Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

1. Why do so many American Progressives, fearing that rich people abuse state power, aim to reduce the riches of rich people, instead of the state power that Progressives admit is subject to being abused?
2. Why do so many American Progressives wish to put even larger swathes of our lives under political control given their belief that politics is so very easily corrupted by oligarchs and big-money donors?
3. Why do so many American Progressives – fearful of corporate power and understandably dismayed by cronyism – support tariffs and export subsidies (such as those dispensed by the U.S. Export-Import Bank)? After all, each tariff and every cent of subsidy is an unearned privilege granted by government to corporations at the expense of consumers, workers, and households – a privilege that creates corporate power and fuels abuse by corporations that would otherwise not arise.
4. Why do so many American Progressives, with one breath, criticize free-market economists for allegedly failing to take account of the immense importance that we humans attach to community, cultural identity, and other non-monetary values and features of our existence, and yet with the next breath talk as if the only inequality that matters is inequality of monetary incomes or wealth? (That this “Progressives” criticism of free-market economists is baseless is a subject for another day.)
5. And why do so many American Progressives, given their correct understanding that monetary values are not all that matter, treat differences in monetary incomes and wealth as sure evidence of economic malfunction?

Why Everything They Say About Climate Change Is Wrong

Fill ‘er Up with Outrage

Claim: US Climate Inaction is Driving Pacific Islands to Embrace China

Babylon  Bee.

Ha, that’ll learn ’em.

The Harvard-Yale football game was delayed after students and alumni stormed the field to protest climate change

How “The Limits to Growth” Broke Australia’s Bipartisan Carbon Tax

Climate Scientists Reduced to Hiding from Climate Thuggery in Germany

Climate Change Cult Update

Samoa climate change resilience challenges Western perceptions

Read it.

No woke deed goes unpunished.

Scott Adams.

Learn to think in microsteps. If you are experiencing couch lock, try wiggling one finger. Then build from there.

Hypnotists and entrepreneurs have overlapping thinking styles when it comes to motivating themselves to take action. When entrepreneurs don’t know how to get from A to B, they take the smallest step in that direction that is available to them, and then see if they can figure out the next one from that new starting point. Hypnotists who see humans as programmable entities understand that they have to start with small suggestions, such as “Your eyelids feel heavier” in order to work up to larger actions, such as “Your arm is so light it will start to float.”

I’m impressed.

John Hinderaker doesn’t like Elizabeth “Fauxcahontas” Warren very much.

Shrinking violets don’t become presidential contenders. Still, even at the highest level of overweening ambition, Elizabeth Warren stands out. She has clawed her way to the top by hook and by crook. One of her favorite techniques is the bald-faced lie. As an academic, she is best known for an article claiming that medical crises are largely responsible for personal bankruptcies. Warren’s article has been used (as she no doubt intended) to promote socialized medicine, but it has been thoroughly debunked. See Gail Heriot’s analysis in the Texas Review of Law & Politics, embedded below.

Fossil Fuel Production Plans Shred Paris Agreement Fantasies

“More Eco-Friendly” Meets “Horrors Of Capitalism”: $34 Toilet Paper ‘With A Conscience’

Why Worse Wildfires? Part 1

UN phony 1.5 Degree C “temperature limit” scam is kaput

Read it.

Former FBI agent Peter Strzok, who led the Bureau’s investigation into both the Hillary Clinton email scandal and what turned out to be the Russia hoax–simultaneously!–has sued the Attorney General over his ultimate dismissal from the Bureau. A filing in that case a few days ago has made public the letter to Strzok from Candice Will of the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility that suspended Strzok without pay for 60 days and demoted him to a non-supervisory position. If the letter has been made public before now, I am not aware of it. It is embedded below and is well worth reading in its entirety.

Steve Sailer.

Basically, South-Central Los Angeles ought to be Magic Dirt, due to its superb climate and close commuting distances to vast numbers of jobs downtown, near LAX, Beverly Hills, and at the giant port. For example, two Presidents of the United States once lived in Compton.

But for some reason that can’t quite be spelled out in the newspapers, all this Magic Dirt turned into Tragic Dirt.

The Epic Hypocrisy of Tom Steyer, Revisited

“Climate Myths” by John Stossel

Prince Charles to witness devastating effects of rising sea levels on Solomon Islands

China Set for Coal Expansion in Threat to Climate Goals

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: “The case for neglecting global warming”

Bernie Sanders Announces Plan To Prosecute Oil Execs Over Climate Change

Vice Climate Alert: “The Collapse of Civilization May Have Already Begun”

Disney accused of hypocrisy for ‘pumping out’ plastic Frozen 2 merchandise despite eco plot line  Uh, don’t confuse The Narrative with The Bottom Line.

Steve Sailer explains it all to you.

It all has something to do with Sacha Baron Cohen.

Read it.

News from the Turd World.

Read it.

he newest form of virtue signaling for the left involves cutting more than just carbon emissions. Now men are getting their nether regions snipped to save the planet – let’s see if this craze catches on!

Read it.

About his strategy, I could make a quick and accurate analogy with medication: most pills are designed to cure a problem, but come with an array of secondary after-effects. Well, Trump is using medication solely for their after-effects, while the first intent of the pill is what’s keeping him in power and alive. By the end of this article, you’ll see that this metaphor applies for just about every decision, move or declaration he’s made. Once you understand what Trump is about, you’ll be able to appreciate the extraordinary presidency he’s conducting, like no predecessor ever came close to match.

…

Donald simply doesn’t care if you like him or not, which makes him the ultimate anti-narcissist, by its psychological definition. And that’s not even up for opinion, it’s a quite simple and undeniable fact.

Read it.

While “Mayor Pete” rises in the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, it is a delight to watch the media tiptoe around his very weak pull with black voters. The New York Times today ran a story headlined, “Pete Buttigieg is Struggling with Black Voters. Here’s Why.” Except the story never really tells you probably the biggest reason why: American blacks are highly hostile to homosexuality. This fact goes completely unmentioned anywhere in the Times story, no doubt because it would blow all the fuses at the Times‘s intersectionality switchboard.

Read it.

Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign rally in Atlanta on Thursday was derailed by parents protesting the Massachusetts senator’s opposition to charter schools.

The group of parents interrupted Warren’s event, which was aimed at courting black female voters, with chants of “Our children, our choice!” and “We want to be heard!”

Living-in-the-moment mentality and climate crisis concerns

Climate Activists Take Over Pelosi’s Office

Read it.

I have my doubts. Political ideology is the most reality-resistant thing in the universe.

Swedish “gangs”? What kind of gangs? Who belongs to these gangs? The ever-sensitive New York Times won’t report this directly, but they more or less give away that these are not gangs of delinquent Lutherans:

Read it.

This is a ‘Merkel Bench’:

It is obviously designed so that people can sit on it but vagrants can’t camp out on it.

Why are they called Merkel Benches, and what need has Auckland for them? Read the article.

Psychologists Vow to Promote Climate Change “Corrective Behaviors”

Largest coal plant in the West shuts down, dealing financial losses to Native American tribes

Exclusive: Inside The Media Conspiracy To Hype Greta Thunberg And The UN Climate Conference

What’s green, employs ten times as many people as the “fossil fuel industry” and fake?

NYT op-ed claiming scientists underestimated climate change lacks evidence

Vice: Despite a Failed Assassination Attempt, These Climate Deniers Continue to Impede Global Action

‘All you need to know about Climate Change… in cartoons’

Climate Extremism in the Age of Disinformation

Thugs bully Munich Conference Center – Force Cancellation of Climate Skeptic Conference

Climate Activists Take Over Pelosi’s Office  No woke deed goes unpunished.

Read it.

For many people, Latin is useless. I won’t enter into a discussion on the meaning of “utility,” a concept with variations and stratifications that are centuries in the making, and which itself merits an entire book. What I will say here, however, is that those “many people”—civilians, politicians, professionals in every field—have a sadly (and dangerously) limited idea of education and human development. What their focus on “utility” betrays is the belief that, in the end, knowledge amounts to know-how, that thought should be immediately adapted toward a practical aim. But if that were the case, knowledge would hardly be useful: we’d have surgeons, plumbers, and not much else, given that machines are growing more and more responsible for satisfying our primary needs. Eventually the surgeon or plumber will disappear too. And if such is the fate of knowledge, that it be surrendered to machines—or, as we put it more often these days, to technology—what exactly will there be for humans to know? Of course, we’ll have to learn how to build the machines and keep them functioning, and to dispose of the remains when they become obsolete, and to procure the materials necessary to build new machines.

Read it.

Here’s the bottom line: Most Americans, even many of those not making much right now, would pay more in new taxes than they would save from no longer paying for private health care.

Never underestimate the ability of the government to make people poorer.

Read it.

A reasonable position, I think.

Read it.

Scientists can now flood the black market for rhino horns with horsehair fakes. Conservationists, however, have serious concerns.

We have the technology.

Venice Flooding Reveals A Real Hoax About Climate Change – Framing It As “Either/Or”

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #386

Hurricanes really are becoming more destructive

Best ethical and eco-friendly Christmas gifts: sustainable present ideas for him and her

Venice and Unenlightened Climate Fear-mongering

Why It’s Hard to Take Global Warming Hysteria Seriously

Climate change hits the young hardest. What will we tell our children?

Climate science has died. The effects will be big.

How Many People Must Die To Fix The Planet?

Lakes are a climate change ‘ticking time bomb’, warn scientists

Read it.

Here in prison, it takes us more than two years to get an annual dental check-up, three years to get a filling, and two years to get eyeglasses.

I find it puzzling that those who adore government-provided health care feel free to ignore existing systems of government-provided health care, like the prison system and the VA network, much less the socialized medicine regimes overseas.

Read it.

I have always suspected as much.

Read it.

If the tentative entrance of former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg into the Presidential race materializes, he may discover difficulty of being an oligarch in an increasingly socialist-minded party. Bloomberg, whose fortune is estimated at $50 billion, many times Trump’s estimated $3 billion, much less Tom Steyer’s comparatively meager $1.6 billion, epitomizes the very capitalist class so detested by party activists.

Read it.

A foreign correspondent I used to know liked to say that a good test for national decline is the smell of urine. In declining countries, one frequently smells it.

Americans in certain jurisdictions can expect to smell more urine soon. Left-wing prosecutors, some financed by George Soros, will be decriminalizing urination in public.

This is one of a several “quality of life” crimes the left wants to stop prosecuting. Some prosecutors also want theft below a certain dollar amount to go largely unpunished.

The theory behind this decriminalization effort is that poor people and members of certain minority groups commit a disproportionate number of these crimes. But it’s also the case that poor people and members of the same minority groups are disproportionately victimized by many of them.

They can expect to be smelling the urine first.

Read it.

There is no actual political debate at all. We live in a post-politics age. Everything now is a moral issue. Opposing immigration is morally wicked. Questioning feminism is morally wicked. Expressing doubts about the tranny stuff is morally wicked. Expressing anything less than absolute support for homosexuals is morally wicked. Questioning affirmative action is morally wicked. Expressing even mild scepticism about racial oppression is morally wicked.

FP Proposes a Joint US / EU Climate Trade War Against China

It’s Officially the Tenth Anniversary of Climategate – and they’ve learned nothing

Does Greta Thunberg’s Lifestyle Equal Climate Denial? One Climate Scientist Seems To Suggest So.

Steve Sailer.

Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York City, apologizes for his greatest achievement: taking New York City murder rates that has already fallen surprisingly far under Rudy Giuliani and hammering them down to Yogi Berra Era levels. Why? Because he’s running for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Read it.

Well, yeah.

Read it.

One of the best ways to learn and come up with new ideas is to focus intensely on a problem, then let your mind wander. I’ve enjoyed doing this when problem solving and learning, and recently I’ve been thinking about how weird it is to build trust in your unconscious to do the work for you, especially when it comes to technical work.

Read it.

A small clinical study in California has suggested for the first time that it might be possible to reverse the body’s epigenetic clock, which measures a person’s biological age.

For one year, nine healthy volunteers took a cocktail of three common drugs — growth hormone and two diabetes medications — and on average shed 2.5 years of their biological ages, measured by analysing marks on a person’s genomes. The participants’ immune systems also showed signs of rejuvenation.

The results were a surprise even to the trial organizers — but researchers caution that the findings are preliminary because the trial was small and did not include a control arm.

Read it.

Based on Oxford College analysis, revealed within the British Medical Journal, vegetarians and vegans have a 20 % greater danger of stroke than those that frequently tuck right into a plate of bacon and sausages. The authors of the research, which tracked virtually 50,000 Britons for 18 years, mentioned this is likely to be as a result of veggies wouldn’t have not sufficient ldl cholesterol of their blood.

The discovering flies within the face of a lot typical knowledge, which says that vegetarianism is a wholesome various to a extra carnivorous life-style. We’re eternally being hectored in regards to the want – for each well being and environmental causes – to chop again on purple meat altogether.

But nutritionists say the elevated probability of stroke is simply one of many many well being dangers that any would-be vegetarian ought to be made conscious of earlier than they make the leap.

The healthiest diet for a creature is the one that it evolved to eat. For humans, that’s meat, fruit, and veggies. (Note the Oxford comma. Go thou and do likewise.) You want to give up cereals, be my guest. But keep the pig.

Do The World’s Energy Policies Make Sense?

Claim: Climate Change is Causing Arctic Blasts to Become Less Severe

An Analysis Of The 11,000 ‘Micky Mouse’ Climate Scientists

German Farmers Block Hamburg In Revolt Against Globalist Environmental Regulations

Climategate And Post-Normal Science

Some Inconvenient Facts for Robert Redford’s Climate Change Cry

“Adam Schiff has a face that says ‘Pick me last for dodge-ball’.” — Scott Adams

Read it.

Yet another reason not to fly.