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After initially blaming mechanical malfunctions for the crash, a version of events that was almost instantly refuted by experts and the airline in Ukraine, Iran is now claiming that UIA Flight 752 tried to turn back after take off, suggesting that the cause of the crash was something other than the misfiring of one of Iran’s Russian-made missile-defense systems, according to Bloomberg.

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Thank you, Minimum Wage Increase.

EU farming subsidies to be replaced by fund linked to efforts to combat climate change, Theresa Villiers to announce

German Greens: Use Climate Emergency Declarations to Jail Deniers

Climate change now detectable from any single day of weather at global scale  And if you believe that one they’ll tell you another one.

‘It’s Not Arson’: Gizmodo Managing Editor Has Meltdown Over Australia’s Wildfires

The Climate Decade that Was: Failed Predictions, Tour De Paris, and the Gretas

Glacier National Park Is Changing Signs Warning That Glaciers Would Be Gone By 2020. Here’s What They Say

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“The missiles fired last night at us and our allies were paid for with the funds made available by the last administration,” Trump said. “The regime also greatly tightened the range on their own country, even recently killing 1,500 people at the many protests that are taking place all throughout Iran.”

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Think of it as evolution in action.

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More suspicious details have surfaced over the past few hours as investigators take the first hard look at the circumstances that caused a Boeing 737 to plunge out of the sky minutes after takeoff.

Bloomberg reports that foreign investigations into what happened will undoubtedly be hindered by the regime, particularly amid rising tensions with Washington. Meanwhile, more evidence as emerged to suggest that the jet was a victim of a misfiring of Iran’s missile defense system.

As theories multiplied, the Ukrainian embassy in Tehran amended an earlier statement on its website, in which it ruled out terrorism. Instead, it offered ‘no comment’ on possible causes.

UPDATE: Group Speculates Ukrainian Jet Crash Was a ‘Shootdown Event’

UPDATE: Tehran Plane Crash Appears To Be “A Shootdown Event,” Experts Say

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Prince Charles will fly round the world to launch summit bid to save the planet

Climate Alarmists Winning the War of Words, Despite Evidence that Nothing Unusual is Happening

Urban Transit Is an Energy Hog

Colbert and Jane Fonda Push Climate Alarmism — Only 10 Years Left!

Greenland Ice Core CO2 Concentrations Deserve Reconsideration

Rest Easy, World. Vogue Editors and Celebrities Are Here to Save the Environment.

Australian Police Charge Several People For Intentionally Setting Bushfires, Activists Blame Climate Change

US Greenhouse Gas Emissions Drop in 2019

Obama-Era EPA Chief Becomes Head Of One Of The Country’s Largest Enviro Groups  Regulatory catch-and-release.

Teen Firefighter Charged With Setting Some Australian Wildfires

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That’s not who we are.

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Hammer tech.

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A massive contribution to the DNC would probably give them the most bang for their riyal.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Extinction Rebellion activists embroiled in row over whether flying is ever acceptable

Climate change is playing havoc with Mexico’s monarch butterfly migration Or maybe not.

Golden Globe Awards Hysteria: ‘Climate Disaster,’ ‘Country on Brink of War’

Tom Steyer: “Climate is my Number One Priority”

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #393

Renowned Entomologist Says ‘Get Rid of Your Lawn’  I think not,.

Nearly 200 People Arrested Across Australia For Deliberately Starting Bushfires  Must be deniers.

FT: “Democracies are ill-suited to deal with climate change”

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Omar, a Somali refugee, won the ignominious vote over Louis Farrakhan and Richard Spencer.

Quite an achievement, even though Spencer is only anti-semitic in proglodyte delusions.

NYT: Australia is Committing Climate Suicide

The sad truth about our boldest climate target

German grandmothers protest broadcast of song calling elderly ‘environmental pigs’

Read it.

I admire Gates’ philanthropy and respect it. He has done fantastic things for this world. But two of the things he has always demanded of the organizations to which his foundation donates is efficiency and return on investment. There is nothing more inefficient than government. While people are sleeping in tents on 35-degree nights, government agencies devoted to stopping homelessness spent money on a conference that featured a stripper.

…

Bill Gates is worth $110 billion. If the government took half of his wealth, he is still filthy stinking rich beyond any of our wildest dreams for ourselves.

Compare and contrast that to a mom and dad who have both worked really hard their whole lives. Let’s say they’ve denied themselves some indulgences because they wanted to provide for themselves and their families, so they could have something for their kids. They’ve invested, they’ve been diligent, and they’ve worked tirelessly. Over the years, they accumulated $1 million or $2 million. Now you want to take half of that? They go from having their own little piece of the American Dream to wondering why they denied themselves those indulgences for all those years, if the money was just going to government anyway. The $1 million they lose out on is a lot different than the $50 billion Gates would lose.

Read it.

Not really news, but a useful reminder that Trump is far from being the worst liar in politics.

The Other McCain is on the case.

In case you didn’t already know, “incel” means “involuntary celibate,” i.e., a loser who can’t get laid. A “normie” is an average, normal guy who may or may not be getting any action, but who is not tuned into the Great Conspiracy Wavelength Frequency by which the incel gained awareness of his existential hopelessness. Incels consider “normies” even more disgusting than “Chads” (the apex predators of the sexual ecosystem), and basically want all normies to die….

2004 Climate Apocalypse Prediction Bites the Dust

1.5 degrees Celsius: the sad truth about our boldest climate change target  Vox.

Scientists detect “fingerprint” of human-induced climate change on weather  CBS.

Meat Loaf: Greta Thunberg has been “Brainwashed”  I’ll do anything for climate change, but I won’t do that.

Greens Pushing Hard to Blame Aussie Climate Policies for Bushfires

Hijacking Australian 2019 Bushfire Tragedies to Fearmonger Climate Change

Own A Home? You’re Responsible For California’s Wild-Fires

CNN Hints Climate Skeptics to Blame for Australia Wildfires

Australian Police Say Arsonists & Lightning To Blame For Bushfires, Not Climate-Change

ZMan points out what everybody’s thinking.

This is a problem that all outsider politics faces. The weirdo problem was not unique to the alt-right. Anyone who has attended a Libertarian Party event knows that movement has had a weirdo problem for generations. The environmental movement has had a similar problem. Most people are happy to support conservation efforts, for example, but when they see some nut dressed as an elf, demanding everyone give up their cars, they assume he and the movement are crazy.

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

In sailing, rock climbing, construction, and any activity requiring the securing of ropes, certain knots are known to be stronger than others. Any seasoned sailor knows, for instance, that one type of knot will secure a sheet to a headsail, while another is better for hitching a boat to a piling.

But what exactly makes one knot more stable than another has not been well-understood, until now.

Read it.

ess than 24 hours after a US drone shockingly killed the leader of the top Iranian military leader, Qasem Soleimani, resulting in equity markets groaning around the globe in fear over Iranian reprisals, the US has gone for round two with Reuters and various other social media sources reporting that US air strikes targeting Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units umbrella grouping of Iran-backed Shi’ite militias near camp Taji north of Baghdad, have killed six people and critically wounded three, an Iraqi army source said late on Friday.

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I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

I’ll bet the bars have swastikas on them. Just sayin’.

Catching the Alarmists in a Baldfaced Sea Level Lie

Amazon Reportedly Censors Employees Over Environmentalism

Climate Hysterics Wrong Again

Protests Follow German State Broadcast Showing Kids Singing About Grandmas Being “Environmental Pigs” For Eating Meat

Models Confirm “The Day After Tomorrow” Was Bad Science Fiction

Amazon threatened to fire employees for speaking out on climate, workers say

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Born in obscurity, frustrated in youth, the dictator rises through accident, patronage or anything except merit to blossom into a fully fledged evil-doer, desperate for the respect and admiration that are wrung from the populace only by skilled PR manipulation. Often feigning modesty, he soon generates a cult that he personally develops. Women and even brave men feel overcome in his presence; schoolchildren chant the praise of the father of the nation; artists and writers deify the great leader. Dictators generally come equipped with an ideology, but since they have no principles, only a lust for power, the process of propagation turns it into a mockery.

Any resemblance to Barack “The Magic Negro” Obama is, of course, purely coincidental.

Victor Davis Hanson.

The Washington Post recently published a surprising indictment of MSNBC host, Stanford graduate, and Rhodes scholar Rachel Maddow.

Post media critic Erik Wemple wrote that Maddow deliberately misled her audience by claiming the now-discredited Steele dossier was largely verifiable—even at a time when there was plenty of evidence that it was mostly bogus.

At the very time Maddow was reassuring viewers that Christopher Steele was believable, populist talk radio and the much-criticized Fox News Channel were insisting that most of Steele’s allegations simply could not be true. Maddow was wrong. Her less degreed critics proved to be right.

All the credentials in the world won’t help you if you are a congenital fool.

Whenever you encounter somebody playing the credentials card, remember Rachel Maddow.

Glacier National Park quietly removed ‘Gone by 2020’ signs in 2019—Update

Unprecedented and Worrying Rise in Sea Levels Poses Serious Threat to Coastal Cities

CNN Climate Expert: “Shouting into the apocalypse”… because climate change

JoNova: Aussie ABC Disappearing Evidence They Helped Climate Activists Campaign Against Controlled Burns

Noam Chomsky on the Climate Crisis  Jeez, is he still alive?

Joel Kotkin is pessimistic.

Is America about to suffer its Weimar moment, culminating in the collapse of its republican institutions? Our democracy may be far more rooted than that of Germany’s first republic, which fell in 1933 to Adolf Hitler, but there are disturbing similarities.

Read it.

“I don’t feel the difference,” Jang, who has been using a 5G-enabled Samsung handset, told the WSJ. In fact, on many days he switches off his 5G service altogether because his connection often drops as his phone pingpongs between 5G and the existing 4G LTE network.

Very disappointing.

Steve Sailer.

n the last few years, we’ve all been lectured about how the biggest crisis in K-12 public schools is Segregation: not enough Students of Color go to majority white public schools.

But then there is also the crisis of Integration or Too Many White Students, as the New York Times explained today in an enormously long article about Young Women of Color’s hurt feelings to start off the new decade on a wholly different note from the media obsessions of the last seven years….

Steve Sailer.

As we’ve all been lectured lately, a great failing of American public schools is that not enough Students of Color go to white-majority schools. This is known as Segregation. We need to bus white students all over the place so that Students of Color won’t be exposed to the sheer hell of going to a school that is majority Student of Color.

The Washington Post follows up on the crisis of Not Enough White Students with a big article about the crisis of Too Many White Teachers. We must rescue Students of Color from the sheer hell of going to a school that is minority Teacher of Color.

BP Boss: Daughter’s Friends on Anti-Depressants Because of Climate Change

Subsidizing The Epocalypse

Read it.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Tyler Cowen has a theory.

Having tracked the libertarian “movement” for much of my life, I believe it is now pretty much hollowed out, at least in terms of flow. One branch split off into Ron Paul-ism and less savory alt right directions, and another, more establishment branch remains out there in force but not really commanding new adherents. For one thing, it doesn’t seem that old-style libertarianism can solve or even very well address a number of major problems, most significantly climate change. For another, smart people are on the internet, and the internet seems to encourage synthetic and eclectic views, at least among the smart and curious. Unlike the mass culture of the 1970s, it does not tend to breed “capital L Libertarianism.” On top of all that, the out-migration from narrowly libertarian views has been severe, most of all from educated women.

Read it.

During colonial times, European powers exploited Africa for the vast resources that it possesses. But what China is doing today is actually much worse. Yes, the Chinese greatly desire African resources, but ultimately what they want is Africa itself. But instead of conquering Africa using military force, China is using economics instead. Today, more than 10,000 Chinese-owned firms are operating in Africa, and virtually every major road, bridge, railway and skyscraper is being built by the Chinese. As a result, most African nations are very deeply indebted to China at this point. And as you will see below, when those debts go bad that gives the Chinese a tremendous amount of leverage.

Climate Prediction Swings & Misses: A Decade Of Alarmist Strike-Outs, 2010-2019

Prince William launches The Earthshot Prize – the ‘most prestigious environmental prize in history’

It’s Not Just You—Wild Swings in Extreme Weather Are Rising  Wired ‘Science’

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Illinois’ population decreased in 2019 by an estimated 51,250 people, or 0.4%, marking the sixth consecutive year the state has lost residents, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Since the turn of the decade, Illinois has lost more residents than any other state, with a drop of about 159,700 people, or 1.2% of its population. Only three other states have shrunk since 2010: Connecticut, Vermont and West Virginia — with West Virginia losing the largest share of its residents, a 3.3% decline.

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New York was one of only 10 states to suffer a total population decline in 2018-19 — its fourth consecutive annual decrease after five years of growth, and the largest population drop of any state.

Only West Virginia, Alaska and Illinois saw their populations fall at a faster percentage clip.

The Cartoonish Climate Crusade

Alan Titchmarsh: Eco-warriors should not preach while block-paving gardens and eating avocados

‘You have utterly no clue’: why ‘climate emergency’ is Australia’s ultimate outrage trigger

Columbia University’s Ten Climate Change Exaggerations

Greta Thunberg’s Parents Went Green to ‘Save’ Their Daughter  Save her for what? Mental disorder?

Study: Climate change lessons are rare at medical schools A shame because, of course, that’s the most important thing for them to learn in med school.

Worst Scenario for Climate Change Doesn’t Look ‘Realistic,’ Says Bloomberg News

A Wind Turbine’s Blades Fly Off In New York City, Crushing A Billboard And Vehicle

Biden Proposes Putting Fossil Fuel Execs ‘In Jail’ Over The Climate

ZMan lifts his lamp beside the golden door.

The first rule of organizing is to develop as many on-ramps as possible for people to come into your thing. The reason outsider politics remains fringe is it tends to have just one entry point and that door is guarded by weirdos. The libertarian movement never got out of the valley of weirdos, because it deliberately disconnected itself from the mainstream, despite so much help from Conservative Inc. The key is offering many paths to entry and not being ideological about those paths.

Read it.

Funny how Democrats don’t appreciate being treated the way Republicans are usually treated by Democrats.

Read it. And watch the video.

This short video is suddenly everywhere. It comes from a livestream of the service at the church near Fort Worth where someone opened fire on parishioners with what looks like a shotgun. He was immediately shot by two legally armed persons, one of whom reportedly was a security guard. It appears that altogether, there were six people who immediately pulled guns in response to the shooter.

UPDATE: This Firearms Instructor Is Reportedly The Hero Who Killed Texas Church Gunman With Single Head Shot