Read it.

California may end a decades-old ban on members of the Communist Party working in its government, after the state Assembly approved a bill that would delete references to the party from its employment requirements.

Yeah, they already allow Democrats, so it’s kind of a dead letter.

Why Don’t You Want To Get Arrested To Save The Environment?

More Junk Science From the AAAS of A: Bird Apocalypse Edition

Ozone hole shrinks to smallest size on record, and it’s not related to global warming

Climate Alarmism in the News is not News

House Democrats Keep Anti-Exxon Climate Crusade Alive As NY’s AG Ratchets Up Pressure On Oil Producers

University dumps professor who found polar bears thriving despite climate change

“Stop The Lies”: Mural Of Greta Thunberg Defaced In Canada

Offshore Wind Getting Crushed by Carbon Capture

Newly Painted Greta Thunberg Mural Defaced: ‘Stop The Lies! This Is Oil Country!’

Word of the week: Ecotistical

Explaining Natural Gas Flaring to the New York Times’ Explanatory Reporters

Read it.

Apparently there are still a few sensible Canadians left.

Read it.

Hint: No.

North of the border, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal party will form a new government despite being a minority that captured not even one-third of the nation’s votes (33.1 percent). Conservative leader Andrew Scheer must concede defeat despite his party having won 34.4 per cent of the vote, or 240,000 votes more than Trudeau.

ZMan looks behind the curtain.

The one universal quality of left-wing politics that is true in every time and place is the need for an external enemy. It is onto this enemy the movement focuses its attention, making it a rallying point and a rallying cry. Ideally, the enemy is mysterious, maybe even a bit supernatural. A supernatural enemy supports the idea of the movement being in a decisive battle for the future of humanity. An important element of left-wing politics is a sense of urgency. There’s no time to wait, as the final battle is at hand.

Orwell, of course, understood this well and created two the great left-wing bogeymen in English literature. Emmanuel Goldstein is the “enemy of the people” during the two minutes of hate at the beginning of the novel 1984. In Animal Farm, Snowball is the blame for all the farm’s troubles, after he disappear. In both cases, the bogeyman is a traitor, who willingly turned on the cause. In both cases, the bogeyman is mysteriously absent, thus can be amplified as an almost supernatural villain.

Progressivism is a classic millenarian cult that seeks to bring about Heaven on Earth and Perfection for humanity.

It is the desperate need for bogeymen that must be the focus of any successful dissident movement, because it is the spirit of the ruling class. The reason the Left advertises those lists of “hate symbols” is to encourage stupid people to adopt them as some form of rebellion. Again, the Left needs enemies to exist, so when none exist, it manufactures them. As the saying goes, the demand for Nazis long ago exhausted the supply, so the business of the Left is in creating new Nazis to meet demand.

With thanks to Bluebird of Bitterness. (No, I don’t know where she finds this stuff.)

Read it.

The reason big new things sneak by incumbents is that the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.” This is one of the main insights of Clay Christensen’s “disruptive technology” theory. This theory starts with the observation that technologies tend to get better at a faster rate than users’ needs increase. From this simple insight follows all kinds of interesting conclusions about how markets and products change over time.

Read it.

There’s a certain kind of liberal who likes to tell conservatives what they should think about this or that matter in order to be true to conservatism. He has no counterpart on the other side of the political divide. I know of no conservative who gets off on telling liberals what they should think about anything. We tend to confine ourselves to pointing out liberal hypocrisy.

What explains this difference between liberals and conservatives? Perhaps it’s just that conservatives are less inclined to waste time telling people who don’t share our perspective what they should think. Maybe liberals are more sanctimonious than conservatives. It might have something to do with conservatives getting into heads of liberals more than the other way around.

Read  it.

Because politics gets boring all the time.

Ace of Spades has the skinny.

I always had my suspicions about Canadians.

EU Official: “we can’t make any progress on climate change until Brexit is resolved”

The Guardian on Extinction Rebellion: “all I see is white faces”

Antarctic ice cliffs may not contribute to sea-level rise as much as predicted  Imagine that.

Andrew Yang Wants a Thorium Reactor by 2027. Good Luck, Buddy

Climate change could kill the ski industry – so take the train to the Alps this winter  Hit the slopes before it’s too late.

The incredible collapsing ‘#ExxonKnew’ climate change lie

People Are Getting Very Sick of the “Extinction Rebellion” and Other Enviro-Antifa Groups

Steve Sailer.

There’s a fun example brewing in the State of Washington (won by Hillary 54-38) that demonstrates once again how the Democrats’ Coalition of the Margins requires constant drumming up of fear and loathing of the White Male Menace to keep their diverse coalition from being at each other’s throats. This time, blacks and Chinese are fighting over affirmative action in state college admissions.

Read it.

Tru dat.

Babylon Bee.

What’s the first thing you do when meeting someone new? Exchange pronouns, of course, to make sure you refer to each other accurately. But what if you didn’t have to do that?

Read it.

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

With thanks to Debby Witt, a kindred soul.

Read it.

Looking sleazier and sleazier.

Read it.

Sometimes it is good to be the son of the Vice-President.

Read it.

Russia covered up the deadly nuclear reactor explosion in August during the salvage at sea of one of Vladimir Putin’s new superweapons, a nuclear-powered cruise missile called Skyfall, a senior State Department official disclosed.

The reactor exploded Aug. 8 off the coast of the northern Russian town of Nenoska, killing seven Russians on a barge in the White Sea as they were overseeing the recovery of a sunken Skyfall. The missile had been sitting on the seafloor for about year after a failed flight test, said State Department official Thomas G. DiNanno.

Read it.

But you have to bear in mind that Trump has done ABSOLUTELY NOTHING during his term in office.

Just remember that.

Absolutely nothing.

Read it.

Gee, they wouldn’t do that, would they?

Perhaps we can look forward to a year or two of ‘mysterious’ explosions and such.

Plastics:  Science is Winning

Why Is The Elitist Establishment So Obsessed With Meat?

Read it.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Unfortunately, they never give it to people like me, who could really use it.

Read it.

I’ll bet you didn’t even know that “ethical use of human genetic material from the past” was even a thing.

ZMan looks south.

If we are looking around for some small event, or seemingly small, that could turn out to be an inflection point today, the Mexican failure to deal with the Sinaloa cartel this past week is a good choice. The operation by the Mexican government to arrest Ovidio Guzmán López, the son of former drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán, and then turn him over to the U.S, may be more than a typical Latin bungle. It has revealed that Mexico is a failed state, largely controlled by large criminal cartels.

Read it.

Last week, several prominent journalism outlets publicized a bombastic claim about tax policy in the United States. According to analysis by Berkeley economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, the bottom 50 percent of earners in the United States now pay a higher overall tax rate than multimillionaires. The New York Times and Washington Post trumpeted this claim as if it was settled fact, even though the study it was based upon has yet to go through scholarly peer review.

Yet as we also saw, Saez and Zucman’s numbers immediately came under intense scrutiny — including from high quarters in the economics profession. Their overall depicted trend in tax rates conflicted with better-established estimates from the Congressional Budget Office (for federal rates) and the Institute on Taxation and Policy (for state and local rates) — which, when combined, reveal an unambiguously progressive distribution of the tax burden.

Saez and Zucman’s supporters nonetheless insisted that their alternative estimates would be vindicated with the release of their new book, The Triumph of Injustice. After an unconventional rollout that included providing selected journalists with privileged access to unvetted stats, the Saez-Zucman data files are finally available. Far from demonstrating the superiority of their new estimates, the statistical release has only cast further doubt upon their methods.

Extinction Rebellion: Metro Climate Protest Attackers were Stressed by Ecological Collapse  No, they were stressed by virtue-signaling assholes who were blocking them getting to work.

Climate ‘limits’ and timelines

Greta Thunberg Leads Climate ‘Strike’ In Alberta — Oil And Gas Workers Counter-Protest

Read it.

And who’s to say that they don’t deserve it?

Read it.

Sometimes it is good to be the Vice-President’s son.

Read it.

If competitive soccer games are too toxically masculine for your taste, and if your idea of “diversity” is an all-black cast, The New York Times has some games for you!

The Times in mid-October posted “Fear, Anxiety and Hope: What It Means to Be a Minority in Gaming,” a roundup of diverse and (uniformly) progressive video game creators who The Times hopes will replace gaming’s “toxic” culture.

Many of the games specifically deal with the creators’ own trauma and issues of identity. From an artistic perspective, the classic advice of “write what you know” is an understandable starting point, but many of these creators seem happy to jump off the deep end.

In Davionne Gooden’s “She Dreams Elsewhere” — which is apparently a “diverse” game because it features “an all-black cast” (“diverse” evidently means not white) — themes of “anxiety and depression” take center stage.

Read it.

They’re fools if they do.

Rush Limbaugh said it best when he spoke to the big Republican Congressional cohort elected under the Contract With America: These people are not your friends. They are not going to report what you say in an objective manner. They are going to twist every word into a stick with which to beat you. Just Don’t Say Anything.

Read it.

This feels like it might be using government process and media to push a political narrative.

In other words, I guess Trump has learned from Obama, Hillary, Comey, Lynch, Clapper, Brennan, and Schiff.

Read it.

The hammer doesn’t care whose hand wields it.

Read it.

I never thought I’d see The Telegraph make the wrong choice between ‘that’ and ‘which’. I’m disappointed.

Babylon Bee.

The California State Legislature passed a law today which requires every American flag in the state to have the stars representing anti-LGBTQ states removed. Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill in rainbow ink this morning and then blew a kiss to the CNN camera in front of him.

Read it.

Guess you can’t trust a Muslim, even a NATO ally.

Read it.

Sometimes it is good to be the Fortunate Son.

Read it.

The National Immigration Institute, the department that manages Mexico’s immigration affairs, announced late Wednesday that it flew 311 Indian nationals from Toluca, Mexico to New Dehli, India. The move is being hailed by the Mexican government as first of its kind, and further illustrates its efforts to stop the flow of illegal migrants reaching the U.S. southern border.

But you have to bear in mind that Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING during his term in office.

Just remember that.

Absolutely nothing.

The Other McCain looks at the Democrat field.

Once the debates began, it became apparent that Biden is not a viable challenger to Trump. He is simply too old, and has too much baggage — not least of which being his son’s deals in Ukraine and China — and cannot inspire the left-wing grassroots. The idea that Biden is a “moderate” who can appeal to blue-collar voters was, perhaps, wishful thinking for Democrats, who have become the anti-white, anti-male, anti-American party. If they nominated Biden, Democrats would be symbolically repudiating everything on which their identity-politics “social justice” agenda is based. Therefore, even if Biden could win the primaries, this would set up the Democrats for defeat in November 2020, because so many of their supporters — especially of the purple-hair feminist SJW variety — would not bother to vote.

Read it.

Gee, I wonder how that happened. We all know that walls don’t work.

Scott Adams lays it out. (Start at the 22:00 minute mark.)

What’s the crisis? Can somebody describe to me what the crisis is? Now, I’ve heard the speculative what-if crisis … the what-if speculative crisis goes like this: If people can’t trust the United States because of our President abandoning the Kurds, that will hurt us later, in ways that we can’t quite specify.

But will it? Is there a country that won’t do a trade deal with us because of this? No. Is there a country that won’t partner with us militarily because of this situation? No, cause what are their other options? Partner with us to defeat your local enemy, or don’t partner with us, and good luck.

It turns out that when you’re the strongest country in the world, people are still going to work with you, because the second choice is way worse.

Who is not going to work with the United States? No one. Which countries uncritically trusted the United States under all conditions when we promised we’ll do something? Which countries believed that we’ll definitely do something if we way we’ll do it? How about nobody? How about nobody believed that. Because at the very least we elect a new President every now and then. Is there some county that could trust that the next President won’t reverse everything that this President did? No. Nobody could trust that. We have a system–because democracy–our system guarantees that we can’t be trusted. We can never be trusted. Because we’ll just vote in a different government and we’ll  have different priorities.

So there’s one thing that people can be sure of, that the United States can’t be trusted, forever, because our priorities change and our government changes. They all know that.

Amanpour Lets Jane Fonda Tout Climate Alarmism, Inspired by Thunberg  Of course she does.

Aussie Left Retreating from Vote Losing Climate Extremism?

London Bans Extinction Rebellion Protests After Blackrock Offices Targeted

Is Greta Thunberg A Putin Puppet? German Politician Demands Answers

Holiday Flights are OK for Extinction Rebellion Climate Leaders

There are three types of climate change denier, and most of us are at least one

Extinction Rebellion celebrities admit they are ‘hypocrites’ for backing protests despite ‘high carbon lives’

Extinction Rebellion Blockade Google HQ

Alberta Government Won’t Be Welcoming Greta Thunberg When She Visits Oil-Rich Canadian Province This Week

Was this zoologist punished for telling school kids politically incorrect facts about polar bears?

Babylon Bee.

I’m holding out for a plenary indulgence.

David Bahr is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

And so I made an inventory unique to WFB (though I encourage you to choose a Minor Prophet at random and try this experiment for yourself). I catalogued his intellectual and practical toolkit to see if I could think through whether or not it would have been sufficient to address our problems in 2019—and, say, the next few decades. Without going through the laundry list, let’s agree that Buckley was a master of the medium of his time. He understood television and print, and wielded both to great effect. He mastered the use of those tools and used them in specific ways. So did each of the Minor Prophets.

But how would they fare today, in a world of new modes and orders? A world of half-baked integralists, Bronze Age Perverts, and Lord knows who else? Do Buckley and Kristol and Reagan still matter to young conservatives, and therewith to the future of intellectual conservatism, as they once did? Are the next conservative intellectuals—serious intellectuals, mind you—stressing about AEI and WSJ internships? Do they have an online subscription to National Review? Do Jonah Goldberg, Ross Douthat, or David Brooks move them any which way? Can they name a Founding Father?

ZMan looks at modern American politics.

Now, the reason the Left wins even when they lose is not because they are shrewd or even that the Right is dumb. It’s that they reject that central premise of popular government, where the losers accept the results of an election and the winners reach a fair bargain with the losers. For the Left, what is theirs they keep. What is yours they seek. This is the central cause of the ratchet effect in American politics. One side exploits the rules, while the other abides by the rules.