Read it.

Is nothing sacred?

Well, there’s always the ‘use a picture of Ben Stiller’ trick.

Read it.

While we’re on the subject of selective indignation, the Great Repudiators will stand exposed as shameless hypocrites if they don’t loudly demand that Yale University change its name, for it is well known that the university’s namesake Elihu Yale was not just a slave-owner but a slave-trader—an act the United States made a capital offense decades before it got round to abolishing slavery. We know they won’t change it—and we all know why, though of course the oh-so-race-sensitive leaders of Yale won’t admit it publicly. Alumni would be furious and donations would plummet, and I suspect even radical black students at Yale wouldn’t want the name changed. Symbolism is one thing, but having “B.A., University of New Haven” on your CV just won’t sound as prestigious.

Note; There actually is a University of New Haven, and it languishes in (perhaps deserved) anonymity.

‘The Politician’ Battles ‘Climate Catastrophe’ This Election Year

The Green Civil War

Wind Energy in Scotland

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #412

Greenhouse effect: “How a cold atmosphere can warm the Earth’s surface”

Greens promote child slave labor and ecological destruction

Judges Acknowledge how Climate Litigation Proponents Try to Undermine Rule of Law

Mass die-offs in marine mammals are accelerating, and climate change will only make it worse  Popular ‘Science’.

How green sand could capture billions of tons of carbon dioxide

India Confirms No Increase in Tropical Cyclones Due to Climate Change

Read it.

Good luck with that.   Your data is how all this Free Stuff Online gets paid for.

Babylon Bee.

Hard to tell these days what is satire and what isn’t.

The Other McCain is on the case.

When I first saw this angle tipped yesterday by Wayne Dupree, I couldn’t believe it. If you saw the video on social media, you probably guessed that the white girl setting fire to Wendy’s was some kind of Antifa radical. To discover she may be Rayshard Brooks girlfriend? Whoa!

Study: Solar Geoengineering Could Weaken Rainfall

BASTASCH: It’s Now Clearer Than Ever Before, Science Bends Itself To Fit Left Wing Politics

The Green Civil War

Pope Says Coronavirus Should Spark New Environmental Awareness  Yeah, it ought to make us aware that ‘scientists’ are just guessing more often than not.

To Solve Climate Change: “stringent eco-taxes …, wealth redistribution … a maximum income, a guaranteed basic income … reduced working hours”

The Glories Of A Post-Modern Society…Feel-Good Projects That Are Divorced From The Cold Reality Of Physics And Engineering And Actual Data

Read it.

For those not following along at home, Mayor Bill de Blasio holds a personal grudge against these rebellious Jews. Many Orthodox Jews continued to hold gatherings during the NYC lockdown. When Orthodox Jews held a public funeral, de Blasio threatened to arrest them.

Mind you, the event organizers actually met with NYPD to arrange their event in the safest possible manner. Can the same be said of the Black Lives Matter protests? While I wouldn’t advocate the arrest of anyone holding a peaceful gathering, why has de Blasio encouraged those protests while threatening funeral attendees?

Other Brooklyn Orthodox Jews have been outraged that playgrounds are closed. Why can people march in the streets if children can’t play on a playground? So the rebels did what good rebels do: They brought bolt cutters and reopened the parks themselves. When new locks arrived, they cut them again. Thus far, they’ve cut the locks 25 times.

Steve has a jaundiced view.

According to a well-known former Republican, the reason Trump’s rally didn’t do well is that leftist liars took a large number of tickets fraudulently. Left-leaner Steve Schmidt, who worked as a strategist for people like McCain and Schwarzenegger, brags that his daughter and her friends have hundreds of tickets. Legislator and former bartendress Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez also bragged about the fraud and said she was proud of the people who had done it.

It’s a sickening moment. People who hate Trump are too stupid and immature to understand that subverting democracy is a great evil.

Some time ago, I predicted that America would one day be ruled not by Democrats or Republicans but by people with smartphones. I said technology’s ability to coordinate people was getting so strong, we would reach a point where elections and laws would lose their power. Everyone can’t be in the police or the national guard. It’s impossible to control Americans when a sufficient number of them are united in real time by gadgets. It looks like we’ve just seen a big step toward true technocracy administered by complete idiots. The Beast is discovering his hands.

Read it.

A handy compendium of tools to get you a better job.

Mass spectrometry and climate science. Part I: Determining past climates

Sky News: Aussie Royal Commission to Investigate how Climate Activists “Hijacked” Forestry Management

Claim: People Believe in Global Warming, But Choose Not to Act

Thunberg Has Hope for Climate, Despite Leaders’ Inaction

When ‘Social Justice’ Comes to Investing  Not by choice, of course, but by government edict.

Read it.

Which doesn’t mean that they’re going to die, nor does it mean that they’re going to give it to anybody else who is going to die. The truth is that this disease has proven to be no more serious than the flu that we go through every year; the major difference is that we have vaccines for flu and we don’t (yet) for coronavirus.

Read it.

On that basis there are a dozen corporations that owe me a total of $500,000.

Read it.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

John Derbyshire.

The brave spirits of Seattle originally named their new country Chaz, for Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. Just as all that was in play, we learned that Chaz has renamed itself to Chop, the Capitol Hill Organized Protest. Why? I asked around.

Apparently the authorities in Chaz were immensely flattered to see themselves being compared to French Revolutionaries. Now, a thing everyone knows about the French Revolution—even, I guess, the drug-addled, low-IQ, miseducated rabble running Chaz—a thing everyone knows is that the revolutionaries chopped off the heads of the former ruling class, including the king and queen, with the guillotine.

“That’s what we’ll do!” the Seattle mob is telling us by renaming themselves Chop.

Read it.

Relocation, at the moment, is only by wealthy folks, who still have the financial mobility to move as the real economy implodes and paralyzes the bottom 90% of Americans. Even with a good credit score, lenders are not preapproving folks like they once were. Many people over the years flooded into San Francisco as the economy boomed, and tech flourished. Now with an economic downturn, social unrest, and pandemic — the city is becoming too dangerous to raise a family.

Guess they found out what ‘vibrant’ really means.

Low-cost solar-to-hydrogen cell achieves breakthrough 17.6% efficiency

The Mystery of Antarctica’s Record Drop in Sea Ice Has Been Solved

Al Gore Hails Al Roker’s ‘Consistent Advocacy’ on Climate Change  To which nobody pays any attention whatsoever.

Polar Bears and Climate Scares – the Real Truth Behind the Issue

Read it.

Bernie Sanders fan Joe Rogan – who admitted in April that he’d rather vote for President Trump Trump over former Vice President Joe Biden – says the left-wing media is ignoring Biden’s cognitive decline.

Megan McArdle is always worth reading.

The left’s long march through the centers of culture has influenced mainstream values, and conservatives saw tech employees being fired for opposing gay marriage, bakeries shut down by civil rights commissions, and their own employers “inviting” them to publicly declare themselves allies of various social justice causes, removing even the option of keeping tactfully quiet on the job. Of establishment Republicans who said moderation was the path to political power, they demanded to know what all that power was for, if not to protect them from this sort of thing.

Thus, instead of a moderate conservative who would defer to liberal sensibilities on touchy issues such as immigration, they chose a champion whose superpowers were reflexive belligerence and utter indifference to social mores. When the GOP establishment warned that nominating Trump would end with Democrats running things, the base responded, “So would nominating one of you.”

The civil war that ensued saw Schwarz’s iron law working in both directions: Both the #NeverTrumpers and the Trumpists were willing to lose the election before they’d allow the other side to run the party. Come November, both sides may get their wish.

Joel Kotkin.

I may have already linked to this, but better too many references than too few. The economic and demographic changes in this country, of which California is on the leading edge, are pretty disturbing. People need to figure out where we are going so that they can prepare to cope, and in order to know where we are going we need careful and comprehensive analysis of the changes that are occurring. I don’t buy all of Kotkin’s analysis, but at least he’s asking the right questions and putting up a structure for discussion.

Read it.

The talks appear to have faltered over a recurring issue: Ethiopia’s refusal to accept a permanent, minimum volume of water that the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, or GERD, should release downstream in the event of severe drought.

Arctic Ocean acidification worse than previously expected

Kevin Williamson.

The Washington Post has published a 3,000-word exposé, a double byline for two senior staffers, about the fact that a woman nobody’s ever heard of at a Halloween party years ago wore a costume that somebody didn’t like. The woman has, of course, immediately been now fired from her job.

Tom Toles, the liberal Washington Post cartoonist who hosted the party and then lied when asked about it, has not lost his job, as of this writing. It’s nice to be in the family.

With thanks to Bluebird of Bitterness, who always has the best cat pictures.

Ann Coulter points out that we now live in Fantasyland.

Quick! Who was Fort Bragg named after? What did he do? Do you even know his first name? When you have to Google the guy on a statue to figure out who he is, maybe it’s not really the daily humiliation you claim it is.

Anybody who doesn’t know who Braxton Bragg is without looking him up is probably a product of the modern public school system and therefore one of the victims.

But she has a point.

How about a bill withholding all federal funds from Yale University until it changes its name? The school’s namesake, Elihu Yale, was not only a slave owner, but a slave trader.

I’m good with that.

Steve Sailer.

With the news that Quaker Oats is canceling its Aunt Jemima maple syrup, because, well, nobody associates blacks with good cooking anymore, I’m reminded that one of the funnier biographical patterns is that two frontmen of the leftist 1990s rock group Rage Against the Machine have the two most Obama-like biographies imaginable.

Read it.

Think of it as evolution in action.

The Conversation: 21% of Rural Australia Ignores Climate Change News

To Halt Climate Change, We Need an Ecological Leninism

Millions of abandoned oil wells are leaking methane, a climate menace

Read it.

The biter bit.

Charlie Cooke, one of the few remaining good writers at National Review.

We know Google can’t be evil, because it says it’s not, and that’s how reality works now. But what about stupid?

Steve Sailer.

What happens to America’s big blue cities when The Establishment switches sides from the cops to the blacks? Our elites appear intent on trying that experiment once again, although we have been through a couple of highly relevant historical examples that they ought to recall first.

Because blacks, despite making up only about one-eighth of the population, have accounted for the majority of homicide offenders in recent decades, overall long-term murder rates tend to be driven by the authorities’ attitudes toward African-Americans: indulgent or hardheaded?

Thus, the first Black Lives Matter era (2014–2016) saw the total number of homicides in the U.S. grow a record-setting 23 percent in two years. Moreover, the most spectacular exacerbations of homicide rates happened precisely where BLM won its most famous political victories over the police, such as St. Louis, Baltimore, Chicago, and Milwaukee. By this point, Black Lives Matter has gotten more incremental blacks murdered than all the lynchings in American history.

Read it.

When I tell other middle-class professionals who don’t know me well that I’m writing a book about working-class culture, it’s amazing how often they respond approvingly that “white racism” is an important subject. My reaction, depending on the circumstance, ranges from embarrassment to rage.

It’s frustrating that “working class” reads as all white to so many people who should know better. And it pisses me off that so many educated people assume that the white part of the working class is either uniformly racist and/or that racism is the most distinctive part of their culture. And it often seems there is a background assumption that little or no racism exists among the educated middle class, that all white racism is contained within the working class.

UN: Covid-19, Climate Change and Racial Justice are all Linked  Not to mention UFOs and crop circles.

A carbon sink shrinks in the arctic

What if NASA’s new ocean satellite finds sea level rise isn’t the problem it’s touted to be?  We’ll never hear about it.

David Cole looks at those pesky facts.

There will, by necessity, be an element of self-indulgence in this week’s column. It’s not possible for me to broach this topic without invoking my own circumstances; my apologies in advance.

Let’s start by acknowledging a simple fact: There is no black genocide in the U.S. Period. You can count the number of unarmed American blacks fatally shot by cops in 2019 on your fingers.

Again, there is no black genocide. Certainly not at the hands of cops or whites in general (and even the black-on-black death toll doesn’t rise to “genocide” levels).

Read it.

Well, let’s see: We can (a) live in a rustic paradise with other people like us and servants who know which side their bread is buttered on, or (b) stay in town and maybe have our fancy homes invaded and burned by roving mobs of Underclass thugs.

Boy, that’s a real head-scratcher….

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #412

No early breakup for W Hudson Bay sea ice again this year: polar bears still on the ice

Forbes: Plunging Renewable Energy Costs Should be Answered with Massive Federal Funding  I mean, after all, we’ve got all of this extra money….

Read it.

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

Read it.

The disease isn’t over, but the hysteria is. For many, the turning point came when public health “experts” who had bitterly denounced demonstrations against shutdowns as health hazards, responded to the Black Lives Matter riots with silence and, often, enthusiastic endorsement. That lasted until President Trump announced his intention to resume holding rallies. Once again, we are told that public gatherings are a vitally important health threat. It isn’t hard to understand the game that is being played here.

Read it.

News is about providing readers with information. The opinion section is about providing readers with arguments. Readers use the information to become more informed, and better able to understand, respond to, disagree with, or otherwise digest the arguments. This process makes them better citizens. Journalism thus plays a very important civic function.

Unfortunately, only the last line in that paragraph is true.

…

In a recent blog post, the economist Tyler Cowen got it exactly right when he wrote “the feature of media that actually draws viewer interest is how media stories either raise or lower particular individuals in status… The status ranking of individuals implied by a particular media source is never the same as yours, and often not even close.”

These implicit status rankings are baked into almost every aspect of how journalism, from how a lede is written to who to quote and in what order, photo selection, headlines, font size, you name it. Print media is particularly prone to this, since the geography of a newspaper is essentially one big status playground. (I’ll never forget the time I got an angry call from a reader for burying a story above the fold on the front page. The sin was that the story he thought deserved more play was lined down the rightmost column of the page, while another (lesser) story ran across the top three columns.)

Hey! That’s MY superpower!

EU Agrees to Weaken Climate Change Rules for Aviation

In Alaska, Summer’s Getting Too Hot for the Salmon Run  Wired ‘Science’.

Genome-edited crops help farmers and environment

I wish I had thought of that.