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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

Read it.

A new report, “What Terrorist Migration Over European Borders Can Teach About American Border Security”, by Todd Bensman, a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, describes the extent to which terrorists disguised as migrants have entered the European Union to commit terrorist attacks.

After 40 Years of Hunting, Scientists Identify a Key Flaw in Solar Panel Efficiency

Are House Republicans Undermining President Trump’s Climate Policies?

Waiting for Thwaites

Plausible scenarios for climate change: 2020-2050

NY Times Delivers Page One Climate Lecture, Demanding Radical Change in Australia  I’d love to see Australia demand radical change at the New York Times.

If you are looking for something in your house, and you finally find it, when you’re done with it, don’t put it back where you found it. Put it back where you first looked for it.

Read it.

Best. President. Ever.

UPDATE: Media Accuse Trump of Politicizing Daytona 500 NASCAR Race

This was Trump telling working-class Americans ‘I AM YOUR PRESIDENT’. I can see why the ‘media’ would have a problem with that.

A Democrat would be complaining that they were contributing to Global Warming and ought to be driving electric cars and, hey, how come half of your drivers are Women of Color? Trump just tells them that they’re great Americans and that they ought to enjoy living in the greatest country on Earth.

Guess who they’re going to vote for.

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Harry Flashman was the ‘school bully’ in Tom Brown’s School Days, a classic of early Victorian literature.  George MacDonald Fraser took this guy and made him the protagonist (hardly ‘hero’) of a series that are the best adventure books since Rider Haggard. Read the article for a flavor of what’s going on and then READ THE BOOKS.

Read it.

From Hollywood to kids’ cartoons, to sappy inspirational Facebook posts, entertainment culture is full of advice on how to live our lives. Imagine the consequences of taking this wisdom seriously. Actually, you don’t need to imagine: our culture is littered with living examples of men and women who embraced the subtle and not-so-subtle popular messages. Still, it would be interesting to flip through a book called A Year of Living Hollywood. Here is some of the most common propaganda of social media, celebrities, and movies:

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As am I.Once the Soviet Union came undone, the reason for NATO vanished. Russia is not the threat that the Soviet Union was, and probably never will be. The rationale for including Turkey in a North Atlantic treaty organization is nonexistent, and only gets us into one of those entangling foreign alliances that George Washington warned us against.

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So what? I can’t name the President of Mexico.The last one whose name I knew was Vicente Fox, and I’m sure that was a while ago. I’m sure both of them could name the Prime Minister of Canada, as can I, because Kid Trudeau is always in the news on account of some gaffe or other. The fact that two serious contenders for the Democratic Presidential nomination can’t name the President of Mexico speaks rather to that guy’s successfully keeping his name out of the news rather than to their cluelessness. We learn of things when they are brought to our attention or when we research them; knowing the name of the President of Mexico might be a thing for the Secretary of State but I’m not convinced it’s all that important for a President.

Think of the world leaders whose names you actually know. Why do you know them? Typically because they are in the news, and that typically because they are causing trouble for the United States.

Human Activity in China and India Dominates the Greening of Earth, NASA Study Shows

Hawaiian residents will suffer greatly from new ‘climate saving’ carbon taxes

The media REALLY wants Trump to be a homophobe

Unsettled Climate Science: 30 Years Apace

Climate Prediction: “Take-off distances will get longer as the climate warms”

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Scott Adams has a bug up his butt pretty constantly about this issue.

Severian lays out some wisdom.

The incorrigible ye have always with you, as somebody must’ve said. Social science types slice it different ways, call it different things — the free rider problem, the tragedy of the commons, etc. — but they all amount to the easily-observed fact that some folks just can’t play well with others. Not “won’t play well with others;” can’t play well with others. Any given population of sufficient size is going to have its unmanageable knuckleheads who are always working at cross-purposes against everyone else, who seem to just get off on causing chaos.

ZMan is on a roll today.

Then there is the issue of taboos, which is raised at about the ten minute mark of that YouTube clip linked above. Unsaid, but implied, is the claim that excluding certain people from dissident politics reinforces left-wing taboos on certain opinions. The claim is that excluding people, who are bad for the image of the group, automatically gives legitimacy to the left, by reinforcing left-wing taboos. In other words, trying to present a good image is playing by the Left’s rules on politics.

This is the error of all reactionaries. Instead of developing an internal logic that naturally results in a set of rules and standards, the reactionary simply responds to what he perceives to be his opponent. To be a reactionary in a society run by ideologues is to be a rebel without a cause. Whatever the people in charge of for, the rebel is against and whatever is taboo, the rebel embraces. The modern reactionary is someone who puts a leash around his neck and hands the other end to his opponent.

Preach it, brother.

Bad news for climate alarmists: global carbon dioxide emissions flatlined in 2019

We Just Endured Hottest January on Record, US Scientists Say  Tell Texas – it’s 39 degrees outside my window right now.

Hot on the trail of cold fusion as a solution to the climate crisis The Guardian.

Earth just had hottest January since records began, data shows  The Guardian.

Earth just had its hottest January in recorded history  NBCNews.

Global Warming In a Few Charts

Is Recycling a Waste of Time? As currently run, I would say so.

MSNBC Cherry Picks, Botches Data on Record High Temps in Antarctica

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Something funny has happened since the rise of New Urbanism as an architecture and design movement in the 1980s and 1990s. The New Urbanists’ resurrection of traditional pre-WWII American built forms—the walkable neighborhood main street with shops along the sidewalk and apartments above; the narrow, shady residential streets; the foursquare home with a quaint front porch—proved popular with the public. People gravitate to traditional design, not only for nostalgic reasons but because it follows principles evolved to meet humans’ basic psychological needs.

What hasn’t proven so popular among developers is actually challenging the basic spatial logic of suburbia, in which different land uses are strictly separated and everyone drives everywhere, on wide stroads that connect one pod-like “development” to another. This logic is wired into our zoning codes through things like parking minimums and subdivision regulations.

And so, the look and superficial feel of New Urbanism is increasingly just co-opted by developers of run-of-the-mill suburbia to make consumers feel like they’re being sold something other than run-of-the-mill suburbia. Call it Movie Set Urbanism.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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I watched the Democrats in New Hampshire so you didn’t have to. It was painful: hours of angry folks painfully reciting leftist talking points. It was like watching the Oscars except with old ugly people.

…

If you have not watched any of these sad displays called the “Democrat primaries,” let me sum them up for you. All the candidates try to top each other in identifying various victim classes. They tell the “victims” how much government money they will give them if elected, and whom they will get back at for them.

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

After decades of Democrats and their fellow travellers complaining about rich Republicans of trying to ‘buy an election’, a guy is actually trying to buy an election — and it’s a Democrat.

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Say’s Law, as explicated by the great liberal political economist Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832), is the principle that supply constitutes demand, with the corollary that aggregate supply always equals aggregate demand. There’s no more important principle in political economy to get perfectly right – and assiduously avoid getting wrong – than Say’s Law.

Innovation always comes from the supply side, not the demand side. As Henry Ford famously said, ‘If I had asked customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.’ Have you ever walked into a store looking for the thing you don’t know you need until you see it? Hardware stores are like that, as well as places like The Container Store.

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It always strikes me when I run into a friend who is amused that I am a Costco member. For someone who grew up in a suburban area, even with the nearest Costco being a 45-minute drive from our house, shopping there was a no-brainer for my family. The reasons why Costco made sense for us are probably not dissimilar from the reasons of its ~100 million other members. Since its founding in 1983, the store has consistently delivered on providing value by selling almost any kind of product at competitive prices (among other things). In a ‘late-stage-capitalist’ landscape riddled with examples of, at worst, blatant greed, scams, and ripoffs, and at best, inadvertent marginalization from platforms, shopping at Costco is one of the few places that, according to its loyal customers, “feels like winning.”

If it has what you’re looking for (never guaranteed), Costco can’t be beat.

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Sidewalk Labs, the architecture and urbanism arm of Google parent company Alphabet, has unveiled a digital model for what would be the world’s tallest mass-timber building, reaching 35 storeys.

Global Warming Blamed For Evaporating Great Lakes; Now Blamed For High-Water Levels In Chicago’s “Climate Emergency”

Climate Lawsuit: UNSW Law Professor Sues Own Retirement Fund

Could a mini ice-age soon impact Earth?

Climate change may not claim as many species as we thought

An autopsy of the climate policy debate’s corpse

Victor Davis Hanson.

Genius is often defined in myriad ways. One trusted criterion is the ability to do something extraordinary in a field where others could not — and doing something that perhaps will never be done again by anyone else.

Scott Johnson at Power Line has an adventure.

I have a pen and I have notes, to borrow a phrase. I have notes of comments made by President Trump at the White House reception for conservative media on April 24, 2017 on the occasion of his first hundred days in office. I used my notes to write up my account of the reception for Power Line readers in “At the White House with Trump.”

In a scenario out of Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits, I was served at home with a subpoena by lawyers for plaintiffs in one of the “travel ban” lawsuits from the early days of the Trump administration. The subpoena would have taken my notes away from me. They were going to let me keep my pen.

Freeberg points out some inconvenient truth.

A scandal about Vindman would necessarily depend on this weird “job-as-property” viewpoint. The idea that once you have a job, it belongs to you, kind of like land. And if you ever lose it then that means someone committed some sort of crime against you. This is the weirdness that is America. Labor unions have indoctrinated us over the course of several generations that whether you’re legitimately fired or not, is up to some “for cause” verbiage in a rule book, not your boss. We’ve accepted it as normal that if the verbiage can be twisted and teased and interpreted the right way, then like Arthur pulling the sword from the stone you become the rightful sovereign, and possessor of that ultimate coveted prize: A regular paycheck provided by someone who really doesn’t want to give it to you.

We definitely need to have some kind of conversation about this.

Anti-Pipeline Protestors Block Major Bridges In Canada

A huge iceberg just broke off Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier OHNOWEREALLGONNADIE.

Shock Discovery: Some Plants can Adapt to Climate Change

Fungi That Absorbs Radiation Has Been Growing All Over Chernobyl Power Plant

Nanny McPhee star turned Extinction Rebellion activist Raphael Coleman dies aged 25  A short life but a scary one.

Global Warming Threatens Luxury Lifestyles Of The Rich  They don’t seem all that worried.

ZMan doesn’t appear to have much time for Mayor Pete.

The Democrat primary season is living up to its promise of being a stinging indictment of modern democracy. Thus far, they have staged two election shows. The first one was a disaster, as the party was unable to properly rig the results, so they effectively cancelled the whole thing. The second time they instructed the media to spend all their time celebrating the king, as it were, of participation trophies for his exemplary participation in the New Hampshire primary, while ignoring the winner.

According to Predictit, per Audacious Epigone.

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The Republican Party has earned a reputation as the anti-science, anti-fact party — understandably, perhaps, given the GOP’s policy of ignoring the evidence for global climate change and insisting on the efficacy of supply-side economics, despite all the research to the contrary. Yet ironically, it is now the Democratic Party that is wantonly ignoring mounds of social science data that suggests that promoting centrist candidates is a bad, losing strategy when it comes to winning elections. As the Democratic establishment and its pundit class starts to line up behind the centrist nominees for president — like Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg — the party’s head-in-the-sand attitude is especially troubling.

This is Voice of the Crust Salon so it’s undoubtedly biased. But you might find it interesting.

Steve Sailer does a review.

The energetic media tycoon Ezra Klein has a book out titled Why We’re Polarized. Spoiler alert: One reason is because too many people watch Fox News instead of reading Klein’s properties like Vox. Another cause is because somebody imprudently spilled the beans to “white Christians” that they are being demographically doomed to defeat while they still have a chance to do something about it.