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You know things are bad for Tesla’s “autopilot” when regulators are not only blaming Tesla, but turning on other regulators. This is what happened on Tuesday, when the NTSB criticized Tesla’s “lack of system safeguards” during a fatal 2018 Autopilot crash in California. They also faulted the “scant oversight” of U.S. regulators, according to Reuters.

The chairman of the NTSB, Robert Sumwalt, said that Tesla ignored safety recommendations issued in 2017 by the agency. “It’s been 881 days since these recommendations were sent to Tesla. We’re still waiting,” he said.

“Industry keeps implementing technology in such a way that people can get injured to killed, including this board’s recommendations intended to help them prevent such tragedies,” Sumwalt continued.

Since 2016, the company’s Autopilot has been tied to at least 3 fatal accidents. And why would Elon Musk rush to correct its behavior or pay attention to NTSB recommendations when there is no negative consequence to ignoring them?

Hammer tech.

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Google’s black box algorithm controls which political emails land in your main inbox. For 2020 presidential candidates, the differences are stark.

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Incidents were reported on Lesbos and Chios, outlying Greek islands that sit on the front line of a migration route for refugees and asylum seekers. Authorities announced this month they would expedite the creation of centres on five Greek islands, angering locals who say they are bearing the burden of the refugee crisis and that more asylum seekers should be transferred to the mainland amid severe overcrowding.

Witnesses said about 500 people attempted to block the unloading of heavy machinery overnight to break ground at a construction site on Lesbos.

Clashes on the streets followed, with residents attempting to block access to the construction site, and police using tear gas. Similar tensions were reported on Chios.

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The London Times reports on the discovery of a major spy ring in Australia. The guilty country is not named, but obviously is China.

Kevin Williamson calls for a time-out.

As we abandon moral language for clinical language, we run into technical difficulties. Writing in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman describes the 2020 presidential election as one that may be a contest between “a self-proclaimed socialist and an undiagnosed sociopath.”

There is no such thing as an “undiagnosed sociopath” because there is no such thing as a “diagnosed sociopath”—“sociopath” is not a clinical diagnosis. It is, like much of the psychological jargon that infests our journalism and our public discourse, less a medical term than a pop-culture trope, something that people pick up from watching too many police procedurals and reading too much self-help literature. (Any self-help literature is too much.) Like “empathy,” “sociopath” is really a literary conceit. The same holds broadly true for “psychopath.” Some terms, such as “narcissist,” straddle the line between medicine and pop culture. We love to engage in amateur diagnosis and to pathologize our rivals, family members, romantic disappointments, etc.

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A monument to people with more money than taste.

Pro-Abortion Nets Spike Appeals Court Upholding Trump’s Pro-Life Rule

A Two-Year Terror Campaign Against One Small GOP Office

Trump Snaps At Jim Acosta’s One-Liner On ‘Truth’ In India — ‘You Ought To Be Ashamed Of Yourself’

Chris Matthews Begs Bernie for Forgiveness; No Apologies for Despicable Trump Family Remarks

‘Trump is Public Enemy No. 1’: Mark Ruffalo Invites Other Countries To Stop Trump’s Election

CNN Cues Glasser to Trash Trump National Security Adviser as Inexperienced Ring-Kisser

PBS Show Insists Sanders Is ‘Mainstream,’ But Accepts Trump as Racist ‘Authoritarian’

‘Berkeley of the East’ seeks to ban fossil fuels as part of sweeping climate plan

Tom Steyer says he’ll declare a climate emergency on day one

See record-high temperatures strip Antarctica of huge amounts of ice

Climate change could be a ‘catastrophic’ national security threat, report warns

Sea level rise: A small California town embraces managed retreat

Cost Of ‘Net Zero’ Will Be Astronomical, New Reports Warn

How Dare You! Libs Mad at German Conservative Answer to Greta

Using Twitter Volume as Scientific Measure of “Climate Change” Is a Very, Very, Bad Idea

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Well, that’s what happens when Democrats run your state.

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What is it with Democrats and their compulsion to tell other people how to live?

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Despite Trump’s hard-hitting domination in the media, most other Republican politicians haven’t yet been able to replicate the success. Capitol Hill hasn’t had a focus on digital communication, which is essential to winning the culture war online. Democrats have the assistance of leftist “Big-Tech” giants in Silicon Valley such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google. This has been a huge problem facing conservative messaging, but the CPI, a nonprofit organization, has a plan to help republicans succeed in the digital arena.

Trump realizes that, in the modern world, the President is not just a politician but also a performer, like the British monarch, and that his performance can help or hurt his agenda.

“The conservative movement needs highly-trained communication professionals now more than ever. The messaging battle begins and ends online: where news breaks, opinions are formed, and ideas go viral. Getting digital right is a seminal part of an effective communications strategy.”

Exactly right.

Read it.

Even the Republicans in Oregon are very odd.

If they have to do this more than once, perhaps they ought to consider moving to a different state.

Texas, say.

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Iran has emerged as an epicenter of the Coronavirus outbreak, where 15 people have died as a result of the virus, according to Iranian state news media. At least 95 people have been infected with the virus, most of them in the city of Qom, which the state news site describes as a major destination for Muslim pilgrims across the world.

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The philosophy of Repair Shop has its roots in the English Arts and Crafts movement, which arose in the 19th century as a reaction against mass production in the decorative arts. The artists and writers of the Arts and Crafts movement believed that mass production had severed the intellectual act of designing from the actual (and deeply meaningful) physical process of producing the good itself, and that this separation was socially alienating and a threat to aesthetic taste. As a countermeasure to this, movement figureheads like William Morris encouraged the mastery of craft skills, the formation of a guild-like society of designer-craftsmen, and the rejection of industrial machinery in favor of the hands-on creation and repair of objects. In his oft-quoted words: “without dignified, creative human occupation, people become disconnected from life.” The Arts and Crafts movement emphasized the role of nature, vernacular British traditions, the importance of craftsmanship, and simplicity of form, all of which combined to create a warm and rustic aesthetic.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

On the other hand, check out James Lilleks, The Gallery of Regrettable Food, for how this can go bad.

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Feel free to worry about that, if you have nothing better to do.

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The short answer is maybe. The long answer won’t make you feel any better.

Ours are too lazy, but other peoples’ might.

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Slow news day.

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Jussie Smollett was back in an Illinois court on Monday, and things are not looking good for the ambitious actor.

This time, an independent special prosecutor has filed a six-count felony indictment against Smollett in Chicago and his lawyers are crying foul, claiming the state already has prosecuted him for the same conduct.

It’s going to get interesting.

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Hidden behind the good economic news is a disturbing new phenomenon – one more far-reaching — and disturbing — than the latest up or down of the business cycle. It is that our economy is now increasingly bipolar, with a traditional economy at one end and a virtual one at the other.

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That would be entertaining.

Democrats: Putting the Duh in Duhmocracy for, oh, a long time now.

ZMan draws an analogy.

This life-cycle of a software system is not unique to technology. It happens in other systems as well. It is not unreasonable to think of revolution as the replacement of a legacy system with a modern one. Politics in this sense is the software of society, purchased by the elite, implemented by the ruling class and administered by the bureaucracy of the state. It is why libertarianism is impossible, by the way. It requires a society to return to pencil and paper on purpose.

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Meritocracy is in trouble. Recent years have seen a flood of articles deploring inequality and blaming meritocracy for it. In the vanguard is Yale Law professor Daniel Markovits who attacked meritocracy in its home, in an address to Yale University graduates in 2015. His new book, The Meritocracy Trap,¹ has just been published.

My objection to the notion of ‘meritocracy’ is that there is no universally valid understanding of what constitutes ‘merit’. One man’s merit may be another xer’s ‘privilege’.

On a conceptual level, one might say ‘Okay, merit has a lot of disadvantages, but how would we be better off distributing rewards on some other basis? We just spend two hundred years fighting free of such systems.’

The basic objection appears to be that meritocracy leads to inequality, and Inequality Is Just Bad. Justifying the animus against inequality is the Step Not Taken. I’m still waiting.

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How effective is a traffic cone as a thrown weapon?

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Everything from casual dress codes to free office meals and the rise of remote work has been driven by Silicon Valley. But Silicon Valley’s biggest export, Robbins says, is the collapsing barrier between work and life. His latest book, Bring Your Whole Self to Work, advocates for workplaces where people feel safe to take risks and practice vulnerability with their coworkers. (Kombucha on tap is not required.) But there’s a dark side. As the boundaries between work and life become more porous, everyone works all the time.

Do We Really Have Only 12 Years to Live?

Climate change is drying up the Colorado River

Humans continue to find ways to backslide on climate

Climate change is drying up the Colorado River  California sucking out all of the water obviously has nothing to do with it. Move along, move along….

BBC: Climate Education is Failing Because Some Graduates Become Oil Executives

The Pentagon aims to bridge the divide between climate believers and deniers

CNN Guest Says The Only Clear 2020 Winner So Far Is Putin

‘Shifty Schiff’: Trump Accuses House Intel Chairman Of Leaking Details Of Russia Briefing  Of course he did.

Nets Downplay Russia Backing Sanders, Fear Monger About Trump

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews Suggests 4 More Years Of Trump Better For Dems Than Sanders Winning White House

David Frum Calls Trump ‘One Of The Fattest Presidents,’ ‘Least Physically Capable Since’ FDR  But not as fat as Frum’s head.

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Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

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The lucrative ‘book deal’ is one of the modern variants of the classic ‘no-show job’ with which Useful Idiots are paid off for their services. There is always a stable of ghost-writers standing by to make sure that the product is not too embarrassing, and a sea of low-information proles standing by to shell out the appropriate contribution.

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I admit, though, that even surrounded by these riches, I am still capable of boredom. Here’s my list of ennui-evoking circumstances….

I am rarely bored but often irritated, especially by ‘progsplaining’.

Read it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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Find the ‘black woman’ in this picture:

For reference, this is a picture of an actual black woman:

ZMan doesn’t like what he sees.

One of the sad truths about the Trump era is that the Republican Party will return to being the Bush party as soon as Trump leaves office. The 2020 election could be a blowout, giving Trump a mandate to push through all sorts of populist projects, as well as giving the GOP a huge majority. Trumpism could become the default position of the base, but the party will immediately begin selling itself as a the kinder, gentler Trumpism as soon as Trump is in the rear-view mirror.

It is one of the enduring features of post-war America. Pat Buchanan pointed it out way back in the 1980’s, when he observed that the people vote conservatives to Congress, only to see them go native in a few years. It is a remarkable transformation made more obvious in the communication age. You can just follow the person’s social media feed to see the transformation. They go from representing their people in Washington to Washington’s representative to those people.

Check it out.

I am always fascinated by products that operate through applied physical principles.

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There has been remarkably little clarity, however, on the key question: What’s really driving the homelessness crisis in West Coast cities? For the past decade, progressive political leaders, activists, and media organizations have insisted that housing costs are the primary cause of homelessness. There is some truth to that: It’s obvious that in the largest West Coast cities, where a one-bedroom apartment rents for at least $2,000 a month, it’s more difficult for low-income individuals to afford stable housing.

However, as an emerging body of evidence shows, homelessness in America’s West Coast cities—particularly unsheltered homelessness—is not driven primarily by high housing costs, but rather by three interrelated phenomena: addiction, mental illness, and permissive public policies.

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One main part of life is the ability for processes to reproduce themselves. This means that a chemical system has to be maintained. Up until now, this was only ever possible naturally.

Now, a team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry has found a way for a system to regenerate parts of its own DNA and protein building blocks, all on its own.

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

UPDATE: Cut thru myths to see facts about COVID-19

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Milken was railroaded by the government. His pardon was long overdue.

Antarctica’s Thwaites glacier at risk of collapse and may lead to sea levels rising by two feet  Daily Mail.

How the Rich Plan to Rule a Burning Planet

Russia-Gate 2020? NY Times Still Crying ‘Conspiracy’ Over Vindicated Nunes Memo

Grenell’s appointment drives media even crazier

PBS’s Mark Shields Compares 2020 Democrats to Founding Fathers, Trump to King George

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We are being told to eat local and seasonal food, either because other crops have been tranported over long distances, or because they are grown in energy-intensive greenhouses. But it wasn’t always like that. From the sixteenth to the twentieth century, urban farmers grew Mediterranean fruits and vegetables as far north as England and the Netherlands, using only renewable energy.

These crops were grown surrounded by massive “fruit walls”, which stored the heat from the sun and released it at night, creating a microclimate that could increase the temperature by more than 10°C (18°F). Later, greenhouses built against the fruit walls further improved yields from solar energy alone.

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But I sure am.

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Global manufacturer Rolls-Royce is the latest entrant in the tech race to provide small-scale nuclear power. Last month, the company announced plans to build 10-15 small modular reactors (SMRs) in the United Kingdom by 2029, with each unit compact enough to sit on the back of a tractor-trailer. The plants would be constructed on so-called “brownfield sites” in Cambria and Wales where aging or decommissioned nuclear power stations are still in place. Rolls Royce has thus far received £18 million ($23.1 m) from the British government, and is requesting £200 million ($258 m) more.

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According to the cohesion-tension theory, mangrove trees desalinate salty water using highly negative pressure (or tension) that is generated by evaporative capillary forces in mangrove leaves. Here, we demonstrate a synthetic mangrove that mimics the main features of the natural mangrove: capillary pumping (leaves), stable water conduction in highly metastable states (stem), and membrane desalination (root). When using nanoporous membranes as leaves, the maximum osmotic pressures of saline feeds (10 to 30 bar) allowing pure water uptake precisely correspond to expected capillary pressures based on the Young-Laplace equation. Hydrogel-based leaves allow for stable operation and desalination of hypersaline solutions with osmotic pressures approaching 400 bar, fivefold greater than the pressure limits of conventional reverse osmosis. Our findings support the applicability of the cohesion-tension theory to desalination in mangroves, provide a new platform to study plant hydraulics, and create possibilities for engineered membrane separations using large, passively generated capillary pressures.

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An Australian fusion startup called HB11, a spin-off from the University of New South Wales, claims to have found a way to revolutionize current nuclear fusion technology, potentially laying the groundwork for a new era of power generation — without running the risk of a nuclear meltdown.

Police Federation: British Police Fear Arresting Climate Protestors

“The Human Race Could Go Extinct”: JPMorgan Fearmongers Climate Change Impact In Leaked Report

Climate change is drying up the Colorado River, putting millions at risk of ‘severe water shortages’ CNN. Actually, water demand from California is drying up the Colorado river.

‘Antarctica Melts,’ NASA Says, Showing Effects Of A Record Warm Spell  NPR.

Family Farms Try to Raise a New Cash Cow: Solar Power

Katy Tur Frets Dems Not Far Left Enough on Global Warming

Study: A Quarter of Climate Denier Tweets are Bots  Bots for reality!

‘Here We Go Again’: 4 Things to Know About New Russia-Trump Election Meddling Narrative

WashPost: Trump Furious He Wasn’t Told Virus-Infected Americans Were Flown Home  As if the Post has any idea how Trump feels about anything.

Trump Calls for Social Security Cuts for the 4th Consecutive Year  In politician-speak, any reduction in proposed growth is a ‘cut’.

Police: Couple Terrorized Teen Boys Over Trump Flags, Posted Video to Snapchat

Eric Swalwell Suggests Russian Support For Bernie Sanders May Implicate Trump As ‘An Agent Of Russia’  I would love to see a picture of Eric in the foil hat that he undoubtedly wears when out of the public eye.

Indiana Couple Drove Boys With Trump Flags Off Road

HBO Producer David Simon: Fascism of 1940s ‘Eerily Similar’ to ‘Today’s America’