Read it.

Now if they can just get them to focus sunlight in order to start forest fires, California will be early adopters.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Gun control activist David Hogg deleted a tweet asking his 1 million followers if they would be interested in hearing his thoughts on the election after 84% responded, “No.”

“Would you be interested in seeing a video post every day from now until election day with my thoughts on what’s going on?” Hogg asked in a Twitter poll. More than 90,000 Twitter users responded to the poll with nearly 80,000 responding with a “no.”

Heh.

Read it.

In a creative—some might say desperate—bid to bolster its amphibious fleet, the U.S. Navy in recent years has been building so-called “expeditionary sea-base ships” that are little more than commercial heavy-load carrier ships with a gray coat of paint and some military radios.

Now the Chinese fleet has demonstrated the same creativity—or desperation. A commercial heavy-load carrier flying a Hong Kong flag recently supported a Chinese naval exercise, functioning as a base for at least two army helicopters.

Read it.

Presumably the HOAX in the title doesn’t refer to the Charlottesville ‘fine people’ hoax that Biden is pushing as the cornerstone of his campaign.

The party of Trump is already a convention of ghoulish clowns

‘It was great’: In leaked audio, Trump hailed low Black turnout in 2016

Leaked audio shows Trump touted low Black voter turnout in 2016: report | TheHill

PEOPLE Lets Biden Rerun Lie That Trump Hailed Racists, Neo-Nazis as ‘Fine People’

Pro-Trump Mother Speaks Out After Women Rip Up Signs, Steal MAGA Hat From Son

Man Who Lives in a Glass House Throws Rhetorical Stones Demanding “Economic Justice”

Reparations Now, Reparations Tomorrow, Reparations Forever!

The court of Chirlane McCray

Watch Out, Chicago! New Yorkers Are Warming Up for a Big Weekend

MSNBC Blames Racism for Voters Preferring Trump on Economy

Police Officers Were Compared To Slave Owners And KKK Members In An Assignment At A Texas School

“Unity” Event Canceled Due to Threats of Violence

This Week in Racial Retribution

Seth Smith, Seth Rich, Nobody Much Cares When Seths Get Murdered

Cooper Lets CNN Analyst Rant ‘This Country IS Racist!’

How San Francisco’s Progressive Policies Made the Homelessness Crisis Worse

The Upper West Side rebels in the face of de Blasio’s homeless plague

UK Officials Exposed For Inflating COVID Hospital Numbers At Height Of “Pandemic”

House Holding Rare Saturday Vote on Postal Changes, Funds  Not surprising, since the Postal Workers Union is a Democrat core constituency, which is why they rushed  back to D.C. to take up their cause when they couldn’t be bothered to work on a stimulus package for the rest of us.

Social Distancing Sign Says: “Look Away When Passing Other People”

Top British Medical Says Coronavirus Will be Around ‘Forever in Some Form or Another’  Certainly as long as the Deep State lasts.

Gizmodo Blames Natural Gas for California’s Rolling Black Outs

Arctic ocean moorings shed light on winter sea ice loss

The Green New Deal means monumental disruption

Carbon emissions are chilling the atmosphere 90km above Antarctica, at the edge of space

Solar Panels Are Starting to Die, Leaving Behind Toxic Trash  All of this ‘green’ stuff isn’t really very green.

Read it.

“When people estimate risk, they overestimate it massively,” says King College London’s Professor Neil Greenberg, who works with Public Health England as part of the Health Protection Research Unit for Emergency Preparedness and Response. “We are very poor as a public at estimating what risk really means.”

That does not mean the threat posed by Covid-19 can be summarily dismissed, but experts are keen for a sense of proportion.

Read it.

The epidemic of homelessness that continues to plague California cities hasn’t abated with the Wuhan bat flu. Downtown LA increasingly looks like a George Romero film: a ruined landscape of wrecked and deserted hotels, bars, restaurants, and stores that had just recently been filled with life before being ransacked, boarded-up, and abandoned to a hollow remnant of humanity with no other purpose than the quotidian shambling from place to place as it wallows in its own effluence.

On the West Coast, in cities from Seattle to San Diego, they have become the ne plus ultra of protected classes: I have heard from friends of LAPD officers that police are regularly paid overtime to protect the homeless and their right to homestead public spaces for their own crapulence. (I somehow suspect this is a part of policing that the Left won’t find their way to defunding.)

Watch: Biden Supporters Steal 7-Year-Old Boy’s MAGA Hat, Attack His Mother

Fact check: Trump delivers blizzard of false claims in Pennsylvania speech attacking Biden  Ponder the absurdity of CNN doing a ‘fact check’ on anybody.

Genuine Joe Shows He’s Everything That Trump Is Not  Daily Beast. I guess we’ll have to give them that one.

Don’t be surprised if Biden doesn’t get a convention bounce in the polls. That’s not the point. Washington Post.

At Convention, Seinfeld Star Mocks ‘Cheater’ Donald Trump (Bill Clinton Spoke Last Night)

Michael Bloomberg: Trump Takes ‘White Supremacists As Allies’

Media Criticizes Trump For Forcing Them To Tear Country Apart For Last Four Years  Babylon Bee.

Mother And Son Allegedly Assaulted Over Pro-Trump Gear

Kevin ‘The Postman’ Costner: Trump ‘Criminal,’ ‘Spits on 200 Years of Freedom’  He’s not a postman but he plays one in a movie, so that’s enough of a qualification for a Democrat.

CBS Does Biden’s Dirty Work by Pestering Pence: Hasn’t Trump ‘Cloaked America in Darkness?’

Director Of ‘Wonder Woman 1984’ Says Villain Was Inspired By Donald Trump

California Ends Exploitation Of Workers For Good By Banning All Jobs  Babylon Bee.

Portland Police Have Dealt With 13 Riots In Last 80 Days, As Rioters Vandalize ICE Building

‘Wake Up Motherf**ker, Wake Up’: Portland Protesters Vow To Keep Up Entire Neighborhoods As Unrest Continues  Is it still a ‘drive-by shooting’ if you shoot the guy driving by?

Chilling Aussie “Mandatory news media bargaining code”: Allowing Establishment Media to Dictate Terms to “Digital Media”

DNC Features Rapper With Ties To Nation Of Islam Leader Louis Farrakhan

“I Have A Right To Make Sure That My Home Is Secure”: Chicago Mayor Lightfoot Defends Ban On Protesters On Her Block  BRAAAAAAAINS!

“White Flight Is Real” – Hollywood’s Apocalypse Triggers Mass Exodus

Billionaire Robert Smith Fighting Federal Criminal Tax Inquiry

“Wake Up Motherf**ker, Wake Up!” BLM Idles Through Portland Neighborhood With Bullhorn

Chicago Police Report 21 Shooting Victims In One Day

OBSESSED: Facebook Fact-Checkers Defend Kamala 60 Times in 10 Days

Florida Man Arrested After Trying To Cash In Stolen Lottery Ticket At Same Store He Swiped It From, Police Say

Democratic Mayoral Candidate Sabrina Belcher Faked Her Own Kidnapping To Win Votes, Police Say

Jack Dorsey Donates $10 Million To A Group Headed By An Activist Who Wants To Make Racism Unconstitutional

Stacey Abrams, Failed Georgia Gubernatorial Candidate, Moderated Panel Of Democratic Governors At DNC  An unusual use of the term ‘moderated’. Perhaps ‘incited’ would be more accurate.

Report: Calls To Abolish Police Met With Skepticism And Criticism In Many Black Communities

A mass of floating volcanic rock could help revive the Great Barrier Reef

Hempcrete: How Sustainable Construction Could Change the World

Californian Blackout Fury: “It’s Not Just the Heat, It’s Also the Anti-Nuclear Power Stupidity”

If you don’t read Dave Zincavage’s blog NEVER YET MELTED, I recommend it.

Read it.

Most keyboards use one-dimensional buttons or a QWERTY design. According to CharaChorder, this can often cause user error—like typos—caused by hitting letters in the wrong order when “muscle memory” is moving faster than a device can keep up with.

With CharaChorder, these “errors” are highly encouraged. A user can type entire words by pressing all letters simultaneously, in a single motion. CharaChorder’s internal processor will then arrange the letters on-screen in real time, faster than the human eye can perceive.

This kind of technology makes it easy for users to learn “chording” (a way to enter characters or commands formed by pressing several keys together) intuitively over time. According to the team, it’s also a much more powerful method of communicating.

Well, we’ll see.

Steve decides to be a collector.

My reasoning goes like this: if I know I will continue shooting a certain caliber until I croak, I might as well buy enough ammunition to get me as far into the future as possible. It won’t rot. It doesn’t have to be refrigerated. You can buy it today and use it 50 years from now, if you’re still here. If you wait, you’ll end up paying much more in the long run. Also, the Democrats are gradually destroying our rights, so who knows if you’ll be able to buy anything a couple of years from now?

I’m convinced.

Joel Kotkin.

For roughly the past half century, the middle swath of America has been widely written off as reactionary, backward, and des­tined for unceasing decline. CNBC recently ranked the “worst states” to live in, and almost all were in what is typically defined as the Heartland.1 Paul Krugman of the New York Times sees the region populated by “jobless men in their prime working years, with many suffering ‘deaths of despair’ by drugs, alcohol or suicide.”

Another Times article describes much of the small-town and rural areas as home to “the left behind”—Trumpian knuckle-draggers at war with modernity. This coastal contempt for the interior is nothing new, going back to celebrated figures such as Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken, who dismissed it as hopelessly “backward if not reactionary.”2 Two New Jersey academics have even proposed, with the ap­proval of much of the national media, that large parts of the Great Plains be evacuated to make way for an expansive “Buffalo Commons.”3 One progressive publication suggested that the country should send “reparations” to the region, as if it were incapable of devising its own recovery.

Yet in reality, the Heartland—a region of twenty states between the Appalachians and the Rockies—has remained a critical part of our country. In 2016, this area generated nearly $5 trillion in goods and services.4 As of 2015, it was also home to nearly 60 percent of the U.S. population,5 a percentage that is likely to increase as both the North­east and coastal California are projected to grow less than the national average between 2010 and 2030.6

Democrats Promise to Bring California-Style Blackouts to Everyone

Study: 1970s Dam Construction Paused Global Warming Sea Level Rise

Global Warming Crop Resilience? Aussie Farmer Helps CSIRO Develop Long Coleoptile Wheat

Fossil leaves show high atmospheric carbon spurred ancient ‘global greening’

80-year-old California man robbed in grocery store dies of injuries, family says

Brawl breaks out on American Airlines plane when passenger refuses to follow face-covering policy

Martha gets into heated argument with president of largest teachers union

This Couple Just Purchased A 53-Acre Ranch For Their Family And Future Generations  Isn’t it just appalling the way black people are so oppressed?

Accused Portland attacker Marquise Love has a lengthy rap sheet

Black newborns 3 times more likely to die when looked after by White doctors  CNN.

Duke Prof Proposes $12 Trillion In Reparations… $800k Per Eligible Black Household  Said professor is, of course, black. I’d like to propose reparations to everyone who can prove that one of their grandparents was born in Ireland, because the U.S. didn’t do squat about the Potato Famine.

Report: Chicago Police Arrest Woman Who Posted Her Looting Video To Facebook

CNN Cheers for DNC Excluding ‘White Men’… Except for Biden, Of Course

Kerry Washington Says Black Community Is ‘Hugely Diverse’ At DNC In Apparent Shot At Biden  Yes! It has people of all colors … so long as that color is black.

Thugs Savagely Assault, Rob Retired NYPD Sergeant In Manhattan Daytime Beating

Covering Their Tracks: CBS’s Reid LIES About Goodyear’s Discriminatory Policy

UN Removes Anti-Racism Survey After Accusations That A Question Was Racist

Main Suspect In Brutal Attack At BLM Protest Seeks Donations While Evading Police

‘All Cops Are Bastards’: BLM Protesters Swarm NYPD Union President Pat Lynch’s House

‘I Make No Apologies Whatsoever’: Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot Defends Banning Protesters From Her Block, Citing Safety Concerns  BRAAAAAAAINS!

DNC Airs Debunked Claim Trump Called Asylum Seekers ‘Animals’

‘He Failed Miserably’: Sen. Warren Criticizes Trump For ‘Incompetence’ During DNC Speech  As compared to her long list of accomplishments. Oh, wait….

‘He’s Destroyed Conservatism’: The Republican Case Against Trump’s GOP  As if you were going to get the ‘Republican case’ for anything from Politico.

The White House has stopped even pretending Trump won’t contest the election results  Considering ongoing Democrat attempts to steal it, that seems appropriate.

Trump ‘cancels’ Goodyear tires as he campaigns against ‘cancel culture’  CNN being sophomoric.

Read it.

Time to leave.

ZMan looks at conservatism.

At the end of the Cold War, Progressives pointed out that conservatism no longer had a purpose, so it was probably going to follow communism into the past. Of course, the Left had its own problems in this regard, but conservatism in America had largely been about opposing the Soviets. They had conceded all the important points in the cultural war and the Left was ready to embrace corporate control of the economy, so there was no longer any purpose to conservatism.

This was a fair analysis, but one conservatives could not accept, as it would mean getting real jobs and doing honest work. Instead they tried to define conservatism as green eye-shade bean counting in the 1990’s. That was no fun as they like spending borrowed money as much as the Left. Then they tried to define conservatism to mean dropping high explosives onto Muslims. That worked for a while, but then the public soured on the pointless flag waving and hollow patriotism.

Severian had a response: The Spiritual Exercises

Victor Davis Hanson.

Perhaps 70 percent of Trumpism remains a hodgepodge of Reaganism: strong defense, realist foreign policy, deregulation, smaller government, big deficits, tax cuts, energy growth, and stars-and-stripes traditionalism.

But it is the other unorthodox 30 percent that excited his base, terrified conservative apostates, and won Trump the 2016 election by energizing between 4 million and 6 million voters in swing states who had either given up on Republicans, or on elections altogether. NeverTrumpers talk of Trump’s demise and their own resurrection as Phoenixes to rebirth the GOP. They have no idea that those who despise them had ensured their Beltway-preferred candidates could rarely win; nothing has changed since.

Read it.

The Airship 2.0 is certainly a different beast from the zeppelin of 100 years ago. The latest generation relies on non-combustible helium, and bulletproof materials that like vectran, mylar and kevlar to make the balloon both lightweight and durable.

Me want.

Read it.

A series of errors by contractors and consultants on the California bullet train venture caused support cables to fail on a massive bridge, triggering an order to stop work that further delayed a project already years behind schedule,the Los Angeles Times has learned.

The bridge is longer than two football fields and is needed to shuttle vehicles over the future bullet train right of way and existing BNSF freight tracks in Madera County.

Authorities have yet to finalize a plan to repair the bridge. Late last year, crews installed temporary steel supports to prevent it from collapsing.

Hundreds of pages of documents obtained by The Times under a public records request show the steel supports snapped as a result of neglect, work damage, miscommunications and possible design problems.

High-speed rail, the Future of America.

Tyler Cowen.

When it comes to Covid-19, I worry about the problem of “phantom risk.” Right now the risks of Covid-19 are very real, but at some point we still will feel those risks when they are no longer present, much as some amputees may feel a “phantom limb.”

How this might play out?

I think we’ve already hit that point. The current government-mandated ‘protections’ are far out of proportion to the actual danger involved.

The Other McCain.

Something that has been turning over in my mind lately is the way some people reject the entire idea of judgment — or, rather, they say they are against judging people. In reality, such people are often extremely judgmental. “Don’t judge me!” they angrily exclaim, but if you pay attention, you’ll notice these people never hesitate to judge you.

Steve Sailer.

Over the last half decade a vast amount of in-depth prestige press coverage has been devoted to the so-called “alt-right” while almost none has been devoted to “Antifa,” despite the latter being vastly larger and more favored by government officials, as we’ve seen this year in unfortunate cities such as Minneapolis, Madison, Seattle, and Portland.

Steve Sailer.

One of the more striking phenomena of recent years is the trend toward making certain news articles duller, vaguer, and more insignificant sounding. Stories used to be written to begin with the five W’s — Who, What, Where, When, and Why — as close to the top as human verbal ingenuity could manage. But lately, many stories are constructed to bore the casual reader into moving on to the next story before he has much of a clue what this one is about.

Read it.

“You might not know this, but most of the actual convention events take place during daytime hours,” he said. “The networks don’t cover them. You have no idea that happened. There’s a reason for that, obviously. But what a loss for the viewing public. If you saw what they were saying during the day, you would never tune in to prime time again. In fact, you might flee the country.”

 

Read it.

In the hour leading up to Night Three of the Democrat convention, PBS aired a profile of Biden’s career by reporter Lisa Desjardins, starring liberal-bias legend Nina Totenberg of NPR. Biden was judged positively for beating Robert Bork’s nomination for the Supreme Court in 1987, and negatively for not helping Anita Hill enough to defeat Clarence Thomas in 1991.

Read it.

Police in San Francisco aren’t waiting around for pandering politicians to “defund” the city’s police department, which has already seen a mass exodus of officers following the passage of a state law called Prop 47, a statewide criminal-justice law passed back in 2014. It appears the pace of officer exits is picking up this year, and what’s even more interesting: The acceleration started before the murder of George Floyd.

Read it.

I’d make that trade. But what would the Danes do with a bunch of Latinx? They’re having enough troubles with the Muslim immigrants.

President Trump Just Dealt a Devastating Blow to Social Security’

US Senate report goes beyond Mueller to lay bare Trump campaign’s Russia links  The Guardian. (Real News: Senate Intel Panel Finds ‘Absolutely No Evidence’ of Collusion, Faced Roadblocks)

Daily Beast: Liberal Networks Worried Sick About Trump’s Unpredictable 2020 Convention

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg: We’ll Remove Trump Speech When It Violates Our Standards  I.e. ‘is given by Trump’.

Climate and extinction crises require urgent change | TheHill

Are tipping points suitable concepts for developing environmental policies?  They’re sure useful for rationalizing why there ain’t nothin’ happening yet.

Cold weather kills more people than hot weather because… global warming.

‘Turn Up Your Damn Thermostat’: Former Gov. Jerry Brown Tells Californians How To Avoid Blackouts During A Heatwave

There is no ‘White culture’

LeBron James Wears A Hat With The Words ‘Make America Arrest The Cops Who Killed Breonna Taylor’

JONES: Joe Biden Believes All Black People Think The Same

Martha MacCallum’s Interview With BLM Chair Goes Off The Rails When He Refuses To Answer Question About Looting

‘Blue Lives Ain’t Sh*t’: Minnesota State House Candidate Participated In BLM Protest In Front Of The Minneapolis Police Federation President’s House

The Progressive Racism of the Ivy League

Derrius Guice Accused Of Raping 2 Women While Playing For LSU

Leo Terrell: ‘We’ve Got to Stop This Race War The Democrats Are Perpetuating’

Walzing with BLM

Oprah Winfrey Discusses ‘Using Whiteness As A Weapon’ In New AppleTV+ Episode

‘So Much For Social Distancing’: Fight Breaks Out On American Airlines Plane

Wash Post: Lose the ‘Toxic Positivity,’ it’s a White American Privilege Anyway

‘Disavowed’ BLM Leader Defends Looting & Rioting Because “US Steals Diamonds & Oil”

Ruhle Denies BLM Supports Looting, Gets Schooled by Guest

Barack Obama attacks Donald Trump at Democratic convention for ‘using power of office to help himself and friends’  He must have been looking in a mirror.

Read it.

Donald Trump registered quite the achievement on Wednesday: He managed to make the avowedly feminist New York Times criticize renowned suffragist Susan B. Anthony in “With Eye on Election, Trump Plans to Pardon Women’s Suffrage Icon,” after the president announced he would mark the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment, giving women the right to vote, by pardoning Anthony, who was arrested and fined for voting illegally in 1872.

Steve Sailer.

Fanning the flames of racial animosity is only bad when Bad People (i.e., whites) do it.

Read it.

Chinese officials in Wuhan Province hid important information about coronavirus from the country’s central government, even as the virus spread rapidly, according to a Wednesday report.

The findings represent the consensus view of the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies, which were included in an internal report first circulated in June, according to The New York Times, which relied on anonymous American officials familiar with the report. Wuhan was ground zero for the coronavirus outbreak.

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

Read it.

A former State Department official told the Senate Intelligence Committee he destroyed records in January 2017 at the request of former British spy Christopher Steele, according to a report released on Tuesday.

Jonathan Winer, who served as special envoy to Libya through early 2017, was Steele’s contact at the State Department. He arranged a meeting for Steele in October 2016 with another State Department official at Foggy Bottom to share findings from a dossier of research he had compiled on Donald Trump.

“SCORECARDS! GETCHER SCORECARDS HERE! You can’t tell your Deep State operatives without a scorecard!”

Read it.

Time to leave.

Read it.

Why does Colorado have color coded ballots? I guess it is because color coding is way quicker than that little R or D under the bar code to know what party the ballot represents.

Read it.

Yeah, that’s a real head-scratcher, that is.