Read it.

The principal reason that large cities have developed is that they provide large labor (and housing) markets. A labor market is also a housing market, since virtually all who work in the metropolitan area also live there. The metropolitan area is the one location where there is one-to-one balance between jobs and resident workers (see: Alain Bertaud, Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities). Labor markets are independent of jurisdictional boundaries (municipality, county, or state), except where international boundaries restrict freedom of labor movement.

Obviously, large labor markets require transportation that permits residents to reach the maximum of jobs in a reasonable period of time (such as 30 minutes, which has historical significance, indicated below). Researchers such as Remy Prud’homme, Chang-Won Lee, David Hartgen, Gregory Fields and Steve Polzin have shown that a metropolitan area is likely to have better economic performance and job creation if a larger number of jobs can be reached by the average worker in a specified period. With the relatively recent development of transportation access measures, the 30-minute one – way work trip (commute) has emerged as an important planning standard (referred to herein as “30-minute commutes”).

2020 set to be latest in series of Earth’s warmest years  Looking forward to it.

It’s time to trash recycling

Transportation Climate Initiative Update

“It Only Produces Clean Energy”—The Unseriousness of Climate Activism

More Evidence That We Shouldn’t Take Advice From Climate Activists

Why Modern Famine Predictions Failed !

Read it.

The Florida resort notified law enforcement to report 56-year-old Jing Lu, according to the arrest report. She entered through the main gate, walked to Mar-a-Lago’s service driveway and entered the property, authorities said. She was captured taking photos of the property.

I’m curious as to what is going on here.

Lu appeared in court Thursday morning and denied knowing the significance of Mar-a-Lago. The incident happened days before Trump is scheduled to visit the location for the Christmas holiday. She is not the first person to gain entry of Mar-a-Largo.

Sounds like part of a bad spy movie.

ZMan cuts to the chase.

One thing we are learning about modern democracy is that it is a myth. The people are not in charge. They get to vote on things and select representatives, but those representative don’t actually represent the interests of the people, who voted them into their positions. The office holders in a modern democracy represent the interests of the money-men who sponsored them. Politicians in a democracy are like prize fighters, in that they are controlled by a management team.

Like a price fighter, one of the demands placed upon a modern politician is that he must at all times seek the attention of the public. Much of what we see in our modern democracies is false drama, designed to gain attention. This is why women have proven to be so successful as politicians. Women are naturally gifted with the ability to get attention, especially through false drama. It turns out that democracy is a form of governance modeled on the beauty pageant.

One full of really ugly people.

Read it.

How … convenient.  Has anybody looked in the Clinton White House? Missing stuff tends to magically re-appear there every now and then.

The Atlantic: Investment Bankers Will Save Us from Climate Change

Climate change legislation, media coverage drives oil companies’ ad spending, study finds  My, what a surprise.

When will the Netherlands disappear? (climate change)  Not soon enough.

Geoengineering’s Gender Problem Could Put the Planet at Risk  Wired ‘Science’.

The case against wrapping paper  Popular ‘Science’. Everything normal is Bad For The Planet. Shame on you.

Big Coal Is Not Dead Yet — Report Shows The World Demands More Coal Than Before Paris Deal  The swine.

Read it. And watch the video, obviously.

I’ve always wondered how well that would work. Well, I guess now we know,.

Read it.

Once again the ‘scientific consensus’ gets turned upside down.

I blame it on climate change.

London has spent billions, but no one can escape climate change  CNN.

UN bureaucrats chow down on burgers – while attacking meat

Guardian: Aussie Bushfires are Australia’s Climate Change “Chernobyl Moment”  It’s a crisis, I tell you.

Third World Countries Remain the Losers of Climate Change Activism

Everything that happened at COP25, a potentially world-changing climate conference  Note that ‘change’ is not a synonym for ‘improve’.

California oceans rising in acidity at alarming rate, study finds  Obviously a crisis.

Ocean acidification: yet another wobbly pillar of climate alarmism But it’s a crisis!

Someone get Greenpeace on the line. Boffins clock carbon ‘pollution’ cloud 30,000 light-years wide choking galaxies

Will We Run Out of Helium?  Is it a crisis>

Nature Deserves Legal Rights—and the Power to Fight Back  Wired ‘Science’.

Watch: Climate Activists Are “Nearly Run Over” Trying To Halt Coal-Laden Freight Train

The Grapes of Climate Wrath

Read it.

I’m good with that. Republicans need to start thinking about who their candidate will be after Trump; Trump is going to be a hard act to follow, and Pence really isn’t up to it.

Popular ‘Science’.

Some people (who lurk on Reddit) believe that Japanese toilets should be a basic human right.

I think it ought to be a basic human right to have such people executed whenever found.

Read it.

They could always go back to using mules.

Popular ‘Science’.

Send your woman on a hike so you can stay home in peace and quiet and watch football.

If she should get eaten by a bear, well, life’s full of hardship.

Read it.

That ‘settled science’ just became unsettled again.

But ‘climate change’ is totally a crisis.

Read it.

Uh, perhaps ‘concentrated’ is the wrong word….

David Cole takes a turn laughing at California.

It was October 2003 and L.A. Times columnist Peter King was angry. Mad as hell, in fact, about white Californians and their expectations of happiness.

…

Peter King couldn’t contain his hostility toward the voters who’d just initiated the Fourth Reich, those “sun-drenched men and women in short sleeves, roaring approval as a Hollywood icon recites a line from an old movie: ‘We’re mad as hell, and we aren’t going to take it anymore.’” How dare we be mad, frowned King, at the “new law that permits undocumented field hands, who make up the majority of the state’s farm labor force, to obtain driver’s licenses”:

Read it.

Be the first on your block….

Can You Pass This 9-Question Climate Change Quiz?

Is fragile masculinity the biggest obstacle to climate action?

The Cosmos and Climate

No seat! Climate Brat Greta Thunberg Learns the Hard Way Why Many People Prefer to Fly

‘We survived war in Afghanistan – but Kabul’s pollution could kill us’

Indoor carbon dioxide can make us dumber, and that will get worse with climate change  Popular ‘Science’

Read it.

This is an interesting development.

Sarah Hoyt.

That’s of course before the pronoun mess that Jordan Peterson properly identified as “compelled speech.” And about a dozen other things, some of them completely ridiculous. For instance, does anyone understand why “Asian” is the right word and “Oriental” isn’t? Or why “Native American” is the right designation for Ameridians, when you know, we know for an absolute fact they came from elsewhere, and did not evolve on this continent? No? Why is people of color good but colored people bad? what is the semantic difference, precisely? Why must we call black people “African American” (even if they’re not in fact American, and/or their ancestors haven’t seen Africa for eight generations but white people are white? Even when they’re really not, but really dark tan? Is “black” something to be ashamed of? No? then why is it bad?

Look, I understand when this bullshit is in the name of an ideological point, no matter how brain-dead, but the above isn’t really. The above is in the name of making people jump when you say frog. There is no other reason, no other point, no other purpose to it, than to prove to themselves that they can make people do exactly as they want, on threat of social ostracism if they don’t.

John Derbyshire.

Here’s an anniversary that, even after the Pensacola (and Pearl Harbor) shootings, doesn’t seem to have been mentioned in the Main Stream Media: the Fort Hood massacre, which occurred just over ten years ago, on November 5th, 2009.

My queation is: Why is Hasan still alive? Really, why?

Greta Thunberg apologizes for ‘against the wall’ remark, plans a break from climate activism

The toxic rhetoric of climate change

Anger erupts at U.N. climate summit as major economies resist bold action  ‘Bold action’ is prog-speak for ‘spending your money on what we think is important even if you starve’.

Read it.

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

I never worry about it, secure in the sure and certain knowledge that if microplastics become a problem for the environment Mother Nature will evolve a creature to eat them, as she always has in the past.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist.

Careful observers often and correctly note that, for many of its adherents, environmentalism is a religion.

Too many environmentalists disregard inconvenient truths that would undermine their faith that calamities are percolating just over the horizon. It might well be that humans’ “footprint” on the Earth is larger than ever; it might even be true that this larger footprint creates some health risks for us modern humans that our pre-industrial ancestors never encountered.

But it is undeniably true that we denizens of industrial, market economies live far better and far healthier than did any our pre-industrial ancestors.

…

What we almost never hear from self-proclaimed “environmentalists” is recognition of the upside of contemporary life. The commerce and industry that produce all the things that environmentalists ecstatically despise also produce incredible amounts of wealth, health and cleanliness — not to mention the leisure necessary for modern people to reflect upon and enjoy nature.

Read it.

“Natural Wine” means exactly nothing. A lot of those vineyards would be dead and gone if it weren’t for modern viticultural and wine-making techniques. It’s a marketing tool designed to attract exactly the kind of people who write and read the NYT, and has very little to do with the quality of wine in the bottle. Sure, some “natural” wines are good, just as some mass-market wines are good. But there are plenty of crappy “natural” or “organic” wines that taste like spoiled grape juice filtered through a hobo’s sock, but they command a market and a price premium precisely because pompous asshats at the NYT tout them as something special. They specialize in linking banal, everyday events and products with some heightened sense of the world around us, as if the bottle of wine one drinks or the toilet paper one uses to wipe one’s ass is in some way imbued with special powers to bring one closer to…something. Anything. As long as it isn’t one of us.

I don’t drink wine so I don’t have a sneer in this fight, but the position of the New York Times as a Voice of the Crust is so solid that I assume whatever they like is probably crap, and they haven’t let me down yet.

ZMan pursues the crazy without fear or favor.

Feminism is a term that is exclusively associated with left-wing activism and generally associated with the more radical elements of the culture war. Modern feminists are the emotionally disturbed old maids in the human resource department, stalking about, looking for unapproved words and thoughts. These are the people purging social media of anything funny or interesting. While true, it disguises the fact that feminism is as much a part of the conventional Right as it is the Left.

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

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Apparently the peasants are more revolting than anybody knew.

Read it.

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.”

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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’.

Read it.

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