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

Name the movie.

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And that’s really all it takes.

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

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That’s new.

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

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Starting to look that way.

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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.”

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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

ZMan does a deep dive.  One of his best.

As a practical matter, politics is about persuasion. The reformer, for example, first persuades people that something is broke. Like a good salesman who creates need in the mind of the prospective customer, the reformer creates a sense of unhappiness with the status quo in his target audience. The reformer is, in effect, a chronic complainer, always talking about his unhappiness with the status quo. His goal is always to first persuade people that something is broken and needs fixing.

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.

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Talk about your niche markets….

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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

ZMan does Jared Diamond.

A strange thing that used to be more common a decade ago, but still persists to this day is the use of the book Guns, Germs and Steel as an escape hatch. That is, when a conversation with good whites turns to biology, they will at some point attempt to change the subject by bringing up this book. Always, it is in the form of “A great book on this is Guns, Germs and Steal. Have you read it?” After all these years, it remains the one acceptably dangerous book they have read on the subject.

In this context, dangerous means that the book sort of accepts the fact that human populations are not exactly the same everywhere. The book attempts to explain why Eurasian and North African civilizations have defined the story of man, while arguing against biological reality. For good whites, merely acknowledging that sub-Saharan Africans have little to show for their time on earth is scary. Even though Diamond is a biological denialist, the book is still a dangerous read.

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

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“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’.

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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.)

ZMan does a deep dive.

he great paradox of democracy is that the system is supposed to break the chains that bind the citizen to the state, but instead it immerses the citizen in the state. If you go back 200 years in any country in the West, you would find that the people had very few dealings with the national government. They had dealings with local government, but even that was minimal. Politics, even in Britain and America where popular government was established, played a minor role in the lives of citizens.

Today, in supposedly free countries, no one can be free of politics. Everywhere you go, politics plays a part in your life. Political correctness governs the workplace and the academy. If you fall behind in the latest trends in pronouns, you could end up in a struggle session with the human resource people. Entertainment is saturated with multiculturalism and the lectures that come with it. It is nearly impossible to live in a modern western democracy without politics.

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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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’.

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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.

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The mayor had warned last week, “Anyone tries to get in the water, they’ll be taken right out of the water,” while also threatening summonses for violators as the city battles to keep the coronavirus under control by banning swimming for now.

But Sliwa, dressed in a wet suit — and his trademark red Guardian Angels beret — strolled into the surf and swam around for about an hour without consequence, while a crowd of people on a pier near the old Parachute Jump cheered for him.

Seven or eight Parks officers tried ordering the Guardian Angels’ founder and mayoral candidate out of the drink at one point, but when he refused, they just stood and stared from the sand.

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Facebook and Twitter’s decision to allow their workers to telecommute permanently could shake up Silicon Valley’s demographics and potentially lead to red states turning purple as people continue bailing on California for Texas and Arizona, among other states.

Michigan Dam Failures and Climate Change

Time: Climate Change is a Threat to Expensive French Wine  Women and minorities hardest hit.

Mississippi Delta marshes in a state of irreversible collapse, Tulane study shows

Naomi Oreskes, the Golden Opportunity

Claim: Climate Change Requires Streamlining of Cash Deliveries to Remote Aid Recipients

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The argument that vitamin D deficiency may contribute to more severe cases of Covid is gaining ground. It is now reaching the point where it is surprising that we are not hearing from leading medical officials and politicians that people should consider taking supplements to ensure they have sufficient vitamin D.

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Twitch tried to downplay concerns over an advisory board member who identifies as a deer and believes many gamers are “white supremacists.” Twitch, the platform for watching internet celebrities broadcast as they play video games, lit fire to a cultural powder keg in mid-May. The company appointed a transgender streamer who identifies as a deer among its “Safety Advisory Council.” Now it’s trying damage control.

I have substantial reservations about any organization that goes by the name Twitch.

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Years ago I learned that when the Scottish Enlightenment said they loved “Equality” and when the French Philosophes echoed that same sentiment, they were talking past each other. Hume and Locke wanted a voluntary equality of opportunity, while the French wanted a compelled equality of result. But there is no indication that either side understood that the same word meant different things across the English Channel. As a result, it took much longer for the rest of the world to understand the intellectual horror that was the French Revolution.

This is why people go to war over the definitions of words (‘gay marriage’ is a good case in point). Those who control what words mean wind up controlling how people talk about something which in turn results in control over how people think about things. Consider the Trayvon Martin case and the attempt by the media to tag the shooter as a ‘white Hispanic’.

The Left understands this at a deeper level than the Right, which is why they end up winning more often than not. The intellectual damage of smears like ‘price gouging’, ‘black market’, ‘windfall profit’, ‘pink slime’, and innumerable other tendentious terms is almost incalculable.

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The coronavirus pandemic, and resulting government response, has created one of the greatest disruptions to daily life in modern American history. With much of the country now focused on “reopening,” pundits and policymakers have focused their attention on what the “new normal” of a post-COVID America looks like. Although much of the attention has been focused on the future of massive public gatherings and changes to American work environments, the most significant change to American societies may be faith in our governing structures.

Actually, we’d prefer that they die, preferably in great pain.

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I’m not sure but I think this is a metaphor for the Biden campaign.