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Anti-Greta’ teen activist to speak at biggest US conservatives conference

Conservative group hires German teen Naomi Seibt to rival Greta Thunberg’s climate views

Why are polar bears going extinct? (Spoiler: They’re not)

We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

Things I Learned from Five Years in Climate Tech

Hollywood’s Carbon Footprint

Babylon Bee.

Hey, it could happen.

ZMan does a deep dive.

Whether or not movies can rise to the level of art is debatable, as the medium is superficial by design. Another aspect of art is it tempts the person experiencing it to think about things they may not be naturally inclined to consider. Motion pictures are a passive medium, encouraging the viewer to relax and let the images flashing past him do all the heavy lifting. Citizen Kane is considered the best film ever made, but it does not rival literature in terms of artistic impact.

That said, maybe movies should be judged on a narrower artistic standard, in that maybe the best they can do is reflect attitudes of the age. The science fiction shows on the later-50’s and early-60’s, for example, reveal the optimism of the age with regards to scientific progress. Fast forward a generation and science fiction films reveal the fear and disappointment in science. Today, science fiction is mostly multicultural personal drama in space, revealing the feminization of our age.

Read it.

Google’s black box algorithm controls which political emails land in your main inbox. For 2020 presidential candidates, the differences are stark.

‘Berkeley of the East’ seeks to ban fossil fuels as part of sweeping climate plan

Tom Steyer says he’ll declare a climate emergency on day one

See record-high temperatures strip Antarctica of huge amounts of ice

Climate change could be a ‘catastrophic’ national security threat, report warns

Sea level rise: A small California town embraces managed retreat

Cost Of ‘Net Zero’ Will Be Astronomical, New Reports Warn

How Dare You! Libs Mad at German Conservative Answer to Greta

Using Twitter Volume as Scientific Measure of “Climate Change” Is a Very, Very, Bad Idea

Read it.

Despite Trump’s hard-hitting domination in the media, most other Republican politicians haven’t yet been able to replicate the success. Capitol Hill hasn’t had a focus on digital communication, which is essential to winning the culture war online. Democrats have the assistance of leftist “Big-Tech” giants in Silicon Valley such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google. This has been a huge problem facing conservative messaging, but the CPI, a nonprofit organization, has a plan to help republicans succeed in the digital arena.

Trump realizes that, in the modern world, the President is not just a politician but also a performer, like the British monarch, and that his performance can help or hurt his agenda.

“The conservative movement needs highly-trained communication professionals now more than ever. The messaging battle begins and ends online: where news breaks, opinions are formed, and ideas go viral. Getting digital right is a seminal part of an effective communications strategy.”

Exactly right.

Read it.

Even the Republicans in Oregon are very odd.

If they have to do this more than once, perhaps they ought to consider moving to a different state.

Texas, say.

Read it.

The short answer is maybe. The long answer won’t make you feel any better.

Ours are too lazy, but other peoples’ might.

Read it.

Slow news day.

Read it.

Hidden behind the good economic news is a disturbing new phenomenon – one more far-reaching — and disturbing — than the latest up or down of the business cycle. It is that our economy is now increasingly bipolar, with a traditional economy at one end and a virtual one at the other.

ZMan draws an analogy.

This life-cycle of a software system is not unique to technology. It happens in other systems as well. It is not unreasonable to think of revolution as the replacement of a legacy system with a modern one. Politics in this sense is the software of society, purchased by the elite, implemented by the ruling class and administered by the bureaucracy of the state. It is why libertarianism is impossible, by the way. It requires a society to return to pencil and paper on purpose.

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.

ZMan doesn’t like what he sees.

One of the sad truths about the Trump era is that the Republican Party will return to being the Bush party as soon as Trump leaves office. The 2020 election could be a blowout, giving Trump a mandate to push through all sorts of populist projects, as well as giving the GOP a huge majority. Trumpism could become the default position of the base, but the party will immediately begin selling itself as a the kinder, gentler Trumpism as soon as Trump is in the rear-view mirror.

It is one of the enduring features of post-war America. Pat Buchanan pointed it out way back in the 1980’s, when he observed that the people vote conservatives to Congress, only to see them go native in a few years. It is a remarkable transformation made more obvious in the communication age. You can just follow the person’s social media feed to see the transformation. They go from representing their people in Washington to Washington’s representative to those people.

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.

ZMan passes the popcorn.

Last week, famous biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins outraged all of the rage heads on Twitter by tweeting out, “It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth wouldn’t it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology” The rage heads responded with outrage and demands that he be thrown into a well for bad think.

It was one of those events where people revealed things about themselves that they probably wish they had kept private. The “world’s foremost philosopher” managed to step on a series of rakes responding to Paul Ramsey. Not satisfied with his twitter performance, he did a full hour on YouTube, where he must have broken a record for the number of logical fallacies committed in one sitting. Apparently he has yet to reach the chapter on Hume’s law or the masked-man fallacy.

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?

The ZBlog Power Hour is one of the best podcasts out there.

eeling a little worldly this week. I have been finishing up travel plans for the spring hater’s season, so I have been thinking about the world quite a bit. People noticed that the candidates did not field any questions about foreign affairs in the Democrat debate this week. That was supposed to mean something, but the truth is Americans have lost interest in the world under Trump. That’s not a terrible thing, as we have plenty of problems to deal with in our own backyard.

Still, it is important to keep up with what is going on in the world, especially in the provinces, where there are some good lessons for dissidents. The Europeans have been doing right-wing populism and nationalism for a long time, so they are better at it than we are in the States. That’s because they have been dealing with left-wing terrorism for a lot longer too. They had to contend with groups like Antifa long before they became an issue for Americans.

Of course, as the center of the Empire, the problems of the world will always end up at our doorstep, so there is no hiding from it. The plagues in Africa will be a problem for the West, just as the Wu-tang fever will be a problem. Both are warnings about what’s coming our way if we remain on the present course. When you build a house of cards, even a gentle breeze is a dire threat. That’s the result of globalism. The small problems on the fringe of civilization become huge problems.

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.

ZMan passes the popcorn.

Bloomberg is the Democrat version of Ross Perot. He’s not really a candidate, but more of a foil for the other candidates. Last night all of them went ham on him in an effort to show they are the most virtuous of the bunch. Warren went full rage head over Bloomberg having called women “fat broads and horse-faced lesbians.” For the rest, Bloomberg was the cartoon rich guy. They took turns flinging their poo at him. For the most part, he just smirked it off, dismissing them as sideshow clowns.

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