Read it.

his is a tough one for Marxists to understand, but the political reality has been apparent for quite a while: small business remains generally conservative, but big business is mostly on the Left. How can that be?

The answer is partly economic. Conservatism favors open competition and innovation. Big business is, for the most part, on the other side of those concepts. The easiest path for the largest companies is to partner with government, erecting roadblocks to upstart competitors in the form of expensive regulations, and blocking innovation so that small competitors have little choice but to sell their inventions to more established companies.

Big government likes this arrangement, too. It is easier for the government to collaborate with, and to control, six banks, say, rather than one thousand. In the modern world, big government likes big business, and vice versa.

Read it.

With school districts across the country announcing their plans for next year, it’s clear that a battle is brewing, or at least should be, between teacher’s unions and parents.

On one side, the teachers, who overwhelmingly don’t want to go back to work. And the unions, of course, have their backs, because protecting teachers is their job, despite the fact that parents know their kids need to be back in classrooms come fall.

Global Warming Is Melting Our Sense of Time  New York magazine.

A Disastrous Summer in the Arctic  The New Yorker.

A Winning Trifecta for Climate Science and Rationality

CLAIM: 100 degrees in Siberia? 5 ways the extreme Arctic heat wave follows a disturbing pattern

Vermont Senate Passes Right to Sue if the State Fails to Meet Climate Targets  Yeah, that’ll end well.

Read it.

It has now been over a month since the killing of George Floyd, and still Yale University has yet to say anything about a process to strip the painful memory of its slave-trader namesake Elihu Yale. Not even a committee to think about a process to come up with a consultation for concepts and ideas about a new name paradigm. Yale’s administrators are failing even to rise to the level of administrative bureau-speak. I keep being told that “silence is violence,” and Yale’s silence is more deafening than noise-canceling headphones!

If they removed the name, they would never get another dime from the vast majority of their alumni. Money talks.

Read it.

A suite of experiments that use the gene-editing tool CRISPR–Cas9 to modify human embryos have revealed how the process can make large, unwanted changes to the genome at or near the target site.

Read it.

Something strange happened to the news over the past four years. The dominant stories all resembled the scripts of bad movies—sequels and reboots. The Kavanaugh hearings were a sequel to the Clarence Thomas hearings, and Russian collusion was rebooted as Ukrainian impeachment. Journalists are supposed to hunt for good scoops, but in January, as the coronavirus spread, they focused on the impeachment reality show instead of a real story.

It’s not just journalists. The so-called second golden era of televi­sion was a decade ago, and many of those shows relied on cliff-hangers and gratuitous nudity to hold audience attention. Across TV, movies, and novels it is increasingly difficult to find a compelling story that doesn’t rely on gimmicks. Even foundational stories like liberalism, equality, and meritocracy are failing; the resulting woke phenomenon is the greatest shark jump in history.

Storytelling is central to any civilization, so its sudden failure across society should set off alarm bells. Culture inevitably reflects the selection process that sorts people into the upper class, and today’s insipid stories suggest a profound failure of this sorting mech­anism.

…

Inverted tropes also define the relationship between the Left and the Right. Rather than tell a new story, the Left and Right tell genre fiction that depends upon their mutual opposition for meaning. Pope Benedict XVI once argued that modernity brought the believer and the atheist closer together because the believer is tempted by doubt while the nonbeliever is tempted by “perhaps it’s true,” and both stories are linked by fundamental uncertainty. A similar dynamic ex­plains why our politics is simultaneously divisive and homogeneous. The Bass Pro shopper tells a story in which patriotism is expressed through the consumer choice to wear an American flag T-shirt. The Bushwick woman tells a story in which getting an ugly haircut makes her “nonbinary.” These stories don’t make sense unless they are told in opposition to the story of the libtard, or the patriarchy, respectively. Polarization makes political actors dependent on their political opponents, which increases divisions because any area of agreement threatens to erode entire political identities. These lazy stories find their apotheosis in our politicians.

Andrew Sullivan.

Iconoclasm is not just vandalism and violence. It is a very specific variety that usually signifies profound regime change. That’s why the toppling of old Soviet monoliths in the 1989 liberation of Eastern Europe was so salient. They were important symbols of that sclerotic Soviet empire’s power. And for true revolutionary potential, it’s helpful if these monuments are torn down by popular uprisings. That adds to the symbolism of a new era, even if it also adds to the chaos. That was the case in Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when the younger generation, egged on by the regime, went to work on any public symbols or statues they deemed problematically counterrevolutionary, creating a reign of terror that even surpassed France’s.

Severian does a deep dive.

I’m increasingly convinced that the Left have screwed the pooch. bigtime.

First, consider the argument, detailed below, that the “Left” is far from a monolith. To us outsiders, it looks like one big, shiny black obelisk of bugfuck lunacy, but it’s actually more like an avalanche — a whole bunch of little pebbles of bugfuck lunacy flowing willy-nilly in the same general direction. The general direction in which they’re flowing is, of course, “the destruction of Western society,” and that’s step two of my argument: The pebbles at the front of the avalanche believe they’re somehow controlling the avalanche… but meanwhile, the big boulders in the back know better. For them, this is endgame.

As Z Man keeps pointing out, lots of what we’re seeing in the Imperial Crapital is a palace coup. There’s open civil war on the Left. I, too, have been beating this drum for years. The orcs and their True Believer enablers in the Media are fed up with triangulation and half-measures. As radical as Pelosi, Schumer, Schiff et al seem to us, the orcs and their propagandists see nothing but geriatric White milquetoasts. They hate Boomers for the same reasons we do, but double, because while we hate them for not riding gracefully into the sunset like every previous generation, the orcs, being natural conspirazoids, see The Man keeping them down again.

Read it.

In a college Roman history class, we read Ronald Syme’s The Roman Revolution (1939). If memory serves, Syme described how Augustus became king, in fact, if not in name, while observing all the niceties of the Republic. The Senate still met but Augustus was firmly in charge. I wonder if we’re in danger of having our country decisively change while the institutions appear to continue.

In 2016, James Comey withheld from the Gang of Eight the investigation of the Trump campaign. The FBI investigation of the HRC private server was a joke and never was seriously pursued. But the pursuit of a Trump and his advisors was ongoing. Comey doubtless withheld the information from Congress because the four Republicans in the Gang of Eight would have protested. The bureaucracy felt itself a fourth part of government immune from oversight.

The First Amendment means little when the SJW mob comes after you. Citing facts only makes things worse since they are a hate crime when they subvert the narrative.

All the pieces of paper in the world won’t help you if the people in charge of the process ignore them and get away with it. Japanese American citizens found this out during World War II — the government ignored the Bill of Rights and nobody in the population was willing to call them out on it, so they were able to run roughshod over the Constitutional rights of thousands of people.

Crikey Slams Bipartisan Climate Policy Offer: “offering to deal with terrorists”

Study: Imprisonment for Climate Deniers is Too Blunt and Risky

Accusation Implodes in MN Global Warming Lawsuit

Extinction Rebellion Communication Head Quits After Researching Nuclear Power

Why Climate Change Won’t Be Stopped  Because everyone realizes it’s a scam?

The Debate Over Burning Dead Trees to Create Biomass Energy

CMIP6 Climate Models Producing 50% More Surface Warming than Observations since 1979

New Climate Assessment Suggests No Dangerous Warming

Mass spectrometry and climate science. Part II

THE CURRENT STATE OF CLIMATE ALARMISTS

Steve Sailer.

Most countries today have a problem with Statistical Racial Inequality: not all groups are as accomplished in each particular field as some other groups.

Australia, however, is apparently solving its racial inequality problem by letting white people, like this neurologist, declare themselves to be Aboriginals.

To a large degree this happens in the U.S. as sell. The traditional ‘brown paper bag and ruler’ test that ‘black’ people apply to each other gives extra prestige points for white ancestry in the ‘black community’ itself; look at the membership of the Congressional Black Caucus and see how many of its members obviously have more European than African ancestry — if Congressman Butterfield has more than 1/16 ‘black’ ancestry he certainly doesn’t show it. (I’d love to see DNA tests on all of the most prominent ‘African-Americans’, who in most other mixed-race countries — like Brazil — would be classed as ‘white’.)

Read it.

The Australian software company Atlassian is putting its new headquarters in a state-of-the-art mass timber and steel skyscraper. While the 40-story building will be the world’s tallest “hybrid timber” tower, it’s just one of among several planned mass timber constructions across the globe.

I’d love to see how well it would withstand a 747 flown into it.

Increased warming in latest generation of climate models likely caused by clouds

The Disparate Impact of California Climate Policies

Why Climate Activists Will Go Nuclear—Or Go Extinct

Now crystal clear: the left is weaponizing science for its benefit

Climate Explainer: “If humans had not contributed to greenhouses gases in any way at all, what would the global temperature be today…”  As if they would know.

Read it.

Oh, look! It’s chickens! Coming home to roost!

Read it.

Hammer tech.

Read it.

FAKE NOOSE! (yuk yuk yuk)

Read it.

Guess which party.

Go on; guess.

Climate Change? Temperature Hits 100 Degrees Above Arctic Circle, Just Like 100 Years Ago

The Arctic Is on Fire: Siberian Heat Wave Alarms Scientists

Why the Arctic Is Warming So Fast, and Why That’s So Alarming

The latest summer forecast calls for deadly heat waves  BS. They can’t even predict the weather five days out, much less months from now.

Read it.

The Orthodox come through.

Steve Sailer.

The years of antiwhite hate hysteria over nooses supposedly being planted by white racists to terrorize blacks will eventually induce some white guy to actually do it. But, judging by what we know so far about the latest brouhaha—over a purported noose found in the garage of Bubba Wallace, the half-black NASCAR race driver—Noose News seems to remain Fake Noose.

The Arctic Circle Hit 101°F Saturday, Its Hottest Temperature Ever  EVER! SINCE THE BEGINNING OF TIME!

Minerals Council of Australia Fails to Appease Climate Activists  Does anything ever ‘appease climate activists’?

Study: Demand for Vegan Soy Driving Climate Change, Brazilian Habitat Destruction

Read it.

There have been extensive randomized controlled trial (RCT) studies, and meta-analysis reviews of RCT studies, which all show that masks and respirators do not work to prevent respiratory influenza-like illnesses, or respiratory illnesses believed to be transmitted by droplets and aerosol particles.

Some science is more equal than others.

Read it.

So many wealthy people are rushing to move away from the big cities that it is creating a bit of a “real estate boom” in many suburban areas, small towns and rural communities. Fear of COVID-19, a collapsing economy and the tremendous urban violence that we have witnessed in recent weeks have combined to create a frenzy of activity. Last week, my wife and I heard from a friend in New York City that is all of a sudden desperate to move to another state, and I certainly can’t blame him for wanting to relocate. If I was in his shoes, I would be wanting to move too. But at this point so many people are all thinking the same thing that the demand for housing in certain areas threatens to greatly exceed the supply.

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.