.

On Friday night’s PBS NewsHour, David Brooks gaffed. He called the Lincoln Project of ex-McCain advisers the “Jefferson Project.” He claimed they are conservatives, Trump is merely an anti-leftist.

“Republicans for Biden” is very exciting for all the leftists at PBS, who take conservative money and make Democrat propaganda. David Brooks is precisely this kind of fraudulent pseudoconservative supporting Biden each week.

Anti-leftist is enough for me; I don’t care about conservative.

Freeberg does a deep dive.

A third of a century into arguing with them on the Internet, I’m still struggling to figure out what the true difference is between liberals vs. normal people who think competently.

A lot of it has to do with feelings. When we grown-ups make a decision feeling a certain way, we are troubled by the possibility that deciding it at another time, with the facts remaining the same, in a different mood we might make a different call. This inspires reflection: Would we be wrong then, or are we wrong now? To a liberal, that proclivity toward emotional reasoning is a feature and not a bug. It seems like they live in a world in which all feelings have to be expressed, and making decisions about things is just another way of expressing them.

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Once upon a time in America, we had nice things.

Steve Sailer.

One of the biggest events in recent American history to be almost completely memoryholed is what happened to white ethnic urban neighborhoods due to racial integration in the second half of the 20th Century. Tens of millions of living Americans have first hand memories of these enormous events, but nobody wants to hear from them. This is particularly peculiar, since many of the children and grandchildren of the victims are bright people, some with jobs in the media.

At the Core of the Climate Crisis  The New Yorker.

Open Democracy: “Why don’t we take climate change seriously? Racism is the answer”

Arctic’s ‘Hottest Day’? Not So Fast

Not the End of the World

Hot Summer Epic Fail: New Climate Models Exaggerate Midwest Warming by 6X

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If ever there were a left-wing partisan, it would be Rosa Brooks. Her leftist resume includes serving as special counsel in George Soros’s foundation. She also held two different jobs in the Obama administration. And as I chronicled back in 2006, she was a virulent hater of then-President George W. Bush, analogizing him to Hitler, and enumerating the various ways in which she hated everything he did and stood for.

So it is nothing short of a fraud upon the public when Brooks and her comrades try to pass off as “non-partisan” a “project” she has devised whose clear aim is to stampede voters into handing Joe Biden a landslide victory.

Brooks’s so-called Transition Integrity Project has war-gamed four different election scenarios. In three of them, President Trump illicitly schemes to hold onto power. The only scenario guaranteeing “integrity” in the transition, and avoiding a “constitutional breakdown,” is the one in which Biden scores such a smashing win in both the popular vote and the Electoral College that Trump is helpless to overturn it.

At the Core of the Climate Crisis  … is a left-wing political agenda. The New Yorker.

100.4 degree Arctic temperature record confirmed as study suggests Earth is warmest in at least 12,000 years  CBS News.

Climate Scientist: “Anyone who wants to predict the future of the permafrost should be sure to keep the beaver in mind.”

Only Six Months to Save the Planet!

House Democrats just put out the most detailed climate plan in US political history

ZMan does the necessary.

As the inner party feverishly tries to create enthusiasm for a second panic over the coronavirus pandemic, it is a good time to take a look at what has actually happened with the virus to this point. It is easy to forget, given the fire hose of nonsense that comes at us every day, but we were all supposed to be dead by now. Maybe not all of us, but a lot of us, a lot more than actually died. Instead, most of us are here, social distancing and wearing humiliation masks to please the rulers.

In fairness to the people who made the initial projections, the only way to get any attention in this age is to make outlandish claims. Everything about the modern media culture has evolved to reward the freaks, the crazy and the outlandishly dishonest, so the model makers probably felt they were doing the right thing. They wanted the rulers to treat the virus as a serious threat, so they were okay with rolling out doomsday predictions that were not grounded in reality.

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To this point, 71 percent more Americans have died in New York nursing homes than have died in the entire state of Florida, which not only has a larger population but a population that skews older. To this point, New York’s death rate has been ten times larger than Florida’s. So, naturally, liberals are busy concocting a narrative that holds that the failures of the American response to coronavirus have been the fault of Trumpian nihilists in the Red States.

The “toxic imbecility” of Republicans is getting people killed, writes Max Boot. “Trumpism, not polarization, drives America’s disastrous coronavirus politics” says Ezra Klein. Some pundits who push this myth, Paul Krugman in particular, had even had the temerity to suggest that the country look to New York State for advice.

I can’t think of any circumstance where anyone ought to look to New York state for advice.

Claim: New research shows the South Pole is warming faster than the rest of the world

Select House Members push “Climate Crisis” Action Plan

The Climate Model Muddle

MET Office: Climate Change will Force the UK to Endure French Holiday Weather

California developer of ‘micro’ nuclear reactor aims to prove environmentalist doubters wrong

Molten Salt Reactors Are Nuclear’s Future. How Do We Get There?

The South Pole has been warming at three times the global average over the past 30 years, study says  CNN.

Forbes Censors Award-Winning Environmentalist’s Apology Over Three-Decade ‘Climate Scare’ – So Here It Is

On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare

Pro surfers hit artificial waves in the heat of the climate crisis

Guillotine Placed Outside Jeff Bezos’ D.C. Home by Anti-Amazon Protesters

The Calamity of Models – Podcast with Willis Eschenbach

Polar bear habitat in Canada and eastern Alaska compared at end of June 2012-2020  More throw pillows, not as many ash trays?

House Dems Unveil Aggressive Plan to Tackle Climate Change  At your expense, of course.

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Harvard has announced it will lift a blacklist on unrecognized single-sex student organizations, including fraternities and sororities, following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County.

…

“The court accepted the plaintiffs’ legal theory that the policy, although adopted to counteract discrimination based on sex, is itself an instance of discrimination based on sex,” Bacow continued. “In reaching this view, Judge [Nathaniel] Gorton relied heavily on the reasoning in one of the appellate decisions (Zarda v. Altitude Express) that was affirmed by the Supreme Court [in Bostock]. It now seems clear that Judge Gorton would ultimately grant judgment in the plaintiffs’ favor in the pending lawsuit.”

Perhaps someday soon we can convince the Supreme Court that ‘affirmative action’ preferences are in fact racist.

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People who aren’t in long-term care and don’t have certain serious pre-existing conditions face very little risk. Almost none of the deaths from COVID-19 occur among people in that category. Leave the bars and restaurants open, and let the virus spread among the healthy so that they develop the antibodies. Then they will no longer spread it, and it will die out in due course, whether a vaccine is developed or not.

The ginning-up of panic over a “second wave” of COVID has already begun. It’s designed to do economic damage (which is always bad for an incumbent president) and induce the states to implement mail-in ballots, which should be more than enough to elect Joe Biden.

In any case, masks are widely considered ineffective. They simply serve as a signal. They say: “I’m a drone in the Hive.”

And let’s face it: the disease itself is mostly a hoax. Now that millions of people are being tested, the incidence of positives is increasing, but the death rate keeps dropping rapidly. That is, the coronavirus is mostly killing people in nursing homes and similar facilities. When it’s done scything its way through those institutions, there are hardly any victims left to kill off.

At this point, the crisis is an entirely political operation.

Michael Schellenberger: “On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare”

Matt Taibbi.

A core principle of the academic movement that shot through elite schools in America since the early nineties was the view that individual rights, humanism, and the democratic process are all just stalking-horses for white supremacy. The concept, as articulated in books like former corporate consultant Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility(Amazon’s #1 seller!) reduces everything, even the smallest and most innocent human interactions, to racial power contests.

It’s been mind-boggling to watch White Fragility celebrated in recent weeks. When it surged past a Hunger Games book on bestseller lists, USA Today cheered, “American readers are more interested in combatting racism than in literary escapism.” When DiAngelo appeared on The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon gushed, “I know… everyone wants to talk to you right now!” White Fragility has been pitched as an uncontroversial road-map for fighting racism, at a time when after the murder of George Floyd Americans are suddenly (and appropriately) interested in doing just that. Except this isn’t a straightforward book about examining one’s own prejudices. Have the people hyping this impressively crazy book actually read it?

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Colorism, the bias against people of darker skin tones, has vexed India for a long time. It is partly a product of colonial prejudices, and it has been exacerbated by caste, regional differences and Bollywood, the nation’s film industry, which has long promoted lighter-skinned heroes.

Oh, it’s olde than that. Varna, the term used in India for the complicated hereditary caste system, literally means ‘color’, and the lighter your skin color the higher in status you are. I suspect that it’s a relic of the Aryan invasion of India staring around 2000 BC.

Steve is learning at long range.

Speaking of dangerous, this weekend, I saw something that should sober up every cocky soy merchant out there who thinks it will be easy to overrun America, loot houses, and confiscate guns. I was in a room full of very ordinary conservative American outdoorsmen, and every one of them could kill a person, or group of people, easily at 500 yards. The instructors could shoot well over 1000 yards, and there are a lot of other snipers and competitors like them.

One of the teachers is a hunting guide. He goes to Alaska and helps bear hunters. He knows how to live in the wilderness. He’s tough. He is a combat veteran. He seems like a nice guy, but anyone who tries to pull anything near his home and family could end up feeding crows and possums, fast. Based on the things I heard him say about his military history and his feelings about leftists who might try to start a civil war, he is one of the last people on earth I would want to upset.

There is a huge number of people with similar skills all over the US. I don’t think leftists understand this. Leftists tend to be very ignorant about firearms and the outdoors. They don’t know what the people they hate do for fun.

I wouldn’t mind learning how to shoot accurately at over 1000 yards.

Steve Sailer.

For example, today when yet another delegation of Mostly Peaceful Protesters broke through a gate and onto private property in St. Louis, a rich couple who have painstakingly restored one of the city’s most magnificent mansions brought their guns out onto their porch to make sure the mob kept moving on past. New York Timeseditorialist Binyamin Appelbaum immediately explained the antiquarian angle that justifies breaking and entering….