Bjorn Lumborg parses it out.

t is an indisputable fact that carbon emissions are rising—and faster than most scientists predicted. But many climate-change alarmists seem to claim that all climate change is worse than expected. This ignores that much of the data are actually encouraging. The latest study from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that in the previous 15 years temperatures had risen 0.09 degrees Fahrenheit. The average of all models expected 0.8 degrees. So we’re seeing about 90% less temperature rise than expected.

Facts like this are important because a one-sided focus on worst-case stories is a poor foundation for sound policies. Yes, Arctic sea ice is melting faster than the models expected. But models also predicted that Antarctic sea ice would decrease, yet it is increasing. Yes, sea levels are rising, but the rise is not accelerating—if anything, two recent papers, one by Chinese scientists published in the January 2014 issue of Global and Planetary Change, and the other by U.S. scientists published in the May 2013 issue of Coastal Engineering, have shown a small decline in the rate of sea-level increase.

All of the screaming and hand-waving about CLIMATE CHANGE DENIERS! is designed to distract attention from the fact that when you look at the facts there is no reason for alarm.

You had to be there.

Check it out.

You may have heard of intersectionality – “the theory that the overlap of various social identities, such as race, gender, and sexuality, contributes to the systemic oppression and discrimination experienced by an individual” – but don’t know how to compare your level of oppression with others. Now, you can!

Brought to us by Steve Sailer. No, I don’t know where he finds this stuff.

My score was 4 as compared to a 5 for Steve. Not sure what that means, but I suspect it isn’t good.

Read it.

Ponder the possibility that they both might be right.

Read it.

Climate alarmism is based on cherry-picked data. That isn’t ‘science’.

Read it.

The argument against Lamont Hill seems to be that he deployed a “dog whistle” — that is, that by using the phrase “from the river to the sea,” he signaled to the more clued-in and pernicious members of his audience that what he really covets is the destruction of Israel. Hill vehemently denies this: “My reference to ‘river to the sea’ was not a call to destroy anything or anyone,” he wrote yesterday on Twitter. “It was a call for justice, both in Israel and in the West Bank/Gaza. The speech very clearly and specifically said those things. No amount of debate will change what I actually said or what I meant.”

The Chattering Class are fond of the term ‘dog-whistle’, never pondering the fact that a subtle message audible only to BadThinkers and them pretty much puts them in the BadThinker bucket. Remember: If you hear the dog-whistle, then you’re the dog.

Rollo Tomassi looks at some inconvenient truth.

How many men hold a default Frame in their marriage? Many women are reluctant to even accept their husband’s last name today. There’s a lot of bullshit reasons for this, but the core truth is that women have no confidence in their man in the long term. They don’t trust his ‘course’. There’s holding Frame, and then there’s establishing a long term Frame, a paradigm, a reality of his own, that defines a man’s authority in his marriage and family relationships. Women today still want marriage, but few want to defer to their husband’s ‘course’. They don’t trust him with her life.

And why would they? For the past four or five generations men have been portrayed in popular culture as untrustworthy. Either they are Beta buffoons in need of women’s uniquely female ‘reasoning’ (which is really male reasoning with breasts) to save them from themselves, or they’re malicious Alpha malcontents (or perverts) also in need of female correction to bring them to female approved justice. It’s the retribution fantasy of feminism played out in popular media, but the societal result is generations of women who have no inherent respect of men and even less trust in any beneficial course they might plot out for them as future wives.

Read it.

That’s because there’s no there, there.

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People need to remember that ‘Just because Hitler liked something doesn’t make it a bad thing.’

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I guess they really are Dicks after all.

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Well, waddle, but sure.

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Think of it as evolution in action.

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Isn’t that amazing.

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“To group them all up like, frankly, our president has done, you know I try to speak very respectfully, but he has basically called them all criminals and said they are not coming in here. At least that’s what I’ve seen,” Ammon Bundy said, taking a shot at Trump.

If they enter the country illegally, they are all criminals.

‘You know, everybody in Russia who has money is an oligarch. … Have you noticed that oligarchs exist only in Russia, and only in the Trump Russia collusion story?’ — Rush Limbaugh

Read it.

Wow, that’s news.

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More wishful thinking from the Zoo on the part of a Voice of the Crust.

Read it.

Two days after the mid-term elections, The Washington Post published an analysis under the headline “These wealthy neighborhoods delivered Democrats the House majority.” That headline is false in several different ways, but it is being repeated among a large group of the punditry because it fits into a class narrative that sees affluent, college-educated white people who live in suburbs as citadels of tolerant decency while white folks without bachelor’s degrees, wherever they live, are wall-to-wall racist and sexist xenophobes.

Listen to it.

A Heritage Foundation podcast addressing the most important issue of our times.

‘Politics is a team sport. If you’re a Crimson Tide fan, you don’t cheer for Auburn, and if you’re a Republican, you don’t want Democrats to win.’ — The Other McCain

That really says everything that needs to be said.

Read it.

Like Uhlmann’s law of legislative analysis:

If an Act of Congress has a long title—lock up the children and run for cover.

Or Uhlmann’s Razor:

When stupidity seems a sufficient explanation, there is no need for recourse to any more elaborate analysis.

Uhlmann’s Razor also has a corollary known as Uhlmann’s First Law of Historical Causation:

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

And my personal favorite:

When evaluating the soundness of any moral proposition, law, rule, or regulation, however popular, to ascertain its true meaning, read it aloud slowly in a German accent.

Read it.

The platform caused an uproar on November 25 when it permanently banned conservative pundit and former Marine Jesse Kelly without explanation. On November 27, the radio host’s account was conveniently restored to Twitter, again without explanation. The Federalist reported that the House Energy and Commerce Committee was looking into Twitter. Only after that story was reported did Twitter reinstate the account.

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.

Rich people are waking up to the fact that, despite paying most of the taxes, they’re not getting their ‘fair share’ of government services. So for mail (UPS/Fedex), law enforcement (private security guards), and now fire-fighting, they’re going direct rather than depending on a government that can’t or won’t provide services.

Read it.

‘In some buildings, there are more Black Lives Matter posters than there are actual black people.’

And there you have the Crust, naked and afraid.

Read it.

In the 1920s and 1930s, a banker named Pat Munroe in the small town of Quincy, Florida noticed that even during the depths of the Great Depression, otherwise impoverished people would spend their last nickel to buy a glass of Coca-Cola.  With good returns on capital, and a once-in-a-century valuation so low that the business was trading for less than the cash in the bank, “Mr. Pat”, as he was called, encouraged everyone he knew to buy an ownership stake in the firm.  He would even underwrite bank loans, backed by Coca-Cola stock, for his responsible depositors to encourage people to acquire equity.

Read it. And by all means watch the video.

Jonah Goldberg never misses an opportunity to Punch Right.

One of these days I’ll read something by him criticizing the Left and I’ll probably die of shock.

Read it.

Damn, what a racist that guy is.

Read it.

Well. There it is.

Read it.

That explains why my brother is a communist, I guess.

Read it.

When I was just a young man, my grandmother said to me, ‘Young man, you will not let a fruit or a vegetable past your lips unless it has been washed off first.’

I said to her ‘Why is that, grandmother?’

She said, ‘You do not know where that fruit or vegetable has been. More importantly, you do not know what has been put on that fruit or vegetable. So you will rinse first, then eat.’

And that advice has stood me in good stead from that day to this.

Sarah Hoyt has some insight.

The goats are needed because the sheep are too social.  I don’t know if it’s true they’ll follow their leader over a cliff, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Sheep ain’t too smart.

…

But when you put this on a national scale, it’s a terrible thing.  We’ve seen exactly how horrible it is over things like the Cultural Revolution, or under Stalin, or for that matter under Hitler, or, in a smaller scale — it was a smaller time — the French revolution.  Because people will do horrible or destructive things rather than buck the group under any circumstances.

Read it.

Well, you know, it’s that time of year….

Joel Kotkin takes  a peek.

Ultimately the gig economy, even as it uses the latest technology, represents something of a devolution of labor. Although widely associated as “progressive,” the arbiters of the gig economy are, perhaps unconsciously, recreating the conditions that led to the impoverishment of the peasants and mechanics — replaced by slaves — at the end of the Roman Republic, or what befell artisans whose livelihoods were destroyed in the 19th century by machines.

Read it.

Embedded in the cerebral folds of every city planner who’s ever lived, there’s a cluster of neurons that lights up like Las Vegas when confronted with the possibility of a blank slate. It started with Hippodamus, the man Aristotle claimed was the father of urban planning. When the Persians destroyed his hometown of Miletus, Hippodamus discovered a bright side to catastrophe: The attackers had erased all the regrettable improvisations that, over the centuries, had made a mess of the place. Tasked with rebuilding, he seized his chance to impose order upon chaos. And so the concept of the urban grid was born.

A designed city is just right from the viewpoint of the designers but might not be from the viewpoint of those who might have to live there. Rather like a planned economy under communism, and we all know how those turn out.

Steve Sailer bring you the news.

In other words, even leaving aside immigrants, scientists can see that English people who migrate out of coal towns like Rotherham for the bright lights of the metropolis tend to have higher polygenic scores for educational attainment (i.e., years of education) than English people who stay home in dead end coal towns. Of course, a simpler way to do this would be just to ask people what their years of educational attainment are, but it’s kind of cool that you can get to a similar result by looking at their DNA.

Read it.

Countries in Eastern Europe tend to be far more socially conservative in this regard, with as few as three per cent of respondents in Georgia and Armenia in favour of legalising same-sex marriage.

Western Europe tends to be more progressive across the questions asked, with 88 per cent of people in Sweden supportive of legalising same-sex marriage, by way of comparison.

There’s nothing like 70 years of living under Communism to bring home to you why proglodyte degeneracy is a bad thing.

Read it.

No, you have a moral duty to track down Mark Zuckerberg and beat the living snot out of him and everyone in his immediate family, including his communist sister who has caused so much evil in the world.

Read it.

If you have to ‘figure out your heritage’, you don’t have one.

If you need a DNA test to figure out who your ancestors were, it doesn’t matter.

Read it.

At ZeroHedge, Tyler Durden reports that the Clinton Foundation “saw contributions dry up approximately 90 percent over a three-year period between 2014 and 2017, according to financial statements.” If there’s anything surprising about this report, it’s that the Clinton Foundation still receives as much as it does ($23 million in 2017) in contributions.

Why pay if you can’t play?

Read it.

Note that, in these days of Identity Politics, it’s vital to let people know Who You Are before they will give any credibility regarding what you have to say. And in most cases Who You Are is the sole qualification indicating that what you have to say is credible.

This technique is usually of the form ‘As An X …’,  as if just being an X is sufficient; typically there’s nothing about being an X that implies any expertise in what one is saying, which is why it’s so important to play that card right off the bat.

Eric S Raymond looks at computers.

Some years ago I predicted that eventually the core of your desktop PC would morph into a physically tiny compute engine that would merge with your smartphone, talking through standard ports and cables to full-sized peripherals like a keyboard and (a too large to be portable) flatscreen.

More recently I examined the way that compute bricks – small-form-factor fanless PCs running low-power chips – have been encroaching on the territory of traditional tower PCs. Players in this space include Jetway, Logic Supply, Partaker, and Shuttle. Poke a search engine with “fanless PC” to get good hits.