An answer that is occurring to many men nowadays.

Read it.

When someone picked up a handgun and turned it toward him, Smith reacted immediately.

In one swift motion, he knocked the gun away. Then he grabbed it, dropped the magazine, cleared the chamber, and replaced the magazine before handing it back.

Excellent.

California files lawsuit to remain a National Security Risk

Soros-Linked Group Joins MSM To Censor And Purge Climate Change Skeptics On YouTube

Want to stop climate change? Embrace the nuclear option.

Feminist Author Demands Germans Stop Having Babies To Save The Planet

Climate activist who climbed Big Ben has ‘Extinction Rebellion psychosis’, judge says

Climate change advisers call for steeper air travel tax to reforest country

World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency – Jan 2020

Mnuchin Slams Greta Thunberg: ‘Who Is She’ to Give Economic Advice?

“Let’s Talk After She Finishes College” – Mnuchin Slams Greta Thunberg

Secret Science Under Attack — Part 2

Al Gore Compares Climate Change to 9/11 Attacks

Elizabeth Warren Demands Banks Provide Their Climate Disaster Plans  I’d like to see their Warren disaster plans.

Read it.

There must be clarity about the character of possible conflict with Iran. The flawed strategies applied over the last 19 years in Afghanistan and Iraq are not the answer to waging war with Iran. Those strategies involved deploying hundreds of thousands of ground forces in the region to conduct prolonged occupation, nation building, and counterinsurgency operations—none of which would be applicable to Iran. Rather, any action against Iran should be modeled after the decisive take-down of Iraq applied in Operation Desert Storm in 1991, when aerospace power was used for 43 days. Only four days of that operation used ground forces to reoccupy Kuwait, and that will not be required in an Iranian effort. We have to stop equating strategy with the number of U.S. boots on the ground. Large numbers of U.S. ground forces in the Mideast plays into Iran’s hands and could lead to unnecessary and unwanted “endless wars.” Rapid accomplishment of desired effects should be the goal.

Victor Davis Hanson.

Before 2002, during the various Palestinian intifadas, Israel suffered hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries from suicide bombers freely crossing from the West Bank and Gaza into Israel.

In response, Israel planned a vast border barrier. The international community was outraged. The Israeli left called the idea nothing short of “apartheid.”

However, after the completion of the 440-mile border barrier — part concrete well, part wire fencing — suicide bombings and terrorist incursions into Israel declined to almost nil.

Read it.

In terms of seriousness, I realize that this question ranks right up there with “Why is There Air?” (which was a pretty funny comedy album from back in the 60s). There have been hundreds of books and articles which have examined the “roots of progressive rage.” At times I believe that we have seen so much progressive fury that we have almost become inured to it. Like most people, I usually adhere to the philosophy of “fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly and progressives gotta rant.” However, during the holiday season, I ran across two instances that caused me to re-examine my own thinking about our current social and political environment.

When I hear the word ‘triggering’ I reach for my revolver. (With apologies to Hermann Göring.)

Read it.

Let’s see whether anybody pays attention.

Read it.

Seventeenth-century scholars were horrified by how much ancient knowledge had been lost when the monasteries dispersed.

Read it.

“In a spirit of conciliation, the Legislature of West Virginia hereby extends an invitation to our fellow Virginians who wish to do so, to join us in our noble experiment of 156 years of separation from the government at Richmond; and, we extend an invitation to any constituent county or city of the Commonwealth of Virginia to be admitted to the body politic of the State of West Virginia,” HCR 8 read.

Joel Kotkin.

Despite an increasingly large lobbying and public relations effort, the oligarchs are in danger of squandering their once near universal political support. Some 70 percent of Americans, notes a recent Pew study, believe social media platforms “censor political views.” In California, just over the past year, the percentage of voters thinking tech firms need to be more heavily regulated has been rising to over 70 percent in both the Bay Area and Southern California.

Steve Sailer covers this stuff so you don’t have to.

Not that ‘woke’ women have any interest in men, of course….

Arctic sea ice can’t ‘bounce back’  More panic based on ‘climate models’.

Kiribati Man is Back: UN Rules Climate Refugees Cannot Be Rejected  Well, let’s see whether they can enforce that.

Summer Sea Ice Could End This Decade: The Voyage to the End of Ice

Judges Explain Why They Are Knocking Down Enviro Attempts To Sue Oil Companies Into Oblivion

Green Economy Is The New Black At Davos 2020  All abord the virtue-signaling train!

“I Don’t See Her In Beijing Or Delhi” – Niall Ferguson Slams Davos’ “Virtue Signaling” Greta Fanboys  They would use her for spare parts.

Prince Charles makes radical call for green taxes after flying to Davos on private jet

Read it.

I’m sure Gabbard’s impending suicide will be covered on the evening news.

UPDATE: Tulsi Gabbard Sues Hillary Clinton Over ‘Russian Asset’ Remark

UPDATE: Tulsi Gabbard Hits Hillary Clinton With $50 Million Defamation Suit

UPDATE: Tulsi Gabbard Sues Hillary Clinton for Defaming Her as a “Russian Asset”

Read it.

So far as I can tell, not a parody. Although these days, you never know….

Read it.

Homes in 74% of the country, mostly the large metro areas, are unaffordable for the average worker. At least three-quarters of millennials will never own home as they’re drowning in student debt, auto loans, and credit card debt.

Renting has also become too costly for many in large metro areas like San Francisco. Millennials have already moved into campers and tent cities to escape rising rents, but there could be a new solution called “pod living.”

If they could live in a college dorm again, they would.

On the Climate Road to Serfdom

UN Panel Says Climate Refugees Can’t Be Returned Home

Davos Elites Warn “Climate Action Failure” Biggest Global Risk In 2020

The Green Swan: BIS Urges Climate Action to Prevent a new GFC

Ozone-depleting substances caused half of late 20th-century Arctic warming, says study

PBS Science Correspondent Blames Global Warming for Australian Wildfires  As they do.

Thunberg Calls Climate Change ‘Real Crisis’ in Davos Talk

‘Climate Puppet’ Greta Thunberg Shames Davos Attendees For ‘Doing Nothing’

Central Bankers’ Core Mission Now Includes Climate Change  Oh, really?

Read it.

Almost as good as a wall.

Zman does some ‘splainin’.

The white American Progressive has always imagined society as a fully enclosed community, that is judged as a whole. A popular slogan among them is that “society is judged by how it treats it weakest members.” This is an explicit expression of communal judgement, which is the traveling partner of communal salvation. The white Progressive looks at society as an organism that moves forward as a whole. If some parts lag behind, the whole thing slows to a halt.

Further, the white Progressive believes in the unitary reformer. That is, the reformer is not just focused on one area of society, but the whole of society. Even if their efforts are in one area, those efforts support the whole community. A reform effort that does not promise to move the whole of society forward is of no interest. For white Progressive reformers, society is the flock and they are the shepherds. Anything that threatens their effort to guard and guide the flock must be eliminated.

It is this spatial understanding of the world that helps explain these largely symbolic attacks on the Second Amendment. In the hive mind of the white Progressive, people who own guns are outside the domain of the righteous. Therefore, they must be marginalized from society. Much in the same way they anathematized smoking, white Progressives seek to make owning a gun disqualifying. Symbolically, these measures are aimed at putting gun rights outside the whole of society.

Steve Sailer.

Steve has made a hobby of documenting the self-absorbed victimhood of black activists. It can get pretty silly.

Read it.

That’s how the New York Times characterizes the Massachusetts Senator in an editorial today. I would have said “liar,” but why quibble?

Read it.

One of the many odd things about the New York Times‘s “1619 Project” on slavery is that Martin Luther King Jr is barely mentioned (ditto Frederick Douglass). This omission may not be accidental, since both Douglass and King found sources for the remedy of slavery inside the American founding that today’s left wishes to repudiate completely. It will be a curious thing to see whether and how the 1619 Project appears in any of today’s observances of MLK’s birthday (or whether, in the fullness of time, there will be a push to rename MLK Day for someone or something else).

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #395

Davos: “Climate Change seems to be Outgrowing the … Institutions … who have Dealt with it Until Now”

The Biggest Lie About Washing Your Clothes, Debunked By Experts

Discovery Regarding Arctic Sea Ice and Permafrost Has Significant Implications for the Future

Venus may have been habitable and Earth-like before greenhouse gas took over  Popular ‘Science’.

California’s trees could shift as global warming forces birds to move out Or maybe not.

An obvious solution to the climate policy crisis

The Senate Impeachment Trial: 8 Things You Need to Know

The Nation’s Global Warming Freak-Out: Sports Will Either ‘Sink Into Sea or Burn’

Read it.

I eat at McDonalds all the time, and I’ve never noticed that the Coke there is anything to write home about.

If they wanted their Coke actually to taste good, they’d serve Pepsi.

Read it.

Yuval Levin’s new book — available for presale on Amazon; released tomorrow — argues that we are living through a social crisis.

Duh. If all it takes to write a book is to wake up and look around, we’re all in clover.

Levin, my colleague at AEI, focuses on the important role of institutions. He writes that public trust in institutions is commonly undermined by abuses of power. That isn’t our era’s unique problem.

Institutions are only as good as the people who man them. If an institution is full of corrupt power-hungry sociopaths, all the paper guarantees in the world will not keep it from going to Hell.

This is what has motivated the proglodyte ‘march through the institutions’ that has been proceeding successfully during all of my adult life.

Read it.

Thank you, President Trump.

Read it.

What the Inequality Weepers never realize is that when one of the 1% like Bloomberg gets a bug up his butt about something he will do out and spend massive amounts of money on it, whether that spanding will be useful (Bill Gates) or wasteful (Bloomberg, Steyer); either one gives thousands of people employment and hundreds of businesses profits. Economic inequality is one of the chief engines of economic growth.

Read it.

Today very few people know that national socialists are just another branch of socialism. They lack the ‘inter prefix’. That’s all. Hitler was a socialist. He admired Mussolini, who also was a socialist. Mussolini was congratulated by Lenin himself when he took over the Italian government. A lot of Nazis and Fascists admired the Roosevelt administration. The feelings were mutual: the US Democrats of the day admired the Nazis and the Fascists. Hitler was particularly impressed by the racial policies of the Democrat party and its Jim Crow laws. He based his Nuremberg laws on those laws. Eugenics were thought up by Democrats, and ‘improved’ by the Nazis. Hitler was Man of the Year 1938 in Time Magazine. On the other side of the pond Mussolini was greatly admired as the guy who made the trains run on time. Socialism really works, and it rules!

Read it.

It’s amazing now many people reason backward from their preferred outcome rather than forward from some sort of basic principle.

Read it.

… European leaders are already thinking about how to cope with a scenario where they face a resurgent empire to the east, and a fading—and no longer friendly—superpower in the west. Under these conditions, a real European army could emerge for the first time.

Won’t happen when they realize that it means they have to spend some money that could go to social programs i.e. buying votes.

Neil Ferguson.

The aftermath of the killing of Iran’s Major General Qassem Soleimani, the mastermind of Tehran’s dirty wars, not only confirmed the weakness of the Iranian government, it also exposed the weakness of President Trump’s domestic opponents.

Yuval Levin.

Our institutions lost the capacity to mold character and have become platforms for performance instead.

Read it.

Federal authorities are turning to a new tactic in the escalating conflict over New York City’s so-called sanctuary policies, issuing four “immigration subpoenas” to the city for information about inmates wanted for deportation.

“This is not a request — it’s a demand,” Henry Lucero, a senior U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official, told The Associated Press. “This is a last resort for us. Dangerous criminals are being released every single day in New York.”

In a pissing contest between the Feds and a city, I suspect that the Feds hold most of the high cards.

Read it.

More evidence that President Trump’s immigration policies are having great effects, from the Wall Street Journal: “Mexican Forces Clash With Migrants at Border With Guatemala.”

Climate Kidz case scuttled by 9th Circuit Court

Climate Activist Thunberg Joins March Ahead of Davos

Ultra-Wealthy Donors Place Low Priority on Environmental Causes

Appeasement: The Root Cause of the Australian Mega-Fires

What’s a Climate Scientist to Wear During Awards Season?

Cold truth: Iceland’s melting glaciers are nothing to panic about

“I hope we get another impeachment after this one. The stock market appears to do very well under impeachment.”

— Scott Adams  (16:05)

Read it.

If they hadn’t confiscated all of the guns, this would be an easy problem to take care of.

Climate Change Is Killing Alpine Skiing as We Know It

A global reforestation project is how we fix climate change

Ok, Boomer: NBC Blames Climate Change for Generational Divide

PBS Guest Argues Media Should Ignore Climate Skeptic ‘Lies’

Michael Mann Beclowns Himself with Aussie Climate Refugee Prediction

Climate Change Destroyed Assyrian Empire… without fossil fuels!  Climate Change — is there anything it can’t do?

Senior Aussie Politician: “Climate deniers are like anti-vaxxers”

Austrian Chancellor Says Battling Illegal Immigration Is Just As Important As Climate Change  Can he say that?

Were IPCC’s 1990 medium-term warming predictions accurate? No.

These Grass Straws Are an Eco-Friendly Alternative to Plastic  Yeah, if you don’t mind your drink tasting like grass….

Angry 17-Year-Old Girl Threatens World Leaders In Davos: “You Haven’t Seen Anything Yet”

Noah Rothman.

The American left has long regarded itself as the antidote to the prudish puritanism displayed by the moralistic right. But as “liberalism” gave way to “progressivism,” this conceit has fallen away. As economic populism becomes fused with and is often superseded by the demands of identity politics, technocratic social engineering has once again become an urgent part of the progressive project. That urgency is accompanied by a sense of moral rectitude and historical inevitability. The result is a form of progressivism that looks a lot like the progressivism of the early 20th century.

This fits with the common perception that the current proglodyte Left are a bunch of Puritans on the hunt for Heretics and Sinners to ‘cancel’.

Peter Robinson holds a discussion with two experts on what to expect.

Christopher deGroot is not sure about all this.

On Wednesday, the liberal writer Caitlin Flanagan tweeted something about the previous night’s Democratic debate that should be of immense interest to social conservatives. “Was it just me,” she asked, “or did all of the candidates seem to think that the place for Mom is at work and the place for baby is daycare?” No, it certainly wasn’t just you, close observer, nor is it surprising that those progressives took it for granted that “gender equality” must consist of “gender parity” in the workplace, even if achieving that goal results in children becoming a kind of afterthought, or anyway, secondary consideration, their care and development to be left to strangers. For the Democratic Party is the party of feminist ideology, and though women, like men, are a heterogenous group, characterized by diverse interests and values, most feminists seem to assume that if women are not “keeping up” with men in the workplace, then in some vague ultimate sense women do not matter as much as men do.

Read it.

Yeah, like that’s ever going to happen.

When I heard Hillary Clinton refer to half of Trump supporters as “deplorables” during her 2016 presidential campaign, I knew she would lose. Her comment exemplified the arrogant, elitist, dismissive attitudes that make many white working-class voters suspicious of the Democratic Party. Four years later, as Democrats try to figure out how to beat one of the least popular Republican presidents ever, they’re still trying to get over their deplorables problem.

The problem is that the new clerisy that runs the Democratic Party has no experience with, nor any sympathy for, working-class people, particularly working-class white people. This is an amazing change for the party that pretends to be the champion of ‘working families’.

Read it.

Yesterday, some irate supporters of Sanders circulated a #Never­Warren hashtag. #WarrenIsASnake also began trending.

Warren deserves this treatment. Contrary to her angry post-debate statement to Sanders that he called her a liar on national television, Sanders’s denial that he ever said a woman can’t beat Donald Trump is just as consistent with the notion that Warren simply misunderstood his comment on the subject. Warren was not justified in going nuclear.

In any case, Warren should not have berated Sanders, and refused to shake his hand, while the cameras were still rolling and CNN was still picking up sound. Sanders was spot on when he advised her, “let’s not do this right now.”

The poor judgment Warren displayed by going nuclear over a comment with an innocent explanation, and with the cameras still rolling, is yet another reason to expect the worst from a Warren presidency.

Who could dislike Professor Umbrage?

Read it.

This does not appear to be a satire.