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.

ZMan’s weekly podcast, to which you really ought to subscribe. It’s only an hour, and well worth it.

I was tempted to take this week off, given that it is the sacred holiday of Juneteenth, a day when all white people are supposed to contemplate their guilt. According to this newly minted ancient custom, whites are supposed to sit at home with the shades drawn and the lights off. It’s sort of like what Jews are supposed to do on their sabbath, except there’s never any forgiveness or the possibility for salvation. This new religion is a one-way street for white people. We’re all going to Hell.

While it is not official, you can be sure our corporate tyrants will try hard to impose this holiday on us. It has already started. My bank is closing early today in celebration of Juneteenth, a holiday they just heard of last week. You can be sure the other global pirates will follow suit for next year. Then there will be a push to make it a Federal holiday, which will get no resistance. The reason for that is anyone who would resist will be silenced or threatened, as Juneteenth intended.

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.

ZMan does some history.

The general pattern in American politics, at least from the perspective of normal White people, is that the Left gets carried away with itself, then there is a snap-back followed by a calm period of putting things back in order. For example, by 1985, most normal White people thought the books were closed on the cultural revolution of the 1960’s, even if the irritants had not been removed. The culture had developed the necessary callouses to carry on with the important functions of life.

Margaret Thatcher called this the ratchet effect. The Left would push society to the left, there would be a click and that’s where things would stay for a while. Everyone would get used to the new normal, finding a way to make things work. There was never a return to the old ways, as roll back was always impossible. For the Left, what they have, they keep, so rollback requires a continuation of the bloody war that the normal white people seek to end. There is never a rollback.

This is where the ‘right side of history’ talk comes from. Proglodytes look at the past fifty years and see that every day in every way things are tending toward their positions, so they think that there is something inherent in the historical process that insures their eventual victory.

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?

ZMan waxes philosophical.

In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu outlined the motivations that drove citizen behavior in the three types of political systems known at the time. In republican forms of government, love of virtue is what motivates the people. In monarchies, it is the love of honor that motivates the actions of the people. In despotism, the people are motivated by fear of the ruler. He argued that the political system must match the inclinations of the people or it would not last.

…

Unlike the motivations behind monarchy, republicanism and tyranny, there is no structure to liberal democratic morality. There is no sacred text or body of philosophical work to provide authority. Like a school of fish, morality shifts on a dime and that new direction is assumed to be the general will and therefore the proper course. Morality in a liberal democracy is a riot with no real purpose, other than to feed the need of the people to feel they are the virtuous actor in the great drama of life.

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.

How This Strange Green Sand Could Reverse Climate Change

ZMan’s weekly podcast.

In this time of grieving and self-reflection, it is important for white people to think about their whiteness. It is what George would have wanted. In order to fully appreciate your whiteness, you must first understand blackness. This is something that gets missed in all of these discussions. Whiteness does not exist outside the context of blackness, because white people simply don’t care about whiteness. In order for them to care, they have to be surrounded by blackness.

Steve Sailer.

How much of the current craziness is a well-thought out, organized putsch in response to the coronavirus economic collapse by organizations and agencies that are funded by states and localities, which are limited in their deficit spending, to defund cops to shift money to themselves?

Steve Sailer

Does anybody remember the grocery store looting TV game show that debuted after the Watts Riots of 1965? You ran through the store loading your shopping cart for 90 seconds and the crew that grabbed the most dollar value of loot won.

Islands Might Not Actually “Drown” As Sea Levels Rise – Here’s Why

Greta Thunberg Demands Canada and Norway Stop Expanding Fossil Fuel Extraction

The Environmentalist’s Dream Came True

A Green New Deal architect explains how the protests and climate crisis are connected

Tesla’s Solar Roof Boondoggle Starts To Collapse, Company Reportedly Cancelling “Many” Orders

Dynamics of the Tropical Atmosphere and Oceans

Plastic Rain Is the New Acid Rain

Podcast: Why the Oceans Really Aren’t “Acidifying” but the Term Is Being Abused by Science and Media

Read it.

Taking it out of the hands of coward politicians.

Read it.

Facebook’s third party fact-checkers, selected by the liberal Poynter Institute, have officially labeled World Health Organization’s (WHO) statement about asymptomatic transmission of COVID-19 as “misleading.” Ironically, in April, Facebook used the WHO to disprove myths about COVID-19.

According to Healthfeedback.org, a wing of Sciencefeedback.org, two scientists analyzed a piece on CNBC and determined that the “statements by the WHO and the reporting by CNBC were misleading and imprecise.” The CNBC piece touting the WHO’s statement was covered up with an interstitial, or filter, and labeled “partially false.”

There’s an echo in here.

Sierra Club: “We’ll never stop climate change without ending white supremacy”  Yeah, we have to put the average-85-IQ people in charge if we want to sell this BS.

British Public Now More Concerned About Coronavirus Than Climate Change

Trump’s latest executive order could let agencies shirk environmental responsibility  Popular ‘Science’.

Forget Sea Level Rise: Ocean Deepening Is Here!

Read it.

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

Babylon Bee.

BILLUND, DENMARK—The world is hurting right now, and everyone knows that the only thing that can heal the wound is big corporations announcing their positions on things.

Well, we’ve taken a big step toward unity today as LEGO announced all building sets in the future would remove the police and replace them with rioters from groups such as Antifa. The new “LEGO Riot City” line of building bricks brings a real, police-less LEGO utopia right to your tabletop.

Read it.

Judging from the picture, I’ll wager that he ‘identifies’ as black.

Victor Davis Hanson.

The ancient Greeks created new words like “paradox” and “irony” to describe the wide gap between what people profess and assume, and what they actually do and suffer.

Read it.

New York City, the metropolitan area hardest hit by the domestic coronavirus outbreak, is losing residents at an unprecedented clip, according to local moving companies.

Roadway Moving President Ross Sapir, for example, told FOX Business that people are moving out of Manhattan in numbers he has “never seen before,” as his company deals with its busiest season since its 2008 inception.

“It’s insane … I’ve never seen such growth,” Sapir said. “[Business is] double or triple compared to any other season as far as moving out of the city.”

On some days, Roadway experiences a 200 percent increase in leaving inquiries. Its clientele consists largely of higher net-worth individuals, typically 25-year-old to 45-year-old professionals in well-to-do parts of Manhattan.

Most of them taking their stupid proglodyte ideas with them.

Sarah Hoyt lays it out.

I’ve said before that the left in the twenty first century seems to have a curious form of autism, in which groups are essential, and people who belong to groups are interchangeable widgets.

Not only that, but they have the duty of being interchangeable widgets. How else do you explain the left calling someone a race or gender “traitor” for not thinking exactly the thoughts the left assigned them?

This is a great part of their mind reading schtick. If you oppose them, they know that you wish for the exact opposite of what they claim to want, and therefore you must for sure want the opposite.

So, say you say something like “Sure, we should encourage girls, but we can encourage boys too.” Because — being binary — by “encourage girls” they mean “promote female supremacy” they KNOW that you want to promote male supremacy.

But it goes way beyond that, to the point that one thinks they must be robots thinking in 0s and 1s and nothing else exists in the world.