Read it.

Meritocracy is in trouble. Recent years have seen a flood of articles deploring inequality and blaming meritocracy for it. In the vanguard is Yale Law professor Daniel Markovits who attacked meritocracy in its home, in an address to Yale University graduates in 2015. His new book, The Meritocracy Trap,¹ has just been published.

My objection to the notion of ‘meritocracy’ is that there is no universally valid understanding of what constitutes ‘merit’. One man’s merit may be another xer’s ‘privilege’.

On a conceptual level, one might say ‘Okay, merit has a lot of disadvantages, but how would we be better off distributing rewards on some other basis? We just spend two hundred years fighting free of such systems.’

The basic objection appears to be that meritocracy leads to inequality, and Inequality Is Just Bad. Justifying the animus against inequality is the Step Not Taken. I’m still waiting.

Read it.

How effective is a traffic cone as a thrown weapon?

Read it.

Everything from casual dress codes to free office meals and the rise of remote work has been driven by Silicon Valley. But Silicon Valley’s biggest export, Robbins says, is the collapsing barrier between work and life. His latest book, Bring Your Whole Self to Work, advocates for workplaces where people feel safe to take risks and practice vulnerability with their coworkers. (Kombucha on tap is not required.) But there’s a dark side. As the boundaries between work and life become more porous, everyone works all the time.

Do We Really Have Only 12 Years to Live?

Climate change is drying up the Colorado River

Humans continue to find ways to backslide on climate

Climate change is drying up the Colorado River  California sucking out all of the water obviously has nothing to do with it. Move along, move along….

BBC: Climate Education is Failing Because Some Graduates Become Oil Executives

The Pentagon aims to bridge the divide between climate believers and deniers

Read it.

I admit, though, that even surrounded by these riches, I am still capable of boredom. Here’s my list of ennui-evoking circumstances….

I am rarely bored but often irritated, especially by ‘progsplaining’.

Read it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

Milken was railroaded by the government. His pardon was long overdue.

Antarctica’s Thwaites glacier at risk of collapse and may lead to sea levels rising by two feet  Daily Mail.

How the Rich Plan to Rule a Burning Planet

Read it.

We are being told to eat local and seasonal food, either because other crops have been tranported over long distances, or because they are grown in energy-intensive greenhouses. But it wasn’t always like that. From the sixteenth to the twentieth century, urban farmers grew Mediterranean fruits and vegetables as far north as England and the Netherlands, using only renewable energy.

These crops were grown surrounded by massive “fruit walls”, which stored the heat from the sun and released it at night, creating a microclimate that could increase the temperature by more than 10°C (18°F). Later, greenhouses built against the fruit walls further improved yields from solar energy alone.

Police Federation: British Police Fear Arresting Climate Protestors

“The Human Race Could Go Extinct”: JPMorgan Fearmongers Climate Change Impact In Leaked Report

Climate change is drying up the Colorado River, putting millions at risk of ‘severe water shortages’ CNN. Actually, water demand from California is drying up the Colorado river.

‘Antarctica Melts,’ NASA Says, Showing Effects Of A Record Warm Spell  NPR.

Family Farms Try to Raise a New Cash Cow: Solar Power

Katy Tur Frets Dems Not Far Left Enough on Global Warming

Study: A Quarter of Climate Denier Tweets are Bots  Bots for reality!

Jonathan Turley.

Roger Stone’s defense team moved to force the recusal of Judge Amy Berman Jackson from the case for bias. These motions have a very low success rate and this particular motion likely has an even lower likelihood of success. Jackson is a respected and experience judge. I actually was taken aback by a couple of her comments about the case but courts of appeal are extremely reluctant to force such recusals. Moreover, the main thrust of the motion is a statement about the jury which would be viewed as virtually standardized language for courts.

The Stone team seems particularly aggrieved that Jackson said that the jury in the case had “served with integrity.” There is a pending motion for a new trial based on the alleged bias of the foreperson of the jury and the defense feels that the comment prejudges the merits of that motion.

Rather late in the process for such a motion, I should think; rather like asking for a different horse after the race is run.

Read it.

Since 2000 use of the Internet has gone from 400 million users to over four billion. Governments around the world have taken notice and in the last decade many have made vigorous efforts to control what they consider a “disruptive”, to their control over the population, technology. Some rulers, usually of dictatorships, have been surprisingly successful in censoring and controlling Internet use by their subjects. Despite that the disruption to central control of information has been fundamentally changed in favor of the ruled rather than the rulers. When it comes to the Internet you can delay or distort the signal but you can’t stop it and what it does.

“You can’t stop the signal, Mal.”

Read it.

When you want to learn something new from reading, read the stories around that thing before you read the thing itself.

This pretty much matches what I do, which has proved very successful.

Read it.

The knives are out for Bernie.

This election cycle is really stressing the joints between the various factions of the Democrat coalition.

Bankers JP Morgan Warn of “Catastrophic” Climate Change

Colorado River flow shrinks from climate crisis, risking ‘severe water shortages’  The Guardian.

Climate change has stolen more than a billion tons of water from the West’s most vital river Washington Post.

Beaverton company using invisible bar codes to revolutionize plastic recycling

China and India rejecting renewables for coal-fired futures

UK weather: Flooding runs risk of creating ‘ghettos’ because properties cannot be insured

Iowa Agriculture in consideration of climate change

Florida Bill to Ban ‘Nature Rights’

Wall Street Has a $1 Trillion Climate Risk

Consumers at risk of being ripped off in ‘wild west’ carbon offsets market

Floating Nuclear Power Plants Are Ready To Shape Global Energy Market

Brooklyn Fractivists for Freezing in the Dark

JPMorgan: Climate Change Threatens ‘Human Life as We Know It’

PBS Panel Wails About ‘Climate Crisis,’ GOP ‘Deniers’; Touts Gore as ‘Global Paul Revere’

Read it.

So-called digital natives still crave opportunities to use libraries as libraries, and many actively seek out physical texts—92 percent of the college students surveyed in a 2015 study, for example, said they preferred paper books to electronic versions. (Plus, a growing body of evidence shows that physical books and papers are more conducive to learning than digital formats are.) The dean of learning and technology resources at one of the six campuses of Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) recently told me about a student he had met: Upon learning that her campus library had only the e-book version of a text she needed to read, the woman opted to make the trek to another campus a nearly half-hour commute away that had the hard copy. A 2016 survey of students at Webster University, which is based in Missouri but has campuses around the world, also illustrates limited use of digital resources, finding that just 18 percent of students accessed e-books “frequently” or “very frequently,” compared with 42 percent who never used them.*

I must be a wierdo, then; I have no problem reading a book on screen rather than juggling it around in my hands. Electronic copies allow text searches, non-destructive highlighting and annotation, and easy cross-referencing. Just lazy, I guess….

Viscount Ridley pokes into a dark corner.

My question is: Why have so many of our recent viruses come from China?

Paul Graham usually has something useful to say.

What should an essay be? Many people would say persuasive. That’s what a lot of us were taught essays should be. But I think we can aim for something more ambitious: that an essay should be useful.

To start with, that means it should be correct. But it’s not enough merely to be correct. It’s easy to make a statement correct by making it vague. That’s a common flaw in academic writing, for example. If you know nothing at all about an issue, you can’t go wrong by saying that the issue is a complex one, that there are many factors to be considered, that it’s a mistake to take too simplistic a view of it, and so on.

Though no doubt correct, such statements tell the reader nothing. Useful writing makes claims that are as strong as they can be made without becoming false.

Progressives are the reason this country’s culture is dissolving into madness. Hey, that was easy.

Someone at The Atlantic is fed up.

If there’s anything corporate America has a knack for, it’s inventing new, positive words that polish up old, negative ones. Silicon Valley has recast the chaotic-sounding “break things” and “disruption” as good things. An anxious cash grab is now a “monetization strategy,” and if you mess up and need to start over, just call it a “pivot” and press on. It’s the Uber for BS, you might say.

If there’s anything that proglodyte journos have a knack for, it’s hating on what other people do that they don’t like.

Read it.

s this the end of the roaring hearth? Domestic coal and certain types of wood are to be banned from next year in an effort to cut air pollution. George Eustice, the Environment Secretary, said the move was necessary as wood-burning stoves and open fires were considered “the most harmful pollutant” affecting people in this country. The Government is keen to be seen at the forefront of global efforts to tackle climate change and air pollution. But it risks accusations of targeting consumers rather than industry as it approves a new deep coal mine. Bags of traditional house coal will be banned from sale by next February, while deliveries of loose coal will be phased out by 2023. The ban, which will affect mostly rural households, also includes wet wood.

UPDATE: The best wood burning stoves that will survive Michael Gove’s new laws

Oil and gas firms ‘have had far worse climate impact than thought’  The Guardian.

For India’s Karnataka fishermen, climate change’s just barren sea

How Warming Winters Are Affecting Everything NPR.

Red-State Utah Creates Long-Term Plan to Tackle Climate Change

Plausible Scenarios for Global Warming

Canadian Government: Anti-Pipeline Eco-Extremists Sabotaging Railway Lines

Jeff Bezos’ $10 billion to fight the climate crisis can make a difference—if spent correctly

Counter-Protesters In Alberta Tear Down Anti-Pipeline Barricade As Trudeau Contemplates Action

Hell and high water: eco-anxiety dominates Jenny Offill’s latest novel

The Other McCain looks at the news.

One of the most amazing things about American journalism is the continued employment of political pundits whose penchant for failure would disqualify them from being hired in any other field. All the experts who were wrong about the 2016 election are now confidently making predictions about the 2020 election, as if their credibility were undiminished by their previous mistakes.

…

Any experienced poker player can perhaps sympathize with the plight of Never Trump Republicans; I once went all-in with a full house and lost when the other guy turned over four of a kind. But I’ve never claimed to be an “expert” on poker, the way Boot and his cohort assert their expertise about politics and policy. The whole crowd — including former Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, Bush-era campaign operative Rick Wilson, and Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post, to name a few — simply could not believe that Trump might actually be elected, and they have never forgiven him (or the nearly 63 million Americans who voted for him) for proving them wrong. None of Trump’s policy successes — crushing ISIS, promoting a robust economy, appointing two conservative Supreme Court justices and numerous other federal judges, and more — can ever redeem him in the eyes of the self-appointed political “experts” whose credibility is further diminished every time Trump wins again.

Read it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it. (warning – long)

Against all odds, and despite the best efforts of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, old-fashioned, analog, motion-picture film is suddenly making a comeback. What’s the magic in this old medium that digital technology can’t seem to match?

Kurt Schlichter is delightfully dyspeptic today.

et’s review how our guardians of justice have covered themselves in glory in recent days. And by “glory,” I mean “Scat Francisco sidewalk sauce.”

The scumbag Democrat donors remaining in the Mueller lynch mob decided that Roger Stone, an absolutely harmless gadfly whose real crime was being aligned with Donald Trump and therefore with you, should be sent away for seven to nine years for “crimes” that the Department of Injustice promptly gave a pass on to the loathsome Andrew McCabe. This is the same institution that also gave a pass to Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit, Comey the Looming Doofus, and those fugly FBI sexting twins.

You would not get a pass.

Read it.

Notice that articles such as this always frame the situation as being either the fault of (a) consumers who are bad people for improperly recycling things or (b) manufacturers who are somehow at fault for how they mark stuff as recyclable or not.

Perhaps we ought to give some thought to creating recycling centers who could actually recycle more kinds of stuff?

Read it.

The state is expected to fight the order.

“California won’t allow the Trump Administration to destroy and deplete our natural resources,” California Attorney General Xavier Becerra (D) said in a statement after the speech. “We’re prepared to challenge the Trump Administration’s harmful attack on our state’s critical ecosystems and environment.”

Critics fear the new plan, which would allow large quantities of water to be diverted from the San Francisco Bay Delta to the Central Valley in order to irrigate farmland, would ultimately harm chinook salmon and the delta smelt, a finger-sized fish that for three decades has stood in the way of the diversion.

Read it.

The haters don’t understand Trump, but the people he helps do.

The Arctic Is Getting Greener. That’s Bad News for All of Us  Wired ‘Science’.

Driven By Climate Change, Desalination Researchers Seek Solutions To Water Scarcity

Wash your Trash! Is recycling working?  Apparently not. I, for one, refuse to wash trash.

ABC Sends Reporter to Africa to Lecture Americans on Climate Change

The Problem with Palm Oil

Victor Davis Hanson.

In 2020 we have finally hit peak progressivism. The adjective “peak”—apex or summit— is often used to describe something that has reached its maximum extent but thereafter will insidiously decline—like supposed U.S. domestic oil production in 2000 when more oil was purportedly taken out of, rather than still in the ground. While the idea of peak oil in the days before fracking and horizontal drilling proved vastly premature, we likely are witnessing something like “peak progressivism” today.

By that I mean the hard-left takeover of the Democratic Party and the accompanying progressive agenda now have reached an extreme—beyond which will only result in the steady erosion of radical ideology altogether.

I hope he’s right.

Read it.

Good to see that somebody is pushing back on these liars.

Read it.

One major factor in the decision to not charge the plainly guilty Andrew McCabe was the fact that the jury pool was to be taken from a voting pool of 90% Hillary Clinton voters, and 4% Trump voters.

We can no longer permit such two-tiered justice based simply on zip codes.

Read it.

A Washington Post op-ed published Tuesday calling for less democracy sparked swift backlash online, causing the publication’s motto to trend on Twitter Wednesday morning.

The op-ed, titled “It’s time to give the elites a bigger say in choosing the president,” suggests that a “better primary system would empower elites to bargain and make decisions, instructed by voters.” It adds that having “intermediate representatives” who are elected and “understand the priorities of their constituents” could be far better than the system of democracy currently in place.

The suggestion was written by Julia Azari, an associate professor at Marquette University. Wapo’s op-ed was ill-received and the publication’s famous slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” ironically began to trend on Twitter.

My brother went to Marquette, and he’s a Bernie supporter. I suspect that the two are not unrelated.

To be fair, we don’t have democracy in America; all of our public policies are fashioned by groups of elected representatives, from the local school board on up. Formally, this constitutes a republican form of government, as guaranteed in the Constitution.

Furthermore, each of these bodies pretends to have members chosen as the ‘best person for the job’, which the ancient Greeks would categorize as aristocracy, not democracy. But nobody cares what words mean any more.

Joel Kotkin looks at the Trump/Bloomberg axis.

Mike Bloomberg’s vision proved to be a cul de sac. The future gentry liberals want is grim. A new urban paradigm is needed that focuses on core services for regular people.

In a year when two boosters of the “luxury city,” Donald Trump and Michael Bloomberg, are vying to run the whole country, the very model that created their “success” is slowly unraveling. After roughly 20 years of big-city progress, measured by economic growth and demographic progress, the dense urban centers, including New York, are again teetering on the brink of decline.

Long associated with glamour, money and cultural influence, the rise of the luxury city has foundered on the rocks of inequality and, increasingly, diminished upward mobility. Indeed, according to Pew research, the greatest inequality now exists in superstar cities such as San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and San Jose. Rather than working to create and sustain a middle class, as Jane Jacobs once suggested, by building local economies, these cities have depended on luring both the ultra-rich and the young and ambitious of the global marketplace to secure and enhance their place.

Read it.

It’s still early, but the Democratic Party nomination process reminds me of Yogi Berra’s line about center field at Yankee stadium: “It gets late early out there.” It’s already late for the Democrats, and it is becoming clear that the Democrats are doomed this year.

Read it.

My prediction for the 2016 race was based on a variety of observational and anecdotal evidence. I listened to Democrats, Republicans and independents across the U.S. I talked to people who consider themselves apolitical. I heard from taxi and Uber drivers, the Verizon man, stay-at-home moms, college grads, professionals, blue-collar delivery workers. And I watched nearly every rally of Trump and his opponents.

Now, that same unscientific methodology has led me to conclude that Trump has already secured a second term — no matter who his main opponent turns out to be.

Read it.

Warren’s collapse reveals the sorry state of today’s political media. From the perspective of voters who watch cable news and take seriously the so-called analysis and punditry they hear from so-called political experts in the media, Warren’s downfall is a shocking development. But it’s only the latest of many examples of said “experts” having absolutely no idea what they’re talking about and showing why no one should take them seriously.

Chicago Records Coldest Valentine’s Day In Half A Century; The Brunt Of Winter Is Likely Over – Hello Spring?

A climate emergency: what happens when the taps run dry?  The Guardian.

What Global Warming? Oregon Governor Supports Destroying Four Hydroelectric Dams

Want to Stop Climate Change? Better Tear Up the Lawn!

Read it.

David Cole imparts some inconvenient truth.

This is not going to be another coronavirus column. Yes, the disease we’ve been saddled with thanks to the Dagwood Bumsteads of China will make an appearance later on. But let’s start by rolling the clock back—way back—to a time long past, a disease long forgotten, and a lesson about footwear.

Mississippi Capital Braces for More Flooding

‘The only uncertainty is how long we’ll last’: a worst case scenario for the climate in 2050

Speeding Sea Level Rise Threatens Nuclear Plants

Sea Levels Around The US Aren’t Just Rising, They’re Accelerating Year on Year

If They Are So Alarmed By Climate Change, Why Are They So Opposed To Solving It?

Aussie Climate Emergency Summit: “Climate change must be accepted as an overriding threat to national and human security”  Or not.

Polar bear habitat at mid-winter as extensive as 2013 & better than 2006  Good thing they can swim.’\

Extremes and Averages in Contiguous U.S. Climate – Part 10: The Contiguous U.S.

Environmental Protestors Dig Up College Lawn To Protest Fossil Fuels  These people need to be in prison,  but of course nothing will happen to them.

Jeff Bezos Launches $10 Billion “Bezos Earth Fund” To Fight Climate Change A cheap way to buy off the mob.

Read it.

Prediction: Nothing will happen. Romney will be re-elected to the Senate as many times as he wants to and will be a perennial pain in the ass to the Senate Republican caucus just like John McCain was.

Same old same old.

Read it.

Are Chinese people more vulnerable than others to the Wuhan coronavirus? The question is raised by Zhao et al. (2020), who examined lung tissues from several donors and studied a receptor that acts as the point of entry for some coronaviruses, including the ones responsible for the SARS outbreak of 2002-2003 and the ongoing outbreak in Wuhan, China. They found that the receptor was concentrated in cells that promote viral reproduction and transmission. They also found that the number of these cells in lung tissue varied with ethnic origin.

The Economist reviews a new book by Garrett Jones.

GARETT JONES, an economics professor at George Mason University in Virginia, knew he was on to a good thing when he got a call from the campus police. A student journalist had written a report on a lecture that he had given suggesting that rich countries would be better off if they were less, rather than more, democratic. The hostile reaction, which spread beyond the university, included a call threatening enough to trouble the university’s private security force. Mr Jones concluded that he had an idea powerful and contentious enough to make into a book. The result is “10% Less Democracy”.

Sounds as if he agrees with Aristotle.

If you’re taking flak, it means you’re over the target.

Read it.

As it happens, I agree with him — especially this part:

“You have to have a different skill set, you have to have a lot more gray matter. It’s not clear the teachers can teach or the students can learn, and so the challenge of society of finding jobs for these people, who we can take care of giving them a roof over their head and a meal in their stomach and a cell phone and a car and that sort of thing.”

This is the kernel of the problem that we face going forward. This is the core message that Andrew Yang was setting out. But just asking the right questions doesn’t mean you have the right answers; the typical Democrat response to this is ‘More Free Stuff!’ and that doesn’t treat the problem, merely disguises the symptoms by  burdening the productive part of the population.