Jared Diamond has some thoughts.

For most of our history we supported ourselves by hunting and gathering: we hunted wild animals and foraged for wild plants. It’s a life that philosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short. Since no food is grown and little is stored, there is (in this view) no respite from the struggle that starts anew each day to find wild foods and avoid starving. Our escape from this misery was facilitated only 10,000 years ago, when in different parts of the world people began to domesticate plants and animals. The agricultural revolution spread until today it’s nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers survive.

The anthropological research I’ve read suggests that hunter-gatherers were better nourished, healthier, and had less of a daily workload than agricultural workers.

Bloomberg calls for closing all coal-fired power plants to combat climate change’

The dangerous winds of trying to prevent climate change

Enviro-Fascism for Toddlers

Greta Thunberg: ‘Put World Leaders Against The Wall’ If They Fail To Take Action On Climate Change

NYT Editorial Board: ‘Impeach’ Trump, But ‘Resist The Pull Of Partisanship’

The guilty ones preventing good policy about climate change

‘Green’ energy relies on copper-nickel mining

Latest UN Climate Talks Collapsing

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I should have thought that bins were exactly the right place for them.

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Take the scourge of the introduced cane toad (Rhinella marina) for example. As this highly poisonous amphibian disperses across northern Australia, the numbers of predators attempting to eat them are crashing. The most notable victims are quolls, goannas and certain snakes, which have been all but wiped out in some regions. Crows, however, have learnt how to eat toads by avoiding the most toxic parts.

If know-it-all do-gooders quite trying to ‘fix’ the climate, Mother Nature will take care of it, as she always has.

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America’s surging politics of victimhood and identitarian division did not emerge organically or inevitably, as many believe. Nor are these practices the result of irrepressible demands by minorities for recognition, or for redress of past wrongs, as we are constantly told. Those explanations are myths, spread by the activists, intellectuals, and philanthropists who set out deliberately, beginning at mid-century, to redefine our country. Their goal was mass mobilization for political ends, and one of their earliest targets was the Mexican-American community. These activists strived purposefully to turn Americans of this community (who mostly resided in the Southwestern states) against their countrymen, teaching them first to see themselves as a racial minority and then to think of themselves as the core of a pan-ethnic victim group of “Hispanics”—a fabricated term with no basis in ethnicity, culture, or race.

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More than 65,000 surviving spouses of people who died in military service could soon be set to receive full survivor’s benefits, after a bipartisan effort to do away with the so-called “widow’s tax.”

The Military Widow’s Tax Elimination Act is a recently included provision of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), an annual bill that allocates government expenditures on the military. The provision reverses a 1972 decision that limited government benefits for families who qualified for two different survivor benefit programs.

World must reach ‘peak meat’ by 2030 to meet climate change targets, scientists warn

No One Actually Believes the Global Warming Hype

Greta Thunberg Is the Perfect Hero for an Unserious Time

CO2 Emissions Will Break Another Record in 2019 ‘Scientific’ American.

BURNETT: Climate-Change Alarmists Are Getting More Delusional In Their Predictions

CBS News Touts ‘Peak Meat’ by 2030 to Avoid Climate Crisis

EU claims success on flagship climate change policy – but Poland says no

Al Gore Says Democratic Candidates Should Absolutely Run On AOC’s Green New Deal: Report  That’s why AlGore is a loser and will always remain one.

After 30 years of failed climate politics, let’s try science!

The Arctic may have crossed key threshold in a long-dreaded climate feedback  ‘May’. So panic anyway.

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About 2 million books get published every year in the world. The indexed web contains at least 5.75 billion pages. So much to read, so little time. In a world obsessed with speed and productivity at all costs, it’s no surprise that someone came up with a solution. It’s called speed reading, and its promise is to help anyone read at speeds of above 1000 words per minute—much higher than the 200-400 words per minute achieved by the average college-level reader. Sounds fantastic. The problem? It’s completely bogus.

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For the first time, BBC News published a news story for every constituency that declared election results overnight – all written by a computer.

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Apparently the peasants are more revolting than anybody knew.

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At Disco, everything has a price, from office desks and PCs to a spot for your wet umbrella. Teams bill each other for their work, while individuals operate as one-person startups, with daily auctions of work assignments and battles for the best ideas in the aptly named “Colosseum.” Payments are settled in a virtual currency called “Will,” with balances paid in yen at the end of each quarter. “We’ve created a free economic zone, just like what exists outside the company,” says Toshio Naito, who designed the program and has continued to work on it since its implementation in 2011. “Work should be about freedom, not orders.”

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Apparently, not as much as you might think.

In the past decade, as pedometers have proliferated in smartphone apps and wearable fitness trackers, another benchmark has entered the lexicon: Take at least 10,000 steps a day, which is about five miles of walking for most people. As with many other American fitness norms, where this particular number came from has always been a little hazy. But that hasn’t stopped it from becoming a default daily goal for some of the most popular activity trackers on the market.

Now new research is calling the usefulness of the 10,000-step standard into question—and with it, the way many Americans think about their daily activities. While basic guidelines can be helpful when they’re accurate, human health is far too complicated to be reduced to a long chain of numerical imperatives. For some people, these rules can even do more harm than good.

I think about taking 10,000 steps a day and it has the same effect as actually taking them. (See previous post.)

The Arctic may have crossed key threshold, emitting billions of tons of carbon into the air, in a long-dreaded climate feedback  WaPo. Women and minorities hardest hit, no doubt.

Greenland ice losses rising faster than expected

Angry, Whiny, Self-Righteous High-school Dropout Picked as Time Magazine’s Person of the Year

Will Lagarde Pledge To Do “Whatever It Takes” To Fix Climate Change?

Pacific Glaciers Redux

Greenpeace activists set off flares atop new EU headquarters as leaders gather for climate change talks

Nominations Open For ‘The World’s Greatest Climate Hypocrite’ Competition

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The near-homogeneity of Silicon Valley political beliefs has gone from wry punchline to national crisis in the United States. The monoculture of virtue signaling and high- and heavy-handed woke corporate leftism at places like Google, Twitter, and Facebook was once a source of chagrin for those who found themselves shut out of various internet sites for deviating from the orthodoxies of the Palo Alto elites. After the 2016 presidential election, however, it became obvious that the digitalistas were doing a lot more than just making examples of a few handpicked “extremists.” From the shadow banning of non-leftist sites and views to full-complement political propagandizing, Bay Area leftists have been so aggressive in bending the national psyche to their will that there is talk in the papers and on the cable “news” channels of “existential threats to our democracy.”

Freeberg does a deep dive.

The Important part:

So I taught myself, in childhood, how to program computers because I figured out I really don’t like people enough to talk to them. Voting consistently against democrats came later, when I realized I don’t hate people enough to want them to suffer. That is also not unusual. I think if you were to question a lot of political conservatives as to why they are conservatives, a fair answer you’d get back a lot of the time would be “I just don’t hate people that much.” But that’s a bunny trail. The truly frightening question that confronted me now was: Given that I can get along with some people, but not all, can it be that the difference lies completely in their social strengths? Am I only making friends with just the friendliest of people? Just taking from what few relationships I have, and putting nothing back?

And we fellas have to ask that question a lot, because when couples have “friends,” most of them are her friends. That’s just how it works. This gets revealed when it’s time for the couple to split, and it leads to a sense of isolation most women will never know.

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I would be reluctant to characterize Methodists as Christian.

Exposing The Promoters Of Climate Anxiety

Greenland’s ice losses have septupled and are now in line with its highest sea-level scenario, scientists say

WaPo.

One-third of recent global methane increase comes from tropical Africa

Report: A Cloud Drifting Over a Solar Farm Knocked Out Power for 10hrs

TIME Names Greta Thunberg ‘Person Of The Year’ Whining is its own reward.

Promoters of Climate Anxiety

Nets Grovel Before Greta: She’s ‘Woke’ With a ‘Sweet Voice’ That’s ‘Inspired a Lot of Kids’

Nation Surprised To Learn Time Magazine Still In Print Babylon Bee.

NOAA goes Hollywood with “Arctic Report Card” at #AGU19

The Manntastic climate doom panel at #AGU19

Climate change could make many US homes uninsurable  But Bernie could pay your insurance for you. Hey, it could happen, just like ‘climate change’.

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I guess you can’t always get what you want. Somebody spread the word on campus.

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People perceive a person’s competence partly based on subtle economic cues emanating from the person’s clothing, according to a study published in Nature Human Behaviour by Princeton University. These judgments are made in a matter of milliseconds, and are very hard to avoid.

Why would you want to avoid them, unless you’re a Grievance Studies professional? People in most cases dress like what they are: Stoners dress like stoners, bums dress like bums, farmers dress like farmers, students dress like students, rich people dress like people in very expensive casual clothes. Most people are Players and dress to tell you who they want you to think they are. Like terrorists, they have no one to blame but themselves if you take them at their word.

Daily Mail.

Of course she did. They all do. This is news?

Actually, the news here is that the knives appear to be coming out for Professor Umbrage.

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Not as long as Trump is President they won’t.

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

Claim: The Montreal Protocol Saved the Arctic From Global Warming

DOJ Watchdog Puts Final Nail In Steele Dossier’s Coffin

MSNBC’s Katy Tur Frets Liberals Not Doing Enough to Dismantle Capitalism

The Woke Media: Apologists For The State

No joke: Russian scientists marked problem Kara Sea polar bear with T-34

Report Reveals The Extent Of Liz Warren’s Past Defending Big Business From Enviro Activists

BREAKING: #ExxonKnew lawsuit crashes and burns

Exxon Defeats Climate Crusading AG’s Attempt To Hold Big Oil Responsible For Duping Investors

Exxon Mobil Prevails Over “Politically-Biased” New York AG In Major Climate-Change Case

At #AGU19, they declare – full “climate crisis mode” – but there’s an inconvenient fact

Mega-Rich Environmentalists Respond To Questions About Their Use Of Private Jets

40 million more people at risk of flooding as Greenland loses ice ‘seven times faster than in 1990s’  Call me when one of them gets wet.

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Professor Umbrage does not appear to be as popular as her Pokemon Victim Point score would suggest.

Ryrkaypiy ‘over-run’ by >50 polar bears is probably due to more Chukchi Sea bears

Miss Universe Says ‘The Planet Is Dying’ After Epic Steve Harvey Eye Roll

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #389

A Geological Perspective on Sea Level Rise Acceleration  I’ll believe it when Malibu is under water.

Mega-Rich Environmentalists Respond To Questions About Their Use Of Private Jets

L A Times supports mandated relocation of coastal properties based on climate alarmist flawed sea level rise claims

The antidote to @GretaThunberg – Naomi Seibt – former climate alarmist turned climate skeptic

Fix earth’s climate crisis instead of dreaming of other planets

Vulnerable Nations Call for Ecocide to Be Recognized as an International Crime  For which, of course, they hope to be handsomely compensated by The Usual Suspects.

Art Basel Climate Change Installation Accused Of Being Bad For The Environment

The Great Recycling Con

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No shit.

Obama started it as The Magic Negro. Nobody cared about his policies; they were just there for the music.

As Scott Adams often says, Trump found money lying on the table and just scooped it up. If the people want a show, well, ‘hey, kids, let’s put on a show’. Mickey Rooney should have been alive to see this day.

Joel Kotkin.

When Britain’s Jews go to the polls next week, they do so at an uncomfortable moment. For the first time in at least a half century, their community—roughly 330,000 citizens—has become a major, if unwelcome, political issue. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is a long-standing ally of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its terrorist proxies Hamas and Hezbollah, and a fierce opponent of Israel’s right to exist, so the prospect of him becoming Prime Minister has made Jews nervous. As the New York Times suggests, British Jews are “Labourites practically by birth,” but many of them are likely to vote Conservative this time around.

Es iz schwer tzu sein a yid.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Joel Kotkin.

Whether in Europe, East Asia or the Americas, this new middle-class rebellion may be seen as what one Marxist publication called “a strike against the rising cost of living.”

Although the leftists identify this more with protests against things like subway fare hikes, in the latest uprising the key has been those things, notably energy and housing prices, which threaten to “proletarianize” the living standards of the not long ago decently comfortable.

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The purpose of their Saturday article by David De La Fuente was to shame the Democrats into including “candidates of color’ at their next presidential debate but a big take away from the story was that it basically described Steyer as a scam artist.

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The headline is a lie; the author doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does about what is “good” and “bad” about automation, merely what he has been taught about what might be good or bad about automation. Articles like this make me itch.

Here’s What Happens When A Stoner Crashes A Climate Protest

Climate Protesters Burn Oil By Holding Up Traffic In D.C.

Climate Models Have Not Improved in 50 Years

2019 the Third Least-Chilly in the Satellite Temperature Record

Climate change: Oceans running out of oxygen as temperatures rise  BBC. Women and minorities hardest hit.

“Bewildered” Climate Scientists: Aussie Politicians are Still Not Listening Gee, I wonder what the reason for that might be….

The polar regions in a 2°C warmer world

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If the NATO summit this week marking the 70th anniversary of its foundation in 1949 was meant to be a resounding celebration, it backfired spectacularly, more as a resounding farce. Amid all the pomp and ceremony afforded by an official reception at Buckingham Palace, hosted by the British Queen, the two-day gathering descended into squabbling, sneering and back-stabbing.

For an organization that declares its mission to be about “maintaining peace and security”, the infighting between NATO leaders showed an organization virtually at war with itself.

The reason for NATO expired with the old Soviet Union. In any case, there is no longer any excuse for including Turkey in a “North Atlantic” treaty organization.

David Brooks, NYT.

Or doesn’t, as the case may be. (Some might say that he still is, only not as much. But I won’t go there.)

My socialist sympathies didn’t survive long once I became a journalist. I quickly noticed that the government officials I was covering were not capable of planning the society they hoped to create. It wasn’t because they were bad or stupid. The world is just too complicated.

Actually, it because a lot of them are bad or stupid. Let’s face it, the cream of the crop don’t go into government service. Visit a local government office if you don’t believe me.

UPDATE: Join the Crooks and Liars, Get a Government Job!, by Audacious Epigone

Go ahead – try it.

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No indication whether this is Trump’s fault, but I’m sure it is.

Steve Sailer.

An article in The Diplomat that is relatively informative by the standards of the genre, argues that the rise of pale-skinned Koreans has made Southeast Asian women even more obsessive about whitening their skins….

CNN Hypes Going to ‘War’ Against Climate Change

Birds are shrinking due to climate change, scientists claim

UN’s Agenda 2030 Translator: How To Read The UN’s New Sustainable Development Goals

The Anti-Greta

Majority of climate simulation models have accurately predicted global heating since 1970s, study finds 

Another year, another carbon emissions record

Hot PBS Take on Fox: ‘Helping to Destroy the Planet’

Climate change could boost British crops, pioneering field trial shows 

Mason scientist develops game to arm users against climate change ‘fake news’

Some Facts About Energy

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And Justin Hammer Elon Musk laughs all the way to the bank….

Babylon Bee.

Why not? They’ve tried everything else.

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This is why a lot of us don’t feel like panicking over ‘climate change’.

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Cory Booker moans that the Democrats are “spiraling towards a debate stage that could have six people with no diversity whatsoever.” This statement is flatly false. The six Dems who have locked up places on the debate stage are Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and Tom Steyer.

Well, let’s look at the numbers.

Looks like blacks and Latinx want the Old White People. Whose fault is that?