Read it.

Bias? What bias?

Read it.

First World Problem.

Read it.

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

Anyone with a lot of money who’s worried that the government doesn’t have enough has a quick and easy route: Just give the government your money. And they aren’t doing that, so, unless you think that billionaires are too dim to think of this possibility, that’s not what this is about.

Taxation is about force, force used by the government to confiscate property. If people are asking to government to confiscate property, are they focused on their own property? No, they’re focused on somebody else’s property. Look for the person (or persons) that will be harmed by this tax scheme, and harmed more than the people proposing it, and you will find the true target. Sure, the proposers will take a hit, but the true target will get hit worse, I guarantee it.

Read it.

Well, no; it was a victory for ordinary people.

The law at issue authorizes heightened penalties for individuals who use firearms to a commit a “crime of violence.”

“Only the people’s elected representatives in Congress have the power to write new federal criminal laws,” Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion. “And when Congress exercises that power, it has to write statutes that give ordinary people fair warning about what the law demands of them.”

“Vague laws transgress both of those constitutional requirements,” Gorsuch added. “They hand off the legislature’s responsibility for defining criminal behavior to unelected prosecutors and judges, and they leave people with no sure way to know what consequences will attach to their conduct.”

I have absolutely no problem with that. I’m liking this Gorsuch guy.

Read it.

Trump is the master of the Mixed Signal. You never really know what he’s going to do, or what he’s even thinking of doing. This sort of thing keeps his opponents off-balance, This, I think, os one of the keys to his success in negotiation.

ZMan.

The aggressive assault on dissidents is a direct result of the unpreparedness of the ruling classes. They really were convinced they had ushered in the post-historical moment as imagined by Francis Fukuyama. The great battles of political economy in the 20th century were settled. All the “isms” had been vanquished by liberalism and there was nothing left to discuss. The sudden reappearance of old cultures and old ideas about how people should organize themselves was like seeing a ghost.

…

The modern Western state is now a collection of cultural parts robbed from graves around the world. It is neither organic nor natural, so it is always at war with normal human sensibilities.

Joel Kotkin has his hair on fire.

Like most exercises in mind-reading, this article is based more on what people are afraid might happen rather than on what is likely to happen. To say that ‘the oligarchs’ have something ‘in mind for us’ other than our buying their goods and services and them having pots of money to spend is the sort of conspiracy-theory nonsense that wouldn’t get a lot of credibility in any other context. You might as well blame it all on the Jews (which some, of course, are perfectly willing to do.) Individual tech billionaires have their political preferences, but if you put Tom Steyer and Peter Thiel in the same room you’ll get a cage match, not a conspiracy, and much the same goes for the Kochs and the Zuckerbergs.

Steve Sailer takes a look.

The various London School of Economics left-wing sociologists are sure there must be one out there somewhere, but they can’t think of any off the top of their heads.

The poisons released by melting Arctic ice

Vox: Republican Generation Gap Over Climate Change Policy

Terence Corcoran: Why the global fossil-fuel phase-out is a fantasy akin to time travel

Read it.

It avoids the media frenzy that would have erupted after a missile strike. CNN reporters would have stood next to piles of smoking rubble and interviewed wailing Iranian women about the death of their puir wee bairns. It’s harder to gin up public outrage over the disabling of a puir wee server farm.

Read it.

A good look at what ‘Trumpism’ is and what it is not.

The author seems to think that Trump is attempting to return American government to the role it had prior to the World Wars, i.e. an referee rather than a manager. I hope he’s right, and I hope it sticks.

ZMan.

Political and social activism is most effective when it reveals some moral contradiction hidden from public view, reveals perfidy by the ruling class or exposes some immoral activity by the rich and powerful. Activism is about changing the moral battle space so that the critics appear to have the high ground, while their targets appear to have something to hide. What the activist is doing is using morality to even the fight, but also using the disparity in power to amplify their moral claims against their opponent.

Read it.

The guy’s problem is not being himself, it’s being himself in everybody else’s face.

Being yourself doesn’t mean you have to let everybody + dog know what that self is; in fact, it’s usually none of their damned business.

The point here is to Be Yourself, not the Person You Would Like Everybody Think You Are.

Fort Lauderdale Deals Another Blow to Climate Litigation Campaign

Alexandria Occasional Cortex Blames Philadelphia Refinery Explosion on Climate Change

Contribution of the Greenland Ice Sheet to sea level over the next millennium

A National Narrative for Media on Climate Change

Read it.

The unexamined life is not worth living, said Socrates, but users of social media are increasingly discovering that the too-closely examined life is not worth living either; or at least, others try to make it not worth living unless one is possessed of a rhinoceros hide.

Read it.

That would be entertaining.

Elizabeth Warren:

America needs to face the things we’ve done wrong and take steps towards making it right. My housing plan creates a first-of-its-kind down-payment assistance program to help Black and Brown families living in formerly redlined neighborhoods buy a home.

Steve Sailer:

Of course, who can remember George W. Bush’s push in 2002 to 2004 to increase black and brown homeownership by 5.5 million households by 2010?

How’d that work out anyway?

The reason banks ‘redlined’ certain areas is not out of racism but because those areas were behavioral sinks full of people who didn’t pay their mortgages (i.e. ‘bad risks’). Banks don’t exist to make loans, they exist to make money by making loans. Politicians (Democrats especially) routinely ignore that.

Read it.

As previously reported by FOX Business, while Florida received more movers than any other state last year, New York’s outflows to the Sunshine State were the highest – 63,772 people. New York had the third-largest outflows of any state, with 452,580 people moving out within the past year. California, another high-tax state, had the largest outflow of domestic residents – with the highest proportion of people headed to Texas, Arizona and Washington.

Plenty of room in Texas. Just sayin’.

Read it.

It wasn’t until 1874, when Illinois farmer Joseph Glidden emerged victorious from patent battle over a mechanically-produced fencing material that barbed wire could be made at scale. Glidden’s machine pulled two strands of wire tight around the barb, then wound the wires together around the regularly-spaced spikes. Just two years later, Glidden’s company was making 3 million pounds of the stuff each year, making Glidden a quick and sizable fortune. Other speculators won big on barbed wire, too. John Warne Gates, better known as “Bet-A-Million Gates,” went from selling the poky product to manufacturing “moonshine” (or unpatented) wire himself. His company was acquired by U.S. Steel, where barbed wire would make robber baron J.P. Morgan even richer.

The wire that won the West … and gave us the Hell of the Western Front.

Read it.

n the US, manufacturers in everything from consumer technology to farming and agriculture have long constructed systems that limit where customers can go for repairs—remember the old “warranty void if broken” stickers found on game consoles or TVs? Today if you have a broken iPhone screen, for instance, Apple runs Genius Bars across the country where users must go for permitted fixes. Other companies parcel work out to a network of authorized vendors. Manufacturers generally argue these constraints are necessary to protect proprietary information that gives their product a leg up in the overall marketplace.

Slowly but surely, though, consumers and third parties outside of vendor-sanctioned circles have been pushing to change this through so-called “right to repair” laws. These pieces of proposed legislation take different forms—19 states introduced some form of right to repair legislation in 2018, up from 12 in 2017—but generally they attempt to require companies, whether they are in the tech sector or not, to make their service manuals, diagnostic tools, and parts available to consumers and repair shops—not just select suppliers.

ZMan looks over the field.

In 2016 there was the Trump Train, now we have the Biden Boat or, given his age, the Biden Buggy. According to all of the polls, even those in keys states, Joe Biden is the clear favorite to win the nomination. He’s polling at around 30%, which is twice his nearest rival. In fact, the latest batch has him with three times the support of Bernie Sanders, who has been in the second seat for a year now. Everyone else is in single digits, bobbing up and down with the news cycle.

Of course, there is a lifetime between now and the first votes. For a guy like Biden, who is pushing eighty, that could be literally true. He is by far the oldest man to run for the nomination and would be the oldest man to enter the White House if he won. Trump set the record when he was elected in 2016, but Biden is a decade older. It remains to be seen if the media will allow that to be an issue. Right now they seem to be tasked with selling good old Uncle Joe to the voters, as the sensible antidote to Trump.

I doubt seriously that Biden will get the nomination — he’s too old, too white, and too male for the modern Democrat party. But this nomination process will be entertaining to watch.

In fairness, Biden really is the Democrat version of Trump. They appeal to the same demographic. Biden has been pitching himself as “working class Joe” for close to a century now. It’s his go-to line whenever he is out campaigning. He tells voters about how everyone has known him as “working class Joe” or sometimes he uses the phrase “lunch pail Joe.” The fact that he has never done a minute of honest labor in his life never seems to matter. The old working class whites like it.

Well, we’ll see how that survives the process that gave us Hillary, possibly the worst Presidential candidate in living memory.

Read it.

Adhesives, you might say, have a bit of a sticky history. It’s easy to think about glue as we encounter it today: From bookshelves to flower beds to arts-and-crafts projects, we think of glue as an object to repair other things. It’s the stuff that sticks one thing to another–simple enough. Technologically, however, glue represents a complex series of decisions that our genus, Homo, has been making for millennia.

Joel Kotkin.

Almost 40 years ago, in his book The Third Wave, the futurist Alvin Toffler described technology as “the dawn of a new civilization” with vast opportunities for societal and human growth. But instead we are lurching towards what Taichi Sakaiya has called “a high-tech middle ages.” In his landmark 1973 work, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, Daniel Bell predicted that, by handing ultimate economic and cultural power to a small number of technologists and financiers the opportunity to monetize every aspect of human behavior and emotion, we would be handing them the chance to fulfill “a social alchemist’s dream: the dream of ordering mass society.”

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

Read it.

A needed reminder that not everybody in a Blue State is a proglodyte.

Read it.

There is no question that automation will change the way people work, but for some sectors of the economy, change is long overdue. Nowhere is this truer than in architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC).

I agree, although I would put health care and education in first place.

Read it.

In the first case of its kind Tendai Muswere admitted using the printer to make a revolver and a handgun out of plastic resin at his London flat.

The 26-year-old Zimbabwean national told police he had made the firearms to use as props in a film project for his course at London South Bank University.

Officers came across the 3D printed component parts for the guns while searching his flat for drugs in October 2017, following a tip-off that he was growing cannabis at home.

…

Scotland Yard said it feared the guns could have fallen into the hands of serious criminals.

Fortunately, this guy wasn’t a serious criminal.

The admission standards at ‘London South Bank University’ don’t seem to be very high.

Steve Sailer.

This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto by Calcutta-born NYU journalism professor Suketu Mehta takes pro-immigration polemics to their logical conclusion: “Immigration as reparations.” Historically white countries must open their borders because whites have sinned and deserve punishment. But just lie back and think of diversity….

I am reminded of going to see the movie Gandhi with my friend Heinrich, who had a number of uncles who served in the SS during The War. He thought it was a comedy, which from his standpoint it probably was; the only reason that Gandhi’s ‘revolution’ worked was that the colonial power was British and so could be jerked around. He pointed out that if the Germans had been running India, the first time Gandhi tried one of his ‘civil disobedience’ tricks a subaltern would have shot him in the head and left his body by the side of the road, and no more would have been heard about it.

Read it.

For all the complaining about ‘right-wing this’ and ‘right-wing that’, it’s amazing how it’s always the Democrats who wind up going to jail.

Read it.

After decades of screaming, “No Uterus, No Opinion!” the feminazis suddenly want men to get involved in the abortion debate. Their sick way of doing this is expand upon all the “benefits” men get from a woman’s choice to put down their children before birth.

They’ve got a point. If the objective is to produce a class of beta-male drone sperm donors, this would appear to be the appropriate road.

Read it.

Good advice for almost any occasion.

Read it.

Black people are SO oppressed in America, it’s just a shame.

Cthulhu and the Stewards of Creation

Read it.

I ate two portions of yogurt in colleg so now I guess I’m safe. Whew!

Victor Davis Hanson.

Everyone realized the Paris Climate Accord was a way for elites to virtue signal their green bona fides while making no adjustments in their global managerial lifestyles—at best. At worst, it was a shake-down both to transfer assets from the industrialized West to the “developing world” and to dull Western competitiveness with ascending rivals like India and China. Not now. Trump withdrew from the agreement, met or exceeded the carbon emissions reductions of the deal anyway, and has never looked back at the flawed convention. The remaining signatories have little response to the U.S. departure, and none at all to de facto American compliance to their own targeted goals.

Sorry, banning plastic bags won’t save our planet 

NY Times Reporter Still Asking for Forgiveness After Climate Sins  Hang ‘im.

Read it.

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

Just remember that.

Absolutely nothing.

Read it.

This would appear to be God reminding us not to eat Turd World food.

Read it.

I missed the notice a few days ago that publisher Houghton-Mifflin is delaying publication of Naomi Wolf’s latest book, Outrages, for the simple reason that it has been exposed as an embarrassing piece of crap.

Read it.

How do statistics so often lead scientists to deny differences that those not educated in statistics can plainly see? For several generations, researchers have been warned that a statistically non-significant result does not ‘prove’ the null hypothesis (the hypothesis that there is no difference between groups or no effect of a treatment on some measured outcome)¹. Nor do statistically significant results ‘prove’ some other hypothesis. Such misconceptions have famously warped the literature with overstated claims and, less famously, led to claims of conflicts between studies where none exists.

Top US Regulator Warns Financial System Is At Risk Due To… Climate Change

Temperatures leap 40 degrees above normal as the Arctic Ocean and Greenland ice sheet see record June melting

Extremes

Why we do nothing to prepare for climate change

More electric cars means more mining, but recycling could help minimize the impact

FLASHBACK: ABC’s ’08 Prediction: NYC Under Water from Climate Change By June 2015  And I was so looking forward to it….

What Is Called Nuclear Waste Is Mostly Fuel for Molten Salt and Fast Reactors

UK: Grass cuttings from roadside verges to be sold to the National Grid to raise money to save the environment

Freeberg nails it.

Rant: I do not believe in conspiracies but I do believe in common incentives and I believe some of these are hidden. These could be fairly called “conspiracies” because they achieve the same effect although they do not involve the collusion that should be necessary to qualify for the term.

There is a conspiracy to fuck with people.

Show me a hundred people who want a “climate surcharge” and I can show you a hundred people who want higher taxes. Show me a hundred people who want higher taxes and I’ll show you a hundred who want the climate surcharge. If things were on the up-and-up it wouldn’t be that way, because higher taxes are not good for the environment. Also, every dollar you spend on higher taxes leaves a dollar less available for surcharges, and vice versa. Furthermore, I would not be able to show you a hundred people who, by their own private conduct, do good things for the environment. On average, their “climate skeptic” dissenters would be kinder to the environment. So these are not people who want to preserve a livable climate; they are people who just want to make it more expensive to live.