Read it.

Blacks commit around 70 percent of black-white interracial homicides. I take it that, as a statistical matter, the “expected” number is 50 percent for all forms of black-white interracial violent crime.

Is the vastly disproportionate number of violent crimes by blacks against whites explained by black racism? Not necessarily. It might be the product of the disproportionate propensity of blacks to commit violent crimes against anyone. But the explanation must be racism, criminality, or both.

Alex Tabarrok, a Real Economist.

The post below, Police Union Privileges, from 2018 is worth revisiting. As I wrote in a follow-up, police union privileges are only one part of a system and reform requires system-thinking. Nevertheless, getting rid of these special privileges, including so-called qualified immunity and restoring the equal rule of law are good places to start. Need I also mention that police should not keep fines and forfeitures–the negative consequences of which I documented in To Serve and Collect, my paper with Makowsky and Stratmann.

Thousands of Species Are Fleeing to Earth’s Poles en Masse, And a Pattern’s Emerging

Anti-Trump Republican group attacks Trump on race in new ad

Wooden Turbine Towers Promise To Push Wind Industry To Greater Heights

Transnational UK Supreme Court Ruling May Open the Floodgates for Global Climate Change Lawsuits

Plastic’s Back! COVID Contamination Concerns Crush California’s “Green” New Deal

UNSW: “Is COVID-19 the dress rehearsal for climate change?”  As a politically-motivated panic? Could be….

TURNER: Models Can’t Accurately Predict Next Week’s Weather, So Why Should We Trust Them To Predict Climate Change?  Shut up, slave!

Annnnnnd…another Canadian polar bear subpopulation is increasing

Hint: Yes.

Read it.

An excellent analysis of a key scene in The Two Towers, both in the books and on film.

I do this kind of thing all the time. My wife hasn’t complained yet.

Study: Integrating satellite and socioeconomic data to improve climate change policy

Destroying the environment to save it

Read it.

If all of the rioters got the coronavirus, I doubt that anyone would be seriously upset. I know I wouldn’t.  Perhaps the CDC ought to dispatch a brigade of academic Karens to quell the riots. That would be amusing.

Read it.

About fargin time.

UPDATE: The Communist Origins of the Antifa Extremist Group

Actually, I doubt that any three people in the AntiFa organization have the wit to be Communists.

UPDATE: Watch: Rioter Sets Himself On Fire Trying To Torch Building  Case in point.

Read it.

I remember that smell. Those were the days.

No asteroids needed: ancient mass extinction tied to ozone loss, warming climate

Humpbacks bounce back from near extinction to help fight climate change  I wonder whether they get free T-shirts.

People Drawn to Conspiracy Theories Share a Cluster of Psychological Features  Proponents of climate-change hysteria are fond of tagging their critics as ‘science-deniers’, ignoring how often their ‘science’ is demonstrated to be mythology. The latest trend is to shovel the non-woke into various psychological boxes, the way the old Soviet government did with dissidents. (They wouldn’t dream of doing that with LGBTQ+ people, of course.)

NYT Op-Ed: ‘Stop Eating Animals’ If You Care About Climate Change, Racial Justice and Working Poor

“Well, lads, there’s a man’s work ahead of us this day.”

Name the movie.

Read it.

And that’s really all it takes.

Both conservatives and liberals want a green energy future, but for different reasons

Read it.

That’s new.

Claim: Aussie Fire Chiefs “gagged”, Ordered not to Talk about Climate Change

Read it.

Starting to look that way.

Read it.

LinkedIn Co-Founder Reid Hoffman, who notoriously backed a group that “spread disinformation during the 2017 Alabama special election for U.S. Senate,” is now being joined by other Big Tech billionaires in a plot to boost presumptive Democratic nominee for president Joe Biden in 2020.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

Scott Adams: “One of the funniest stories is that Democrats are getting panicked that the economy might come back too quickly.  It might come back too quickly, and before the election.”

Read it.

I sat down at a restaurant the other day; it was slow, as most dining rooms have been the last two weeks. I live by myself and like to talk, so I like having conversations with the wait staff fairly often. I can’t remember the comment I had (something about a COVID impact on the restaurant I think), the lovely lady said, “You can’t see it but I am smiling behind this mask.”

If you look at the actual data, the overwhelming majority of coronavirus victims who have died were elderly people with pre-existing conditions in long-term care facilities.  This whole ‘wear a mask’ business is politically-motivated fetishism, ‘I am wearing the Magic Mask and therefore I am safe from the Demon Covid-19!’.

UPDATE: 98.1% Of ‘COVID-19 Deaths’ In Massachusetts Had An Underlying Health Condition

Read it. And listen to the podcast.

On today’s show we discuss the biggest lies told about coronavirus, including the ones that led to the lockdown.

We also discuss the House changing the rules so members no longer have to actually show up to work, Nancy Pelosi seeing opportunity in the pandemic and Joe Biden breaking wind.

Read it.

Talk about your niche markets….

Read it.

And as DNA synthesis gets cheaper and cheaper, biological engineers are coming up with more and more clever ways to put DNA to good use. Some you might expect, such as in the life sciences where it can make futuristic cancer drugs and personalized medicine. Others are a little more surprising, such as how the chemical industry is turning to biology as the preferred method to manufacture high-performance bio-electronics for the phones in our pockets.

The Extraordinary Way We’ll Rebuild Our Shrinking Islands

Paris Agreement Architect: “… Governments Are Failing To Protect Citizens From COVID-19, Climate Change”

NYT Op-Ed: ‘Stop Eating Animals’ If You Care About Climate Change, Racial Justice and Working Poor

Read it.

A writer in Time magazine attempts to explain Flyover Country to the Crustians who read it.

Read it.

“We are about to see the best economic data we’ve seen in the history of this country,” says a top former economic adviser to Obama.

Instead, he believes, the way to think about the current economic drop-off, at least in the first two phases, is more like what happens to a thriving economy during and after a natural disaster: a quick and steep decline in economic activity followed by a quick and steep rebound.

The Covid-19 recession started with a sudden shuttering of many businesses, a nationwide decline in consumption and massive increase in unemployment. But starting around April 15, when economic reopening started to spread but the overall numbers still looked grim, Furman noticed some data that pointed to the kind of recovery that economists often see after a hurricane or industrywide catastrophe like the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Prior to the pandemic imbroglio, Trump presided over the best economic performance of any President in my lifetime. It would be very easy to make the case that the existing super-strong economy is what is making the recovery very resilient — so, even if the economy is still weak at election time, Trump can point out that it would have been far worse without the prior ginormous gains.

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup # 410

There is no escaping from climate change, even in the deep sea

Climate change in deep oceans could be seven times faster by middle of century, report says  The Guardian.

Michael Moore film Planet of the Humans removed from YouTube

Victor Davis Hanson.

Obama’s policies are in tatters, and the worst scandals of his White House are coming to light.

Like the phrase ‘new used car’.

Read it.

Most ‘sermons’ are rather pointless – somebody talking to you about what is important to them rather than what is important to you (necessarily). This one is different.

A good sermon raises questions rather than trying to answer them, although it may suggest certain answers; it never leaves you exactly where you started. And you really can’t ask for more than that.

(Well, you could, but you won’t get it. So deal.)

Steve Sailer.

Another effort to fool the public with an obvious super-telephoto lens shot that compresses distance. You can tell by how it constantly appears that the pedestrians are about to carom into each other, but they never do. Plus the store signs look like the Old City of Kowloon and the white streetlights appear to be set 12 inches apart.

A commenter says this video looks like it was shot with the Hubble space telescope.

Read it.

At least in the eyes of the Washington Post.

“Anti-Greta” Naomi Seibt Strikes Back at Climate Activist Misanthropy

How pandemics are linked to climate change

Prioritizing climate over pandemics

Read it.

A former Florida Department of Health data manager has received ample media coverage over her claims that she was fired after she objected to the removal of certain data from the state’s public-facing coronavirus dashboard.

But the data in question has been available to the public since early May, and documents reported by The Associated Press Sunday show that Rebekah Jones was fired after she repeatedly overstepped her duties as a data manager despite being warned multiple times about her behavior.

One’s status as a ‘whistleblower’ tends to depend these days on whose whistle is being blown.

Read it.

With short videos and paid newsletters, everyone from superstars to half-forgotten former athletes and even journalists can, as one tech figure put it, “monetize individuality.”

Much more interesting than anything I’m accustomed to seeing in the New York Times.

Cameo is blowing up in this strange season because “every celebrity is really a gig economy worker,” says Steven Galanis, the company’s chief executive. They’re stuck at home, bored and sometimes hard up for cash as performances, productions and sporting events dry up. The company’s weekly bookings have grown to 70,000 from about 9,000 in early January, it says, and Mr. Galanis said he anticipated bringing in more than $100 million in bookings this year, of which the company keeps 25 percent. The company expects to sell its millionth video this week.

Cameo is, on its face, a service that allows housebound idiots to blow money on silly shout-outs. Seen another way, however, it’s a new model media company, sitting at the intersection of a set of powerful trends that are accelerating in the present crisis. There’s the rise of simple, digital direct payments, which are replacing advertising as the major source of media revenue. There’s the growing power of talent, trickling down from superstars to half-forgotten former athletes and even working journalists. And there’s the old promise of the earlier internet that you could make a living if you just had “1,000 true fans” — a promise that advertising-based businesses from blogs to YouTube channels failed to deliver.

Read it.

The heavily footnoted “primer” is several books in one handy cover. It is a history of the Chinese Communist Party origins of 21st-century Chinese intelligence organs. The history entwines with careful, clear analysis of China’s shifting intelligence objectives during the Anti-Japanese War (1937-1945), the civil war, the Cold War (including the Korean War and Taiwan) and Deng Xiaoping’s economic transformation. A major theme: Whether serving as regime-protection units, domestic secret police spying on Chinese citizens or spies targeting foreign entities, the intelligence services’ first loyalty is to the senior CCP leaders.

While it doesn’t appear that anything in this work will come as a surprise to those of us who are paying attention, I am curious as to why this has been embodied into a published book. It is no doubt of value to those whose business it is to detect and counter Chinese intelligence operations, but that is surely a fairly small audience; and while there are certainly a large number of people who would be curious about the details of Chinese intelligence operations, it isn’t clear to me that many are going to be willing to shell out as much money as these guys are asking ($27 for a Kindle edition? Seriously?) to scratch that particular itch. Certainly that price point quiets any curiosity I might have had on the subject.

Perhaps this is yet another instance of Tenure Doesn’t Grow On Trees. It certainly suggests that such books are why God gave us InterLibrary Loan.

Read it.

In a follow-up piece to “NYC’s Rat Population Hit With Hunger Crisis During Lockdowns,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has published a new warning that rats across the country are becoming hangry as they scavenge for food amid the closure of restaurants triggered by COVID-19 lockdowns.

Why is this a problem? When rats come out, they expose themselves to extermination. This seems like an excellent opportunity to get rid of something universally recognized as a pest and a danger to public health. Presumably rat traps and poison are freely available; if those don’t suit, get a cat or two.

Viscount Ridley explains it all to you.

When you think about it, what has happened to human society in the last 300 years is pretty weird. After trundling along with horses and sailboats, slaves and swords, for millennia, we suddenly got steam engines and search engines, and planes and cars and electricity and computers and social media and DNA sequences. We gave ourselves a perpetual motion machine called innovation. The more we innovated, the more innovation became possible.

It’s by far the biggest story of the last three centuries—the main cause of the decline of extreme poverty to unprecedented levels—yet we know curiously little about why it happened, let alone when and where and how it can be made to continue. It certainly did not start as a result of deliberate policy. Even today, beyond throwing money at scientists in the hope they might start businesses, and subsidies at businesses in the hope they might deliver products, we don’t have much of an idea how to encourage innovation at the political level.

Babylon Bee.

A local state governor brought the house down this week with a rousing press conference that left everyone in tears. As people around the state watched, intently waiting for the governor to give them hope, or at least permission to get a haircut, the governor gave a speech to remind his citizens where their hope truly came from.

Babylon Bee.

The Bible tells us to work smarter, not harder. Or, better yet, don’t work at all if you can help it. You can look it up. It’s in the Proverbs somewhere.

Read it.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

Or spend half an hour painfully writing out a paper check.

Read it.

On the Left, mask wearing has become a basic marker of good citizenship, no matter how silly it may be in a particular case. So naturally, the fact that President Trump, who is tested regularly, I believe, for coronavirus, generally prefers not to wear a mask, has become a political issue on the Left. Not surprisingly, CNN has embarked on a crazed campaign to “catch” President Trump maskless.

Well, it keeps them off the streets.

One imagines the CNN “photojournalist,” whose name is Khalil Abdallah, skulking behind bushes with a telephoto lens, hoping to catch an incriminating shot of the president and the rest of his foursome. Of course, only a lunatic would wear a face mask while riding a golf cart around a course, all by himself. But that means nothing to CNN: “None of the men are wearing masks.” The horror!

It Hit 80 Degrees in the Arctic This Week  Women and minorities hardest hit.

Scientists identify a temperature tipping point for tropical forests

This Week’s Disasters, Climate Change and the Pandemic

THE CONSENUS FRAUD part 1 – Climate of Freedom Series

Sir David Attenborough: ‘Coronavirus pandemic has swept climate change off the front pages’  Funny how ‘dying next week’ tends to take the attention off of ‘dying in forty years’.

Read it.

Was thinking about similarities and differences between the reaction to AIDS and to SARS-2. AIDS hit much more slowly, of course. It was way more dangerous per customer, but it was obvious early on that it was only spreading in a small fraction of the population.

The health authorities such as the CDC didn’t believe in quarantine then, either, and they prevailed. They were wrong, of course. They spent a lot of effort trying to convince the public that HIV was a significant threat to straight men and women: that was a lie. Presumably it was motivated by the probably-correct notion that people wouldn’t give a shit unless they were personally threatened, or possibly just because. Wiki is still doing its part to further nonsense on this topic: ” Announcements by various celebrities that they had contracted HIV (including actor Rock Hudson, basketball star Magic Johnson, tennis player Arthur Ashe and singer Freddie Mercury) were significant in arousing media attention and making the general public aware of the dangers of the disease to people of all sexual orientations.” Arthur Ashe got a bad transfusion: as for the others, what do you think?

Although it really did manage to spread in the general population in Sub-Saharan Africa – but not much elsewhere.