Read it.

The city of Port Angeles, Washington spent $107,516 putting up wind turbines in a new city park. The turbines will power 31 lights in the park. This will save the taxpayers of Port Angeles a whopping $41.58 per month.

That’s before subtracting operating costs, though no one yet knows how much it will cost to operate them. The city is in a dispute with the manufacturer, so it will be another month or so before they turn them on.

Washington state is the northern province of Left Coast Ecotopia, so it’s a glaring example of politically-motivated ‘environmentalism’ that underscores the Thatcher proverb ‘the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money’.

Read it.

Texas spends $275 million a year on a vehicle inspection program and has never bothered to find out if it makes the public safer or healthier.

The Lone Star State isn’t alone. None of the other 14 states with vehicle safety inspections could provide the Government Accountability Office with any evidence justifying the existence of the programs.

Sounds like the perfect government program.

Read it.

Nobody is in charge at the U.S. Postal Service’s (USPS) Board of Governors after today when the last Senate-confirmed governor’s term expires, leaving Postmaster General Megan Brennan and Deputy Postmaster Ronald Stroman large and in charge, with no oversight.

Not that ‘oversight’ of the Post Office ever did anybody any good. There’s a reason the Post Office has entered American folklore as the poster child for bureaucracy, inefficiency, and incompetence.

The number of governors on the postal board has dwindled as nobody has been appointed to new terms since 2010. Former Democratic presidential candidate and Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders has blocked multiple presidential appointments to the board, according to outgoing governor James Bilbray, a former Democratic congressman from Nevada. Meanwhile, the USPS’s deficit reached $5.6 billion this year.

This is the first I’ve ever heard of Bernie objecting to people being employed by the government. I doubt that the USPS’s deficit bothered him a microsecond.

Read it.

The net impact of solar panels has actually increased carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions due to how much energy is used in their construction, a new study by Utrecht University concluded.

Researchers looked at 40 years of CO2 emissions from solar panels, including those caused by their production, then subtracted that by the amount of CO2 they prevented from being emitted. They found many older solar panels would take decades to lead to a net emissions reduction, which is far longer than their expected lifespan. They also concluded that the current generations of panels will probably only just reduce net emissions over years.

How about that ‘green’ energy, eh?

Read it.

Pistols and shotguns hung frozen in the air, their blunt ends aimed at various persons, who remained as still as, well, mannequins. One man was prostrate under the back of a car, as if for cover, the barrel of his shotgun peeking out. Another hid behind a plastic trashcan, flimsy protection if this were a real battle.

Gee, they all appear to be black. Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

It was a version, albeit an edgy and ultimately inadvisable one, of the mannequin challenge – that Internet craze of filming a scene of stark-still people, generally with the song ‘Black Beatles’ by Rae Sremmurd playing over it. It has become so popular that everyone from Taylor Swift to NFL players to Alabama inmates have recorded a version.

Show biz for stupid people.

Read it.

The liberals are truly going nuts, and it’s beautiful. They recently resurrected Nancy Pelosi for another glorious term winnowing away the House Democrat caucus. Pretty soon it’s just going to be her and some guy representing Berkeley who they recruited while he was shouting “Workers of the world unite!” at bored coeds on Telegraph Avenue. You know, if you want to reach out to the kind of hard-working, salt-of-the-earth, normal Americans who voted for the black guy then allegedly refused to vote for the woman because they are racist, you totally want an ancient, rich, snooty, San Francisco leftist and Botox after-picture like the Nanster.

I forget who said that the Democrat party is a conspiracy of the Upper Class and the Lower Class against the Middle Class, but he ought to get a medal.

Read it.

It can’t be that this is a mass delusion, Mark. It’s not that you’re being conned by people with a political and financial interest in manipulating your emotions. This really is the most important crisis of our time. It really is just like World War II. And you’re proving them right by walking across the country. Barefoot. It all makes sense.

Must be nice to have nothing better to do with your life.

As for how this American hero is financing his months-long journey, he says he “won a poetry fellowship for the state of Rhode Island.” So this story is pretty much perfect.

Glad I don’t live in Rhode Island and see my hard-earned money wasted on drones like this one.

Read it.

Trump’s victory was largely minted in the suburbs and smaller cities of the new American Heartland, from Pittsburgh to Omaha to Dallas-Ft. Worth. The heartland regions depend on agriculture, home construction, manufacturing and energy, all of which could benefit from the policies of the new presidential administration and Republican Congress. In contrast, Hillary Clinton favored extending the Obama administration’s policies on fossil fuels and housing that may win support in the dense progressive bastions of the East and West coasts, but were viewed with alarm by many tied to heartland industries, some of which have been under pressure from a global decline in commodity prices.

Read it.

Whether or not Trump can or should attempt to reverse the decline in manufacturing jobs is not the big story here. He can’t. The real story is that he continues to tap into the anger of his voters about being left behind. That will give him much more power than our criticisms will take away.

Politicians, aided by economists, have long ignored the negative impacts of trade-induced structural change. Indeed, they have even cheered it on. After all, the process “releases resources” for use in other, more productive parts of the economy. Those workers are just “low-skilled” workers. The US needs more “high-skilled” workers anyway.

Fact: Workers hate being referred to as “low-skilled.”

How we respond to Trump is important. If we simply fall back on our standard numbers, we lose. If we confidently predict that TPP is a big win because it will add 0.5% to GDP by 2030, we lose. If we just use this as an opportunity to reiterate the importance of a college degree, we lose. We have been doing this for decades, and it helped deliver Trump to office.

…

We don’t have answers for these communities. Rural and semi-rural economic development is hard. Those regions have received only negative shocks for decades; the positive shocks have accrued to the urban regions. Of course, Trump doesn’t have any answers either. But he at least pretends to care.

Just pretending to care is important. At a minimum, the electoral map makes it important.

A Reddit that asked people who had met Trump before he ran for President what he was ‘really’ like.

A typical comment:

A post from Tyler Cowen’s econ blog Marginal Revolution, explaining why celebrities and CEOs make better politicians than politicians typically do.

Read it.

Read it. And listen to the audio.

Read it.

Jordan, who has repeatedly called for Koskinen’s impeachment, said the targeting of conservative groups by the IRS is unacceptable. He said Koskinen’s role in the scandal warrants impeachment proceedings.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

A wind turbine that’s part of the first U.S. offshore wind farm broke down before the site started commercially producing power.

Yeah, those ‘renewables’ are really dependable. (NOT)

Read it.

The employer mandate of the Affordable Care Act requires businesses with more than 50 full-time employees must provide health care for at least 95 percent of the employees and dependents up to age 26, or pay a fee.

Katz told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that that between his two restaurants in Fort Worth and Dallas, he has more than 50 employees. Because he doesn’t provide health care to his staff, starting Jan. 1, he will face a penalty between $200,000 and $300,000.

“I don’t have that kind of money,” Katz told the Star-Telegram. “Instead of 50 or 60 people without healthcare, we have 50 or 60 people that aren’t employed anymore. It makes no sense.”

Read it.

“Farmers, ranchers and growers the world over are transitioning to precision agricultural methods,” Tobe told EE Times in advance of his exclusive report on agricultural robots, “Subdividing their acreage into many unique subplots—and in some cases right down to the individual plant, tree or animal—thereby enabling increased productivity, traceability and lower overall costs. Unmanned aerial vehicles are integral to the process and are being used to map, observe, sense and spray.”

Pretty soon there won’t be any rednecks for Obama to kick around any more.

Read it.

A team of researchers from the US and Germany have now confirmed that the Wendelstein 7-X (W 7-X) stellerator is producing the super-strong, twisty, 3D magnetic fields that its design predicted, with “unprecedented accuracy”. The researchers found an error rate less than one in 100,000.

Read it.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

A progressive non-profit suppressed evidence of anti-white hate crimes following Donald Trump’s presidential victory, apparently in favor of promoting a narrative that exclusively reported violence and racism by Trump supporters.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) released the results of a survey on Nov. 28 that purports to find a “Trump Effect” in American schools. SPLC noted that, of the 10,000 teachers who responded to the survey, about 40 percent reported they had “heard derogatory language directed at students of color, Muslims, immigrants and people based on gender or sexual orientation.” Eighty percent reported heightened anxiety by “marginalized” students, and 90 percent said the election had a generally negative effect on students.

Read it.

“Intersectionality” is the post-modern identity politics term of art for conflating the car crash of competing victimization categories. I think. Because in addition to oppressed women, minorities, and genderfluid people, it apparently also includes . . . chickens. Also cows.

You have to read the abstract to believe it. Sample sentence:

Such socio-spatial practices are the means through which men, women, chickens and cattle become privileged and/or othered within dominant gender–species hierarchical arrangements.

Read it.

When Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagún arrived in New Spain (Mexico) in 1529, he embarked on an extraordinary project: the compilation of an encyclopedic compendium of the world of the Aztecs in the wake of the Spanish conquest a decade earlier.

Finally completed between 1576 and 1577 – essentially Sahagún’s life’s work – the result was the Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España (the General History of the Things of New Spain). Sometime between 1578 and 1584 the manuscript was taken to Spain and by 1588 Sahagún’s Historia found its way to Florence, part of the Medici family’s magnificent collections. How exactly the Historia came into Medici hands remains unclear but that is where it still resides today, in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, which explains how the Historia became more commonly known as the Florentine Codex.

Read it.

A robochef, like Rosie from the Jetsons, could be just the machine to salvage desire from disappointment. The robochef, Lusk informs us, isn’t just a dream of futures past, but a present-day reality. Designed by Moley Robotics, a prototype robochef — a pedestal topped by a seven-foot cylinder with programmable robotic arms — debuted at a 2015 industrial fair, where it prepared a crab bisque by duplicating the movements of a celebrity chef.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Liberal black activists have launched a monthly “subscription box” designed for white people to “to not only financially support Black femme freedom fighters, but also complete measurable tasks in the fight against white supremacy.”

The subscription service is called Safety pin box and was launched last week. Wearing a safety pin has recently become a symbol within the liberal community for one to show solidarity with minorities.

The group headed by Leslie Mac and Marissa Jenae Johnson. Johnson is one of the black lives matter protesters who interrupted Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders during a speech in Seattle last year.

There are four different types of subscriptions offered by the group. The “e-ally box” is $25 a month and is “an electronic form of solidarity.” It comes with “exclusive ‘calls to action’ when urgent ally services are needed in times of crisis.” Ally is a term used by black lives matter activists to describe white comrades.

Kudos to the smart guys who found a way to monetize White Guilt (and SWPL stupidity).

When it comes time to cull the herd, their customer list will come in handy.

Read it.

Even Social Justice Warriors get it right sometimes.

Read it.

How about that Global Warming, eh? Do you feel the rising seas nipping at your toes yet?

Read it.

Virginia Tech students collaborated to create a list of fifty “microaggressions” that students have experienced.

Students groups such as the NAACP, Muslim Student Association and Jewish Student Union collected statements that students found triggering.

The resulting campaign, called “Microaggressions: #hokiesspeakup,” started in the spring semester. Posters are strewn throughout the campus to warn students about triggering statements.

I find the whole concept of ‘microagressions’ to be triggering.

Read it.

I’m wondering why everybody is having the vapors about offending the Russians. Looks to me as if they’re still a Third World power. Do any of their nukes still even work?

Read it.

Part of the reason I got embroiled in this [gender identity] controversy was because of what I know about how things went wrong in the Soviet Union. Many of the doctrines that underlie the legislation that I’ve been objecting to share structural similarities with the Marxist ideas that drove Soviet Communism. The thing I object to the most was the insistence that people use these made up words like ‘xe’ and ‘xer’ that are the construction of authoritarians. There isn’t a hope in hell that I’m going to use their language, because I know where that leads.

Read it.

Much can be said about the Left’s lavishly-financed effort to portray global warming as an existential threat, so that a small minority can profit while the rest of us are impoverished. But this is perhaps the most fundamental point: a scientific argument can be made that doubling the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will increase global temperatures by about one degree C. Most people agree that this would be a good thing; it would undoubtedly contribute to the greening of the Earth, since CO2 is the plant food required for photosynthesis.

So what’s the problem? The climate alarmists assert that various positive feedbacks, principally an increase in the main greenhouse gas, water vapor, will amplify that scientifically-defensible one degree increase into something like six degrees. EVERY SINGLE THING you have ever read about the supposedly baleful effects of CO2 is based on that unproven assumption. Actually, the net feedbacks–clouds are the great unknown–may be negative rather than positive.

Read it.

Where’s the enthusiasm for the President ruling by decree now? They were all for it when the Magic Negro was in power.

The problem with an Imperial Presidency is that anybody can do it.

Read it.

How about that Global Warming, eh? Feel the Rising Sea Levels(tm) nipping at your toes yet?

Read it.

It’s hard to single out the most delicious example of the post-Trump liberal freak out, but the din about California secession has to rank high on the list. Among other obvious things, California provided Hillary Clinton with her entire margin of victory in the popular vote—without California, Trump wins the popular vote in the other 49 states handily. (Without California and the five boroughs of New York City, Trump’s popular vote victory starts to approach a landslide.)

Read it.

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

Read it.

Read it.

This is from The New Yorker so who knows how practical it might be, but I’m sure it will look authentic.

Read it.

The Whitechapel Bell Foundry, based in London’s Whitechapel, has long been the international centre for bespoke bells but the family run business has announced it is now set to close due to the “changing realities” of running a niche business.

Listed in the Guinness World Records as the oldest manufacturing firm in Britain, the company was formed in 1570 in the reign of Elizabeth I.

UPDATE: More here.

Read it.

In just one brief period between Monday and Tuesday, WaPo ran the following headlines:

• Romney twisting in the wind offers a preview of Trump’s reality-show governing style
• ‘We’ve never had anything like this’: Racist, threatening message left on door of black church
• Donald Trump’s political mandate is historically small
• House Democrats demand Chaffetz probe Trump’s finances
• Trump’s ‘news’ source: Alien lizards, fluoride mind control and voter fraud
• Why we can’t — and shouldn’t — ignore Donald Trump’s tweets
• In one tweet, Trump trashes two constitutional amendments
• Donald Trump and social media have weaponized the conspiracy theory in American politics
• Trump just scored perhaps the biggest victory of his new tenure. But it comes with a huge asterisk
• AP FACT CHECK: Trump won presidency but lost popular vote
• Donald Trump is never going to change. Not ever.
• Trump’s populism is about to face a rude awakening
• Trump has already defeated the news media. And it’s unclear what we can do about it.

Read it.

Among bacteria’s many attributes, perhaps one of its most overlooked yet important ones is its ability to propel itself via flagellum, a unique appendage hanging off its end. This mechanism is a perfect example of a naturally occurring, biological wheel.

Read it.

On Feb. 29, Carol Greider of Johns Hopkins University became the third Nobel Prize laureate biologist in a month to do something long considered taboo among biomedical researchers: She posted a report of her recent discoveries to a publicly accessible website, bioRxiv, before submitting it to a scholarly journal to review for “official’’ publication.

Disintermediation is our friend.

Self-Watering Planter.

Kitchen in a Box.

Baseball Brush Cleaner. For those of you with dirty balls (you know who you are).

Read it.

Another day, another hate hoax.

The culprit in what was initially believed to be a pro-Trump, anti-black act of vandalism in South Philadelphia earlier this month turns out to be a 58-year-old black man.

According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, William Tucker faces four charges related to the case. Police say that on Nov. 9, the day after Trump was elected, Tucker sprayed “Trump Rules” and “Black Bitch” on a white SUV owned by his 62-year-old neighbor, a black woman.

Read it.

Gotta retrain those rednecks who voted for Trump somehow.

Harvesting takes me an hour. That’s an hour in which I drive at little more than walking pace from one end of a field to the other and back again 20 or 30 times. It’s not the most fun I’ve had in a video game, but then I do need the money.

Farming Simulator 17, released on 25 October, is the latest game in a series made by Giants Software in Schlieren, Switzerland. Players start out with little land and few machines and must plant, tend and harvest crops – or raise livestock – to earn money to buy more land and more machines.

Prediction: No Democrat will ever play this game.

Read it.

He must have seen a film of the Iraqis torching the oil wells in Kuwait as they were being hammerd out and said, ‘Hey, I can do that to America!’

Read it.

Eight years of Obama will do that to you.

Too bad they didn’t think of starting a ‘green energy’ company that would get massive government subsidies and then go bankrupt, leaving them all with golden parachutes. But I guess Obama can’t get to everybody.

The Other McCain explores Leftist sociopathy.

Inside their liberal echo chamber, hermetically sealed by epistemic closure, Democrats never have to consider the possibility that they’re wrong. Their friends at the New York Times and CNN all agree with them, as does every professor at Columbia, Yale and other major universities, and every celebrity in Hollywood. Democrats never talk to anyone who disagrees with them, because people who disagree with Democrats are not merely wrong, but also ignorant and evil.

Yeah, there’s a lot of that going around.

The Alt-Right Dog-Whistle Theory, as we may call it, serves a valuable psychological function for Democrats. If the people who voted for Trump were racist — “RAAAAACIST!” — then (a) Trump’s election can be dismissed as morally illegitimate, and (b) the Democrats can avoid the question of whether their policies are wrong. Inside their echo chamber, Democrats cling desperately to this kind of rationalization, because the only alternative would be an embarrassing admission of failure.

Remember: If you hear the dog-whistle, you’re the dog.

Democrats hate babies. Democrats hate Catholics. Democrats hate Jesus.

Democrats used to love Catholics, when Catholics helped elect Democrats like John F. Kennedy who, among other things, supported Vietnamese Catholics fighting against Communism. By 1972, however, Democrats hated Catholics and supported Communists in Vietnam. Of course, I’m old enough to remember when Democrats were the party of the working class, whereas now Democrats are the party of Hollywood, George Soros and every whiny liberal arts major at Oberlin College.

So it would seem.

Read it.

How about that Global Warming, eh? Feeling the rising sea levels nipping at your toes yet?