Read it.

I mean, if Trump is Hitler now, can you imagine how Hitlery he’d be if he’d actually done more than merely continuing the policies of previous administrations (Kids in cages! Separation of families!)?

Read it.

Information has emerged about the Afghan man suspected of being beaten by the hip-hop artist A$AP Rocky and his companions. Among other things, the migrant has a tattoo on his neck that is said to pay tribute to Islamist terrorism.

Read it.

You can find anything on the Internet.

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I don’t know who first made the point that the demand for racism today exceeds the supply, which is why we see things like the Jussie Smollette hoax and countless other campus racism hoaxes. And now Trump has the left’s Default Dog Whistle Racism Detector turned up to 11 with his attacks on cities and districts run chiefly by African-American and Democratic Party machines, because for the left criticism of any non-white politician is off limits.

I have a simple theory: Trump knows what he’s doing. This is the political equivalent of “Crazy Eddie,” the frenetic TV ad pitchman constantly hawking his “insane” sales on electronic goods. In Trump’s case, he’s forcing the left to max out its race card, such that the left’s bankruptcy after Trump’s re-election next year will be epic.

Steve Hayward finally gets it.

Read it.

On Friday, a federal judge in Kentucky tossed Nicholas Sandmann’s defamation case against the Washington Post. Sandmann, the Covington Catholic student smeared by the Post and many other outlets earlier this year as a smirking, MAGA-hat-wearing racist who had blocked Native American elder Nathan Phillips’s path, promises an appeal.

On appeal, Sandmann is likely to win. I’ll lay out why, after a quick review of what happened.

Read it.

I’m cool with that.

Most municipal ‘recycling’ programs aren’t there to recycle plastic, they’re there to insulate municipal governments from criticism by environmental activists.

Climate Geoengineering Prizewinner: Refreeze the Arctic with a Big Mobile Submarine

Why Climate Change Chicken Littles Demand Action NOW!

Anti science L. A. Times hypes propaganda denying global wide Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age

Climate more pressing than Brexit, say 71% of Britons – poll

Extreme Climate Events Impact Marine Habitat Forming Communities Along 45% of Australia’s Coast  Women and minorities hardest hit, etc.

Read it.

Like many, I was wrong about the subscription model for the news media. I thought that a possible scheme for subscriptions could be: one for national media, in the $12–20 a month range, another, less expensive ($5–$9/month) for local news, and the last one for specialized content, whether it is a business or a leisure publication.

I was wrong. Recent studies show that in most markets, not only is a small 10 percent slice of the readership is willing to pay for an online publication, but, on average, there is room for ONE, paid-for media subscription per consumer unit.

The migration to digital has put news content in direct competition with everything else. News, social, video-on-demand, games, are now fighting for spending allocation, and time spent.

An interesting analysis.

Read it.

Ponder how successful that approach would be in China or Russia or any country in Africa.

Hint: ‘No, but we can shoot quite a few of you Your call.’

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

ZMan wades in.

Just when you thought it was safe, after the Mueller testimony was a colossal flop, President Trump finds a way to get everyone outraged all over again. His tweets about Congressman Elijah Cummings and his congressional district, have all the usual suspects pointing and sputtering. Given the amount of pointing and sputtering they have had to do the last three years, it is a miracle that they can even sputter. It should not be possible to be outraged for three years, but here we are.

Of course, the usual suspects are howling about the racism, as Cummings is black and his district is a black carve out. It includes some of the worst parts of Baltimore city, which means the mostly black parts. The district is about 30% white, which is why Cummings wins his elections with ease. In 2018 he won with 76% of the vote. If you are white and trapped in one of these districts, voting is pointless. In fact, voting for anyone is pointless as the results are known in advance.

I don’t know of any areas in the United States where Republicans approach anywhere near to a ‘one-party state’ the way Democrats do in (a) predominantly black areas like most inner cities and (b) predominantly hipster areas like the Left Coast. How much this situation makes an oxymoron of their party name will be a fun subject for historians — if we last long enough.

Read it.

We have heard much this year about how much the country needs a Green New Deal to reverse the negative effects of climate change, ensure economic security, revamp the nation’s transportation system, restore damaged ecosystems, secure a sustainable environment, and achieve justice and equality. Overlooked in all of the analyses of the Green New Deal is that Americans didn’t need the original New Deal.

Previous recessions had recovered in two or three years; the New Deal turned the 1929 recession into the Great Depression that dragged on for over a decade.

Climate change could revive medieval megadroughts in US Southwest

Underwater glacial melting is occurring at higher rates than modeling predicts

Concerns grow regarding sea ice and Greenland’s ice sheet

Paris Set Their All-Time Hottest Temperature This Week. Is it Climate Change? No.

We have the tech to suck CO2 from the air–but can it suck enough to make a difference?

Read it.

This marked discrepancy is due to the fact that western mass media outlets serve not a political party, nor even money, but the power structures of the western empire. This is the real reason why Russia hysteria has been mainlined into mainstream consciousness day in and day out for three years. Not for ratings, not to hurt Trump, not to help the Democrats, but because Russia is viewed as a disobedient geopolitical adversary by the US-centralized power alliance. That’s all it’s ever been.

There are many gaping plot holes in the Russiagate narrative that outlets like MSNBC have been bashing everyone over the head with, but the most obvious and easily provable of them is the indisputable fact that Donald Trump has escalated tensions against Russia more than any US president in decades. You never hear anyone talk about this self-evident fact in all the endless yammering about Russia, though, because it doesn’t advance the agendas of either of America’s two mainstream parties, and it doesn’t advance the interests of US imperialism. Democrats don’t like acknowledging the fact that Trump has been consistently and aggressively working directly against the interests of Moscow, and Trump supporters don’t like acknowledging that their president is just as much of a neocon-coddling globalist as those they claim to oppose, so the war machine has gone conveniently unchallenged in manufacturing new cold war escalations against a nation they’ve had marked for destruction since the fall of the Soviet Union.

I have often felt puzzled by this tendency of the proglodyte press to shout RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA all the time.

Read it.

A Voice of the Crust emits an opinion that, until the 1960s, would have been derided by ‘progressives’ as reactionary.

According to a recent Pew Research survey, a staggering 85% of Americans support policies to restrict the rise of robots. We even have a presidential candidate in Andrew Yang running to protect jobs from automation.

Economists tend to dismiss anti-technology sentiment as backwards and Luddite. But they miss an important point. As I argue in my new book, The Technology Trap, The Luddites, who smashed machinery during the Industrial Revolution, were right to fight back. Much like today’s factory workers, they weren’t going to benefit from new technology.

‘Progressives’ have always viewed economics with their own particular moral squint. To them, the purpose of a business is not to make stuff as efficiently (and profitably) as possible, but rather to hire and pay workers (who will then vote reliably for ‘progressive’ candidates in order to preserve those jobs). Proglodytes don’t see workers as individuals but as a vast Marxist mass of Workers, each of which can be substituted for any other — which, in Marx’s day, they were.

Check it out.

Unfortunately, round doors are more trouble than they’re worth.

Read it,

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

Just remember that.

Absolutely nothing.

Read it.

Judge John Miraldi ordered the Ohio liberal arts college to post a bond of more than $36 million to cover the judgment plus interest while Oberlin appeals. Without explaining his reasoning, he approved the exact amount the Gibson’s Bakery plaintiffs had asked Oberlin to pay in lieu of letting them collect on the judgment immediately.

Read it.

Apparently they’re just high-tax-and-spend.

According to a Tax Foundation report, “Scandinavian income taxes raise a lot of revenue because they are actually rather flat. In other words, they tax most people at these high rates, not just high-income taxpayers.”

…

“The bottom line: Copy the Nordic model if you like, but understand that it entails a lot of capitalism and pro-business policies, a lot of taxation on middle-class spending and wages, minimal reliance on corporate taxation, and plenty of co-pays and deductibles in its health care system,” the J.P Morgan report adds.

Kevin Williamson blows the whistle.

Why is Trump’s “poor foreigners are exploiting us” shtick racist and xenophobic while Paul Krugman’s “rich foreigners are exploiting us” shtick is progressive conventional wisdom?

The Other McCain is not impressed.

Twitter rolled out a site redesign this week and it sucks — a giant leap backward, to a clunky and inefficient user interface. Who did this? It was a crew of social-justice quota hires….

…

That’s the thing about “social justice” as a human-resources policy — if your employer decides it needs to hire more “women of color,” just to satisfy some diversity goal, the people hired under this policy can never be fired, no matter how spectacularly incompetent they are, or no matter how much harm their failures inflict on the company’s profitability

Read it.

I guess Trump didn’t get the memo that he wants all black people rounded up and deported, if not exterminated.

You’d think he could stick to the script.

Berkeley Bans New Natural Gas Connections Because Climate Change

BBC: Climate change: 12 years to save the planet? Make that 18 months

The Total Myth of Ocean Acidification: Science! Edition

Could wooden building be a solution to climate change?

Records Could Be Smashed Today As Second Heatwave Roasts Europe 

U.S. media conceal 4.5+ billion tons increase of CO2 by developing nations – push meaningless “sustainability” propaganda agenda

Pedal powered farms and factories: the forgotten future of the stationary bicycle

Gillibrand Releases Her $10 Trillion Climate Plan Including ‘Immediate Action To Enact The Green New Deal’

No Climate Event in 2,000 Years Compares to What’s Happening Now  Women and minorities hardest hit, etc.

The 20th century was the hottest in nearly 2,000 years, studies show  Hot blooded – check it and see….

Popular climbing routes in French Alps becoming more dangerous due to climate change, say researchers

Read it.

This could get interesting.

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n a tweet, Wen stated that the board ended her employment due to “philosophical differences over the direction and future of Planned Parenthood.” She elaborated further in a message to her former colleagues. She had joined Planned Parenthood “to run a national health care organization and to advocate for the broad range of public health policies that affect our patients’ health,” including abortion. However, she wrote, for the board, “the priority of Planned Parenthood moving forward is to double down on abortion rights advocacy.”

Margaret Sanger’s original intent, in founding Planned Parenthood, was to reduce the number of babies from ‘inferior stock’, like black people.

Read it.

In his “Rich Habits” study, Thomas C. Corley found that 86% of wealthy people with full-time jobs worked at least 50 hours per week. They’re willing to work hard so they can make more money. And they often sacrifice work-life balance to increase their earning potential.

I’d be as rich as Bill Gates if I were willing to put in the hours that he was.

Read it.

If you’re an Austen fan, you’ll know what that means.

The rule of thumb for agricultural estates was 1 pound per acre, so 10,000 a year would be an estate of 10,000 acres (more or less). At the other rule of thumb (agricultural land was conventionally valued at ’20 years purchase’ or %5 return), this means a capital value of 200,000 pounds.

Climate change: 12 years to save the planet? Make that 18 months

As Climate Changes, Taxpayers Will Shoulder Larger U.S. Payouts to Farmers

Never Have US Health Professionals Been So Foolish

Record Cold Cripples Food Crops: Future Food Security at Risk

Eurostar trains breaks down as Belgium and Netherlands reach hottest ever temperatures

Forests and climate change: pine trees dying in France

Victor Davis Hanson.

Each week we are warned of a recession. And each week the economic news “unexpectedly” and “surprisingly” improves or stays steady — in ways well aside from the staples of continued near-record-low peacetime unemployment (3.8 percent), near-record-low minority unemployment, booming annualized GDP (3.1 percent), and a record-high stock market.

…

The subtext of the failure of all the Trump impeachment hysterias was not merely that they were based on emotional narratives rather than evidence and facts — empiricism has never been the forte of congressional frenzies — but that the public believed either that the removal of a successful president would stall the economic expansion or that it might show ingratitude for a domestic job well done. Democrats seems to have forgotten that voters are most interested in the economy — along with illegal immigration — and least concerned with their obsessions with climate change and the Green New Deal.

Read it.

So much for the Fight for $15! Sen. Bernie Sanders, (I-VT), campaign created a PR crisis for himself after staff complaints that they were being paid “poverty wages” got leaked to the press. That hypocrisy might have hurt him politically — if journalists had actually reported it. Although The Washington Post reported that his unionized campaign staff was upset over their pay, the networks and three national newspapers ignored the story.

Read it.

When Selene Nelson pitched some articles on plant-based food to magazine editor William Sitwell, he wrote back suggesting a series on killing vegans – and was forced to resign in the storm that followed. Here Nelson explains what it was like at the centre of that storm, and how it felt to meet Sitwell for The One Show.

They’re like a religious cult without the religion.

Witnesses say broken wind turbine caused several hundred acre fire

The Fake Science of Global Warming

Deadly fungal infection is first to emerge because of global warming, scientists believe

Leveraging Environmentalism to Impose ‘Hegemonic’ Marxism

Some perspective on the “massive heatwave” in the USA

Many Animals Can’t Adapt to Climate Change Fast Enough  Women and minorities hardest hit, etc.

House Democrats Reveal Climate Change Agenda, Ding Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Socialist Climate Policies’

Claim: Climate Activists Face an Ethical Dilemma Abandoning Air Tourism

CNN Contributor: Confronting Trump’s Base Is ‘Confronting White Nationalism’

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Perhaps there’s room for ASAP Rocky in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. I hear it’s nice.

Joel Kotkin has his own unique take on the situation.

America’s electorate in 2020 has been dissected by race, region, cultural attitudes and gender. But the most important division may well be, in a nation that has become profoundly unequal, along class lines. All politicians, from Donald Trump to Elizabeth Warren, portray themselves as “fighting for the middle class” and “working families.”

Yet our increasingly neo-feudal America is best broken down into four broad groups — the oligarchs, the clerisy, the yeomanry and the serfs. The oligarchs dominate the economic realm, including control of information media. Below them are sometimes allied members of the clerisy, the well-educated middle class who set the country’s intellectual and cultural context.

Below them are the two most numerous classes — the property-owning yeomanry and, most numerous of all, expanding the new serfdom. Understanding these groups provides a valuable insight into 2020’s realities.

The Antiplanner does some fisking.

A recent article in the Atlantic rewrites history by claiming that the law forces Americans to drive automobiles. “Our laws essentially force driving on all of us,” asserts University of Iowa law professor Gregory Shill, “by subsidizing it, by punishing people who don’t do it, by building a physical landscape that requires it, and by insulating reckless drivers from the consequences of their actions.”

CNN: You know those metal rivets on your jeans? They could be going

Ted Nordhaus: Carbon Pricing Has to be Imposed Slowly, to Avoid Yellow Vest Riots

Ridley: Rejoice, the Earth Is Becoming Greener

Heat Wave Hysteria? The Truth Shall Set You Free

Antarctica Warmer 1,000 Years Ago… Now, *That’s* An Inconvenient Truth!

Read it.

The Pentagon lifted all combat job bans for women in December 2015. Since then, roughly 35 women have reached the elite levels of Army Ranger, graduating Marine infantry school or passing the initial assessment phase of Green Beret training, according to the AP.

Check it out.

Everybody loves a secret door, although few of us have them.

Lileks.

In our continuing series intended to remind you that life is better than before, despite the calamitous storm of news that clatters down 24/7 like buckshot on a tin roof, we present installment No. 9,275: why it is harder to drive into the ditch than it used to be.

Ace of Spades points out some inconvenient truth.

There is a lazy assumption among the media (wow…that never happens!) that the Republican Party is in its essence for the wealthy, and the Democrat Party is for the little man…the real people of America.

But anyone who has been paying attention has realized by now that the concentration of wealth in the pure blue cities and in the tech sector is overwhelmingly leftist.

Read it.

Additionally, as part of their spat with their LNG producing brothers, the Saudis are threatening to build the Salwa canal across the base of the Qatar peninsula and turn Qatar into an island.

That would be entertaining.